Collected Works of Bastiat, vol. 4: Miscellaneous Economic Writings

[Created: June 15, 2017]


Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)	Map of Les Landes in SW France

Introduction

We are providing in draft form volume 4 of the Collected Works of Bastiat which contains his Miscellaneous Economic Writings. Please note the following:

this is an "Author's Final Draft" which will be tidied up and properly formatted by our in-house editor, especially things like data tables
what we do not have here is the Front Matter and Guido Hülsmann's Introduction
the internal references have been left blank deliberately (e.g., see, pp. 000.) as they are place-holders
the quotes are side-by-side in French and English for research purposes. Only English quotes will apper in the final version
we now include an Editor's Introduction to each piece

For more information about Frédéric Bastiat see the following:

Summary of the Bastiat Project
Works in the OLL by Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)
A Reader's Guide to the Works of Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)
A Chronological List of Bastiat's Writings
The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat. In Six Volumes (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011 -2015), General Editor Jacques de Guenin. Academic Editor Dr. David M. Hart.
- Vol. 1: The Man and the Statesman. The Correspondence and Articles on Politics (March 2011) - published book version
- Vol. 2: "The Law," "The State," and Other Political Writings, 1843-1850 (June 2012) - published book version
- Vol. 3: Economic Sophisms and "What is Seen and What is Not Seen" (March, 2017) - published book version
- Vol. 4: Miscellaneous Works on Economics (June 2017) - final draft version
- Vol. 5: Economic Harmonies (February 2019) - final draft version
- Vol. 6: The Struggle Against Protectionism: The English and French Free-Trade Movements (forthcoming)

Some Additional Letters (7)
Early Writings: The Bayonne and Mugron Years, 1819-1844
The "Paris" Writings I: Bastiat and the Free Trade Movement (Oct. 1844 - Feb. 1848)
The "Paris" Writings II: Bastiat the Politician, Anti-Socialist, and Economist (Feb. 1848 - Dec. 1850)
Appendices
1. Appendix 1: Further Aspects of Bastiat's Thought (CW4)
2. Appendix 2: The French State and Politics (CW4)
Bibliography
A Chronological List of Bastiat's Writings (see separate file)
Glossaries
Endnotes

Some Additional Letters (7)↩

Source

P. Ronce, Frédéric Bastiat. Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Guillaumin, 1905). Appendix, pp. 277-314.

Editor's Introduction

There is some additional material by Bastiat in Ronce's book which was not included by Paillottet in the OC. The following are short letters or parts of letters, five of which come from his final months when he was en route to Rome where he would ultimately die of his throat condition on Christmas Eve 1850.

P. Ronce, Frédéric Bastiat. Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Guillaumin, 1905). Appendix, pp. 277-314; and pieces of 6 previously unpublished letters.

Letter 209: To M. Muiron (Eaux-Bonnes, 7 Nov. 1844), Ronce, pp. 86-87
Letter 210: Letter to Paillottet (Pisa, 30 Sept. 1850), Ronce, pp. 253-55
Letter 211: Letter to Paillottet (Pisa, 7 Oct. 1850), Ronce, pp. 255-56
Letter 212: Letter to Paillottet (Pisa, 11 Oct. 1850), Ronce, pp. 256-59
Letter 213: Letter to M. Soustra, (Pise, 12 Oct. 1850), Ronce, pp. 225-27
Letter 214: Letter to Paillottet (Rome, 8 Nov. 1850), Ronce, pp. 260-61

1. Letter 209 to M. Muiron (Eaux-Bonnes, 7 Nov. 1844)↩

Source

Letter 209 to M. Muiron (Eaux-Bonnes, 7 Nov. 1844), in P. Ronce, Frédéric Bastiat. Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Guillaumin, 1905), pp. 86-87.

Editor's Introduction

Ronce tells us that this letter was written soon after Bastiat's first article "On the Influence of French and English Tariffs on the Future of the Two People" was published in the JDE (Oct. 1844) which was his breakthrough into the world of the Parisian economists. 42 In it he thanks a friend, M. Muiron, (about whom nothing is known) for having delivered his manuscript safely to the Guillaumin offices in Paris. As an outsider living in the remote south west of France, Bastiat depended on the assistance of friends like Muiron to help him get established as an author and political activist. Although he is critical in this letter of the editor of the Journal des Économistes (Hippolyte Dussard), 43 published by Urbain Guillaumin, he would soon enter Guillaumin's network of economists, politicians, and supporters, and would publish many more articles in the Journal (about 28 between 1844 and 1850) as well as numerous books and pamphlets, not to mention his Oeuvres complètes (Complete Works) the first edition of which appeared in 6 volumes in 1854-55, and a second edition in 7 volumes in 1862-64.

Text

M. Muiron, 70, rue de Seine Saint-Germain, Paris.

Monsieur, the generosity which you have shown towards me and the precious moments I enjoyed with your instructive conversations make me duty bound to express all my thanks to you. I would not have delayed expressing this to you until now if I hadn't been waiting for the right moment provided by the publication of this piece which you kindly agreed to return to "M. Bastiat of Paris."

Works of this kind, even if they contain the merit of being timely and independent minded, run the great risk of getting buried in the depths of oblivion if generous friends do not bring them to the attention of the appropriate people. I hope that you will be willing to introduce the first fruits of my studies to M. de Salvandy. 44 The opinion of a man as important as he is because of his position and his stature would be a prize of infinite value for me, especially if it were of an encouraging nature. If the opposite were the case, it would still have the advantage of warning me that a man who lives in solitude must marshal his forces carefully.

The editor of the journal thought fit to cut an entire passage (on p. 149) in which I attempted to reveal the reasons why the Parisian press is in general so hostile to free trade. 45 I had the failing common to all scribblers to think that they had cut exactly what I thought most merited being kept in. Certainly, this part of my work showed at least some courage because one has to confront the fearsome power of Messrs "les journalistes." The proof of their power lies in the cuts which the editor of the journal ordered to be made.

I would be happy to learn that your good health has improved and that, in recognition of this fact, you might plan to spend another season at Les Eaux-Bonnes. 46 It would be a great pleasure to resume our walks and our conversations.

Yours sincerely…

2. Letter 216 to Félix Coudroy (1845)↩

Source

Letter 216: Letter to Félix Coudroy (1845). This letter was discovered by the original French editor Paillottet among Bastiat's papers and was inserted in a footnote to T.9 "Reflections on the Question of Dueling" (11 February 1838) which was a review in the local newspaper La Chalosse of Coudroy's pamphlet on dueling. Paillottet states it was written sometime in 1845. [OC7, p. 10] [CW1, p. 309].

Editor's Introduction

This short letter to his boyhood friend and neighbour in Mugron Félix Coudroy 47 tells us something about Bastiat's method of writing, namely that he preferred the simplicity and directness of his first drafts. It also shows us that he was aware of a new work by one of the leading members of the circle of economists in Paris, Charles Dunoyer, 48 whose three-volume magnum opus De la liberté du travail had been published in early 1845. Dunoyer was the President of the Political Economy Society which would host a welcome dinner for Bastiat in Paris in May 1845. Coudroy and Bastiat belonged to a discussion group in Mugron called "The Academy" which would meet regularly to discuss new books and current events and where they no doubt discussed Dunoyer's book soon after it appeared. Bastiat would write but not publish a review of Dunoyer's book in March 1845 which can be found below T.20 "On the Book by M. Dunoyer. On The Liberty of Working" (March, 1845). Coudroy would later that year write a long review of Bastiat's first book on Cobden and the League for the JDE. 49

Text

My dear Félix,

Because of the difficulty of reading, I cannot properly judge the style, but my sincere conviction (you know that here I set aside the usual modesty) is that our styles have different qualities and faults. I believe that the qualities of yours are such that, when it is used, it shows genuine talent; I mean to say a style that is lively and animated with general ideas and glimpses that are luminous. Always make copies on small sheets; if one needs to be changed, it will not cause much trouble. When you are copying you will perhaps be able to add polish, but, for my part, I note that the first draft is always faster and more accessible to today's readers who scarcely go into anything in depth.

Do you not have an opinion of M. Dunoyer?

3. Letter 210 to Paillottet (Pisa, 30 Sept. 1850)↩

Source

Letter 210. Pisa, 30 Sept. 1850. Letter to Paillottet in P. Ronce, Frédéric Bastiat. Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Guillaumin, 1905), pp. 253-55)

Editor's Introduction

Bastiat's health continued to get worse throughout 1850. His last attendance at a session of the Chamber of Deputies was on 9 February after which he took a leave of absence. The first volume of his treatise Economic Harmonies was published in January 1850 with 10 chapters but he was too ill to work much on completing volume 2 which was eventually reconstructed from his notes and drafts by his friend Prosper Paillottet. 50 This enlarged edition of Economic Harmonies with an additional 15 chapters appeared posthumously in July 1851.

In May 1850 Bastiat left Paris and returned to his home town Mugron in Les Landes, and then went to the spa town of Les Eaux-Bonnes in June and July to recuperate and work on his two pamphlets The Law and What is Seen and What is Not Seen . He briefly returned to Paris in August but was told by his doctor that he could not survive another winter in Paris and advised him to go to Italy where the climate was less harsh. He attended his last meeting of the Political Economy Society on 10 September so he could say farewell to his friends and colleagues. 51

He took 6 weeks travelling to Rome, spending time along the way in Lyon and Marseilles (September), Pisa (October), before arriving in Rome in early November, where he stayed until his death on 24 December. His friend Prosper Paillottet went to Rome to see him during his last days, as did the Cheuvreux family who had become close friends and supporters of Bastiat. Madame Hortense Cheuvreux 52 ran an important liberal salon in Paris which Bastiat had attended over the previous two years.

One of the things Bastiat and Paillottet discussed at this time was the completion of his treatise Economic Harmonies and the editing of his Complete Works after his death. Bastiat appointed Paillottet his literary executor and with the assistance of Roger Fontenay 53 carried out Bastiat's wishes.

Text

My dear Paillottet, I left Paris on the 11th and here it is the 30th. So there you have it. Twenty days away and I have still only received a single letter from Marseilles. I keep asking at the post office and the usual answer is "there is nothing for you." I fear that they have the wrong address and there is a misunderstanding about this, as I cannot imagine my friends leaving me without any news. They must know that in this life of hardships to which I have been condemned, not being able to speak or write or to make friends, their memory is all I have to soothe my soul. How happy I would be if only they thought to write to me often! But are absent friends always in the wrong? No! I much prefer to think that it is the Post Office which is not doing its job properly. And anyway, how can they be mistaken with such a simple address: M. F. B., poste restante, Pisa, Tuscany?

My dear Paillottet, I am waiting for the arrival of what you wrote to me about from Marseilles, that is the dispatch of the box of books. 54 Sadly, I now see that they will not be of much use to me, either for reading or for working with, because the Italian climate instills in me a great feeling of far niente (doing nothing). And then, without feeling that I am sicker, it is clear that I am weaker. I do not sense it by comparing one day to the next, but if I turn my mind back one or two months I cannot fail to see my decline. If this continues for much longer I will not be able to do anything.

I suppose M. de Fontenay has returned from the countryside. Next time you see him, give him a kick in the pants to get his book on Capital published. 55 Without that, I think he is a man who will let the days and months slip by.

Pisa is a delightful place, at least the quarter where foreigners and the sick live. The Arno river forms a large semi-circle along which are houses. From my window I can see the sun from sunrise to sunset. The warmth, the light, the view of the river, the activity on the quay, makes any sad thoughts seem far away. There is not even time for boredom. One has to think that the sound morale influence of this location augurs well for my physical recovery.

Mme Cheuvreux told me that they have decided to travel here from Florence. I received this news from Marseilles. But not having received any more letters I am in an agony of uncertainty not knowing if they will change their minds. You would do me a very great service if you could make inquiries upon receipt of this letter and let me know by return mail. At the same time, tell M. Cheuvreux that, according to what I have been told, quarantine would not last longer than October 19, which is the day the State packet-boat departs. In addition, assure him that the quarantine station at Livorno is quite comfortable. Therefore I think the best plan is to board the Post ship. If I had had advance warning I would have gone to the quarantine station to reserve the best places, on the assumption that this hoax which is quarantine takes longer than expected.

Farewell my dear Paillottet. I will have your reply in only 12 days time. Like a good schoolboy I will cross myself every morning at matins.

Farewell, your devoted friend.

4. Letter 211 to Paillottet (Pisa, 7 Oct. 1850)↩

Source

Letter 211. Pisa, 7 Oct. 1850. Letter to Paillottet in P. Ronce, Frédéric Bastiat. Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Guillaumin, 1905), pp. 255-56).

Editor's Introduction

In a last flurry of activity towards the end of his life, Bastiat had to respond to the charge made against him by the American economist Henry Carey 56 that he had plagiarised Carey's work on the idea of "the harmony of interests" and his criticism of Ricardo's idea of the natural productivity of land. Bastiat's book on Economic Harmonies was circulating among the economists in Paris in manuscript form by the end of 1849 and was published by Guillaumin early the following year, in January or February. It was reviewed quite critically by Ambroise Clément in the JDE in June 1850 57 after a delay which Bastiat thought was a slight on him because of his radical new ideas. Although he lived in America, Carey read Clément's review and this provoked him into writing a letter of complaint to the Editors of the JDE in August 1850 but which was not published until January 1851, two weeks after Bastiat's death. In the letter he argued that he had expressed his ideas on harmony and land rent in his book Principles of Political Economy which was published in 1837 and that Bastiat should have cited this in his book, especially since he not not started writing about economic matters until 1844. 58

Carey's next book, with the strikingly similar title, The Harmony of Interests, was published in Philadelphia in 1851 59 but Carey's book was available in proofs at the end of 1850, probably sent by him to the Parisian economists to prove his case against Bastiat. The difficulty was in getting a copy of the proofs to the dying Bastiat in Rome in time for him to look at them. They arrived sometime in November and Bastiat wrote a reply to Carey's criticisms and sent it to the JDE just a couple of weeks before he died. They published Carey's original August 1850 letter, along with Bastiat's response, and a letter in support of Bastiat by Clément in the 15 January 1851 issue of the JDE. 60 In essence, Bastiat said he got his ideas from many sources, only one of whom was Carey (he listed in his correspondence and elsewhere that J.B. Say, Charles Comte, and Charles Dunoyer had been the major influences on his thinking) and that the idea of "the harmony of interests" was not "une individuelle invention" (an invention of an individual) of Carey or anyone else.

In spite of being saddened by Bastiat's death in December Carey continued the debate with another letter to the JDE which was published in May 1851 61 in which he responded to Bastiat and denied that he was seeking any "brevet d'invention de ces lois" (patent on these (economic) laws) but just wanted due recognition of his prior work. There was some venom in these letters back and forth which was complicated by feelings of national pride, with Bastiat not liking criticisms of French institutions by an American, and Carey in turn not liking French criticism of America, citing the work of Tocqueville and Beaumont in particular.

In the absence of his friend, Proposer Paillottet jumped in with a letter to Carey published in the June 1851 issue of the JDE 62 in which he pointed out that Bastiat had been writing on economic matters, especially on the relative contributions to the creation of "value" made by labour or land itself, as early as 1834 and could not have plagiarised Carey's 1837 work. 63

Carey's final word on the matter was penned in December 1851. 64 By then he had come to accept the idea that "the word" harmony had been used independently by many writers but that "la chose" (the thing or the theory) which lay behind its meaning could be very different. Whereas Bastiat thought that what lay behind the idea of value, including the value produced by land, was the exchange of "service for service," 65 Carey thought it was the exchange of "labour for labour." However, Carey's bigger concession was to come to realise during the course of the debate that Bastiat's views were also strongly opposed by the more orthodox economists at the JDE, like Joseph Garnier, who were staunch Ricardians and Malthusians. Thus, although he may have resented Bastiat's claim to have independently discovered the idea of "the harmony of interests," Bastiat was in fact an ally of his with his radical rethinking of the Ricardian theory of rent and Malthusian pessimism which ran along very similar lines to his own.

Another thing we learn from this letter is the real excitement Bastiat felt at the immanent arrival of the Cheuvreux family, in particular Madame Hortense Cheuvreux whose salon Bastiat had attended in Paris and to whom he was very close. She and Paillottet were the only people from his circle of Parisian economist friends who visited him in Rome as he was dying.

Text

My dear Paillottet,

I intended to reply to your kind note of 27 September but at the moment my head and my hand are tired from scribbling down the pages which are included below. I will write back you in the next day or so to discuss Carey, the books, etc. and what concerns me the most, your plans to travel in Italy with Mme Paillottet. In the meantime, I will say to you that since one has a trip like this only once in one's life, it is necessary to do this in the best possible conditions. If I get better between now and the spring, and if chatting to you is not forbidden, I don't need to tell you how much pleasure it would give me if I could be a tourist with you. But if I am like I am now, pray don't let my presence here influence your plans. I would only be a hindrance to you and thus completely ruin your plans; and you yourself, by trying to be kind to me, would cause me harm by encouraging me to talk. You can understand how delighted I am to see the arrival of the Cheuvreux family. Well, reason tells me that their presence here will be painful for me. I will suffer terribly knowing that they are so close and not being able to follow them; or at least, if I give in to this feeling I can say goodbye to what little have left of my larynx.

But whatever may happen, this is not what I am writing to you about today. My letter has a special purpose. Mme Cheuvreux writes that she leaves Paris on 14 October. Now, it is that very day that the letter I inclose will arrive in Paris. Will she receive it? Will her concierge know where to send it?

This is what I am going to ask you to do. Since I am giving Mme Cheuvreux some information about her travels, would you see that it is forwarded to her upon receipt of this letter ?

If she has already left, would you address the letter to M. Auguste Girard, Captain of Artillery at Valence and the brother of Mme Cheuvreux, and attach stamps to it so the barracks porter doesn't get it into his head to refuse to accept it.

Farewell, my dear Paillottet, your devoted friend.

5. Letter 212 to Paillottet (Pisa, 11 Oct. 1850)↩

Source

Letter 212. Pisa, 11 Oct. 1850. Letter to Paillottet in P. Ronce, Frédéric Bastiat. Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Guillaumin, 1905), pp. 256-59). Only part of this letter was included in Paillottet's edition of the Oeuvres complètes and in our CW1: Letter 197. Pisa, 11 Oct. 1850. To M. Paillottet (OC1, pp. 443-44).

Editor's Introduction

We can only speculate about the reasons why Paillottet left out this part of Bastiat's letter from his edition. In it Bastiat talks about his illness and his doctors, his worries about not being able to fulfill his duties to his electorate and the Chamber of Duties where he had been Vice-president of the Finance Committee, his fussing about the Cheuvreux's travel plans to come visit him in Italy, his embarrassment at not having said farewell to some of his friends in Paris, and matters concerning the sending of Henry Carey's manuscript to him so he could evaluate for himself the reasons for Carey's accusation of his plagiarising his work on "the harmony of interests" and the productivity of land.

Concerning his activities in the Chamber of Deputies during the Second Republic, after the Revolution of February 1848 Bastiat was elected on 23 April as a Deputy in the Constituent Assembly representing the département of Les Landes. He was soon after appointed Vice-President of the Finance Committee to which he was re-appointed 8 times. He was re-elected on 13 May as a Deputy in the Legislative Assembly representing the département of Les Landes on the "Social Democratic" list. As his health deteriorated Bastiat lost his voice and was unable to speak in the Chamber as there were 900 Deputies in a very large hall with no amplification. He tried writing his speeches as pamphlets and circulating them among the Deputies so he could reach more people. He also began taking leaves of absence from the Chamber to let his voice recover. He gave his last formal speech in the Chamber on 12 Dec. 1849, on "The Tax on Wine and Spirits" and he last spoke in the Chamber in a debate on plans to give money to Workers' Associations on 9 February 1850. 66 Shortly after this he took another leave of absence, returned to his home town of Mugron and the local spa town of Eaux-Bonnes to rest, and never returned to the Chamber.

Text

[The following passage concludes the first paragraph of Letter 197 in OC and our CW1, p. 280. The following paragraphs were cut by Paillottet and then the letter continues in CW1, pp. 280-81]:

Thank God I am not dead, nor even sicker … But in the end, if the news had been true it would have been necessary to accept it and resign oneself to it. I would like all my friends to be able to adopt the philosophy I myself have adopted in this regard. I assure you that I would surrender my last breath without pain, almost with joy, if I could be sure to leave behind for those who love me, not bitter regrets but soft, affectionate, and melancholy memories. I want to prepare them for the time when I will get sicker.

[The following lines were cut by Paillottet in his edition of OC but were included in an Appendix in Ronce's book.]:

Mme Paillottet shared your worries. Tell her how much I appreciate this show of concern for me. I hope that in the spring she can reassure herself in person that my body and soul are holding together quite well, and that they will not be separated without fierce resistance. Concerning this journey, I beg you to make up you mind without any consideration regarding me. If I am better, I will let you know, and then I'm sure it would be a pleasure for both of us to be tourists together. But if I am in the same state as I am now, then your trip would be completely ruined. Even in the first situation, I have to avoid making my stay in Italy anything other than purely therapeutic. What would my electorate say, what would my colleagues say, if I, supposedly under care for my health, went to admire the marvels of Naples and Venice in the middle of the parliamentary session and after having taken a year of successive sick leave? No, that would not be acceptable. M. Andral 67 prescribed Pisa or Rome and I will limit myself to that, and I will try to spend the month of April with my family in Mugron. 68 As for the rest, we have plenty of time to talk about all these other projects. 69

When you see M. de Fontenay thank him for the recommendations he made. The one for Livorno was not useful. I hope never to have anything more to do with that town. As for a doctor, I have met one who appears to me to be a prudent and educated man. He is professor Mazzoni. After he examined me he told me that his observation was that what was suitable for my condition was healthy living rather than any remedies. Here is a doctor who doesn't want to impose himself on you.

The Cheuvreux left Paris on the 14th. It seems that their travel plans were very different from my way of undertaking a journey. Not only did they not follow my advice but their letters prove to me that they didn't even read them. There they are, leaving Paris on the 14th, just in time to miss the Post Ship which leaves Marseilles on the 19th. Now, from every perspective that was their best way to make the crossing. They will now be reduced to travelling partly by land, partly by sea, in ships loaded down with cargo, where people smoke, where there is neither first nor second class berths, no security, etc. 70 The worst is that they will remain at sea for so long, despite the portion of the journey which they will take on land. I spelled out all of this to them like so many As, Bs, and Cs. They certainly skipped over all these passages in my letters. I am really upset.

My cousin 71 hasn't written to me. However, he should have received one of my letters, one of the first letters I sent from here. If you see him, remind him about me and tell him not to neglect me in this way.

I would also be very much obliged if you could visit on my behalf M. and Mme de Planat 72 whom I was not able to visit to say my goodbyes. I don't excuse myself for this omission which only you can carry out now if you are willing to do so.

When Guillaumin 73 sends me Carey's article I will be able to see what I have to reply to. 74 I said a word or two about this to M. Say 75 yesterday. Unfortunately, I fear that our communication and the shipping of the proofs of Carey's book will be impossible because of the price. Each letter I write costs 12 sous in stamps and those I receive cost 30 sous in shipping costs. My conclusion is that shipping large parcels would be exorbitant. As for the rest, as I am nowhere near being on the road to recovery in my ability to work, the postal reform of Tuscany will have to wait. 76

6. Letter 213 to M. Soustra (Pisa, 12 Oct. 1850)↩

Source

Letter 213. Pisa, 12 Oct. 1850. Letter to M. Soustra, in P. Ronce, Frédéric Bastiat. Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Guillaumin, 1905), pp. 225-27)

Editor's Introduction

Bastiat was surprised and hurt by the poor reception his book on Economic Harmonies received, even by his colleagues in the Political Economy Society, when it appeared in print in January 1850. This should not have surprised him as he had published a number of articles which later became chapters in Economic Harmonies , such as the articles on competition 77 and population 78 in 1846, the opening chapters of Economic Harmonies in the JDE in January, September, and December 1848, 79 and two pieces on rent in 1849. 80 So he knew his very different views on the Malthusian population trap, the Ricardian theory of rent, and the orthodox view of the nature of value had upset some of the other economists and that they had expressed their reservations in personal conversations and at meetings of the Political Economy Society several times. 81

The Journal des Économistes was slow to publish a review of his book perhaps knowing that it would hurt Bastiat especially as his health was rapidly deteriorating. His friend Ambroise Clément 82 reviewed it some six months after it had appeared in print which was rather unusual as the JDE was quick to bring new books to the attention of its readers. 83 After making some brief remarks about his skill as a writer and complimenting him on his chapters of "Natural and Artificial organisation" and "Exchange" Clément attacked as "graves erreurs" (grave errors) Bastiat's opinions on several key issues, namely his rejection of Malthusian population theory, his rejection of the idea that land and other raw materials create "unearned" income for the owner, and his new argument value is created by the reciprocal exchange of "service for service." 84 In a posthumous review of the second enlarged edition (which appeared in July 1851) in the JDE in August 1851 Joseph Garnier 85 reprimanded Bastiat for continuing to ignore "the masters" of political economy (as well as his colleagues) whose views on value and land rent he rejected. 86 Garnier had hoped Bastiat might have left some notes or drafts written during his final year to address these criticisms. But he did not.

Another close friend, Gustave de Molinari, shared Garnier's criticism of Bastiat's theories in the obituary he wrote for the JDE which appeared in February 1851. 87 He considered Bastiat's attempts to rethink Ricardo's and Malthus' ideas to be "fâcheuse" (unfortunate), that his reformulation of the theory of value as the exchange of "service for service" a mere play on words, and that ultimately Bastiat was a popularizer of economic ideas like Benjamin Franklin, rather than an innovative theorist like J.B. Say. 88 Among his professional colleagues, only Michel Chevalier thought highly of it.

In several other letters Bastiat's expresses his frustration with the responses of what he called "middle-aged men (who) do not easily abandon well-entrenched and long-held ideas" and sadly came to believe that he was only speaking to a future generation of thinkers who might understand his ideas and develop them further. 89

This letter also gives an interesting insight into Bastiat's very critical views about the practice of journalism in France. His series of witty and clever articles known as the "economic sophisms" showed that in just a few years (1844-48) Bastiat had become a master of the craft of journalism becoming perhaps one of the greatest economic journalists who has ever lived. Many of his friends and colleagues were also journalists so he knew the profession very well.

Text

… My dear Soustra, 90 don't think that the indifference shown by the journals towards my book has affected me very much. What has affected me a little (and again I begin to bore myself by talking about it) is the impossibility of seeing myself continuing to work on it. As for journalism, I have seen it too close up. It is a trade, the most trade-like thing imaginable. A man overburdened with tasks, who does not have time to read, who cannot and will not correct his ideas, who has a party line to follow, runs the business. Five or six beardless youths, who are crassly ignorant, who have no other skill than knowing how to turn a nice phrase, compose the article line by line. They never read, they never study, and they attach no importance even to the things they write. One can only compare them to a student doing his homework. Such is the Parisian press, with only a very few exceptions. Also, the signature of a well-known author confuses them. If this system can be helped, it will renew the blood of journalism which it needs very much.

Whatever the case may be, upon reflexion, I understand that in our present time, few of these young writers have been able to penetrate very far in understanding enough of my theory to review it. I would be consoled on the day when some pen or another has grasped the key idea, because then I would be sure that it has not been lost. My regret is that I have left this work in draft form. 91 There remains a lot for me to do, but this work demands strength …

7. Letter 214 to Paillottet (Rome, 8 Nov. 1850)↩

Source

Letter 214. Rome, 8 Nov. 1850. Letter to Paillottet in P. Ronce, Frédéric Bastiat. Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Guillaumin, 1905), pp. 260-61)

Editor's Introduction

Ronce tells us that Bastiat's spirits were lifted by the early arrival of his friends from Paris, the Cheuvreux and Bertin 92 families, to Pisa on October 22. He felt well enough to spend a day or so travelling with them to Florence. The Cheuvreux then accompanied him to Rome where he would remain until his death. He relates to Paillottet how he now suffers from boredom as he is no longer able to work on projects like rewriting his pamphlet on "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" (March, 1849) which the Guillaumin publishers wanted to reprint.

One interesting fact we learn from the letter is that, even at this very late stage in his illness, Bastiat still has the capacity to joke and laugh at himself, on this occasion a joke about the inefficiency of the "Roman Revenue Service" and "the seen and the unseen."

Text

It would give me great pleasure to write to you, my dear Paillottet, a long letter. But I will have to content myself (and perhaps you as well) with a short one in the style of Girardin, 93 because even though I could write for a long time I would have to confront my great physical difficulties.

I am very happy to have come to Rome where I enjoy the loving and constant care of the Cheuvreux family. Furthermore, I have been able to shake off a second illness which was growing upon the first one while I was in Pisa. It goes by the name of boredom . At last, I have had the good fortune to find here a close relative and friend (Eugène de Monclar). You can see how pleased I am with my move here. However, I ought to say that my larynx 94 does not appear ready to move into the next phase of convalescence.

You can tell Guillaumin to go ahead and reprint my pamphlet "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interests" 95 and that I approve of the measures you have taken together. However, don't think that if I were not prevented from doing so, I wouldn't resist correcting the pamphlet. I would want to cut the first part, lengthen all the examples I gave on the constitutional history of Britain, and above all correct something which I attributed to M. Thiers. 96 I was so angry to have made this mistake that, when the public discussion of it was taking place, I would have retracted my statement from the rostrum, if I hadn't forgotten to do so. But let us not dwell on the impossible.

As for the book by Carey, send it to me when and as you can. 97 If Guillaumin had some contacts in the French embassy, this way of contacting me would be convenient. As for the other matters, getting copies of the Journal des Économistes costs me in Tuscany no more than a standard letter. I don't know what it is like in the Roman States. But sending it via the Embassy is more convenient from the point of view of security than that of cheapness.

Concerning the delivery of letters, I have just learned that those which come from France in envelopes cost double. This is absurd, but it is true. If you fold it and seal it in the old fashioned manner you would save me 75 centimes that I can see and which the Roman Fisc (revenue service) does not see . 98

Our dear friend Michel Chevalier 99 has not failed us in writing a strong review in favour of my book. 100 I plan to write to him to thank him for his article which, as you can imagine, has made me very happy.

Tell me about M. de Fontenay. Is he hard at work? What is he busy with? Perhaps he should avoid concentrating all his energy for too long on a single subject. Experience has shown many thinkers that a single object of study disappears in the face of too determined research. By examining several topics at once one can see the connections between them. When he has finished working on Capital , then could work hard on something else, like Wages , or this wonderful subject which I have been busy with, the importance of the consumer .

Farewell, my dear Paillottet. Don't don't forget to mention me to our friends, and give my news to Justin.

Your devoted friend.

Early Writings: The Bayonne and Mugron Years, 1819-1844↩

Section Introduction↩

[See the Reader's Guide to the Writings of Bastiat]

1. T.296 (before 1830) "On the Romans as Plundering Villains"↩

Source

T.296 (before 1830) "On the Romans as Plundering Villains" (sometime before 1830). This previously unpublished sketch was discovered by the original French editor Paillottet among Bastiat's papers and inserted in a footnote to "Baccalaureate and Socialism". He estimated that it had been written sometime before 1830. [OC4, pp. 454-55] [CW2, pp. 194-95] </titles/2450#lf1573-02_footnote_nt177>

Editor's Introduction

This very short piece is an early expression of the great hostility Bastiat showed towards Ancient Greece and Rome, which was so admired by his contemporaries and played such as crucial role in French education. He mentions this several times in his theoretical work, in his letters, and in his speeches and articles on educational reform. He rejected the morality of the ancient Romans in particular who were warriors and slave owners who kept the majority of the Roman people in political subjection and ruled the rest of the Mediterranean world as subjects of their ever growing empire. The Romans disliked manual labor, used violence to maintain their economic privileges and political rule, and regarded war and the warrior virtues as supreme. For all these reasons, Bastiat despised the Romans.

In his writings on the theory of plunder, Bastiat placed Roman slavery at an early point in the evolution of European society which he saw as moving from primitive plunder, through war, slavery, theocracy, monopoly, governmental exploitation, and communism (or what he called "false fraternity").

Bastiat's very first reference to Rome was in a letter to his friend Victor Calmètes (8 December, 1821) which set the tone for his views for the remainder of his life:

In Rome, wealth was the fruit of chance, birth, and conquests; today, it is the reward only of work, industry, and economy. In these circumstances, it is nothing if not honorable. Only a real fool taken from secondary school would scorn a man who knows how to acquire assets with honesty and use them with discernment. 101

As someone who attended an experimental school in Sorèze, where modern languages, history, and music were taught, Bastiat believed that the study of the Latin language and Roman classics in government schools help twist the minds of modern-day youth and prejudiced them against voluntary cooperation and industrious work. As he stated in an early article "On a New Secondary School to Be Founded in Bayonne" (1834) he warned educators about teaching pupils too much about the Romans:

For what is there in common between ancient Rome and modern France? The Romans lived from plunder and we live from production, they scorned and we honor work, they left to slaves the task of producing and this is exactly the task for which we are responsible, they were organized for war and we aim for peace, they were for theft and we are for trade, they aimed to dominate and we tend to bring peoples together.

And how do you expect these young men who have escaped from Sparta and Rome not to upset our century with their ideas? Will they not, like Plato, dream of illusory republics; and like the Gracchi, have their gaze fixed on the Aventine Mount; and like Brutus, contemplate the bloody glory of sublime devotion? 102

He was still saying the same thing during the Revolution of 1848 where he stated in an article on "The Scramble for Office" in his revolutionary newspaper La République française (March, 1848) that:

In a country in which, since time immemorial, the labor of free men has everywhere been demeaned, in which education offers as a model to all youth the mores of Greece and Rome, in which trade and industry are constantly exposed by the press to the scorn of citizens under the label profiteering, industrialism, or individualism, in which success in office alone leads to wealth, prestige, or power, and in which the state does everything and interferes in everything through its innumerable agents, it is natural enough for public office to be avidly sought after.

How can we turn ambition away from this disastrous direction and redirect the activity of the enlightened classes toward productive careers? 103

In one of the last major pieces he wrote in his final year, Baccalaureate and Socialism , which is his most extended work on the defects of a classical education and "Roman morals," he attributed much of the violence and interventionist legislation during the recent revolution to the classical ideas taught in French schools:

The causes of the Revolution probably had no connection with a classical education, but can we doubt that this form of education contributed a host of mistaken ideas, sadistic feelings, subversive utopias and deadly experimentation? Read the speeches made in the Legislative Assembly and the Convention. They are in the language of Rousseau and Mably. They are just tirades in favor of, and invocations and exclamatory addresses to, Fabricius, Cato, the two Brutuses, the Gracchi, and Catilina. Is an atrocity going to be committed? There is always the example of a Roman to glorify it. What education has instilled in the mind is translated into act. Sparta and Rome are agreed on as models and so they must be imitated or parodied. One person wants to establish the Olympic Games, another the agrarian laws and a third (the distribution of) black broth in the streets. 104

For a similar early diatribe against the Romans see "On the Romans and Self-Sacrifice" below. 105

Text

Distance contributes not a little to giving antique figures an aura of greatness. If Roman citizens are mentioned to us, we do not normally conjure up a vision of a robber intent on acquiring booty and slaves at the expense of peaceful peoples. We do not visualize him going about half naked, hideously dirty in muddy streets. We do not come across him whipping a slave who shows a bit of initiative and pride until the robber draws blood or kills him. We prefer to conjure up a fine head set on a bust brimming with force and majesty and draped like an ancient statue. We prefer to contemplate this person as he meditates on the great destiny of his fatherland. We seem to see his family around the hearth honoring the presence of the gods, with his wife preparing a simple meal for the warrior and casting a confident and admiring look on the brow of her husband and the children and paying attention to the words of an old man who whiles the hours away reciting the exploits and virtues of their father. …

Oh! How many illusions would disappear if we could evoke the past, wander in the streets of Rome, and see at close hand the men whom we admire from afar in such good faith!

2. T.297 (before 1830) "On the Romans and Self-sacrifice"↩

Source

T.297 (before 1830) "On the Romans and Self-sacrifice" (before 1830). This previously unpublished sketch was discovered by the original French editor Paillottet among Bastiat's papers and inserted in a footnote to "Baccalaureate and Socialism". He estimated that it had been written sometime before 1830. [OC4, pp. 490-91] [CW2, pp. 223-24] </titles/2450#lf1573-02_label_299>

Editor's Introduction

See the Editor's note above on Bastiat's attitude towards the Romans.

Text

When I sacrifice part of my wealth to build walls and a roof that will protect me from thieves and the weather, it cannot be said that I am driven by self-renunciation but that on the contrary I am endeavoring to preserve myself.

In the same way, when the Romans sacrificed their internal divisions in favor of their security, when they risked their lives in combat, when they subjected themselves to the yoke of an almost unbearable discipline, they were not practicing self-renunciation; on the contrary they were embracing the sole means they had of preserving themselves and escaping the destruction with which they were threatened by the reaction of other peoples to their acts of violence.

I know that several Romans demonstrated great personal self-sacrifice and devoted themselves to saving Rome. But there is an easy explanation for this. The interest that determined their political organization was not their only motive. Men accustomed to conquering together, to hating everything foreign to their society, had to have an exalted degree of national pride and patriotism. All warlike nations, from primitive hordes to civilized peoples who make war only accidentally, experience patriotic exhilaration. This is all the more true of the Romans, whose very existence was based upon permanent war. This thrilling national pride, combined with the courage born of warlike customs, the scorn of death it inspired, the love of glory, and the desire to live on in posterity, had frequently to produce dazzling exploits.

For this reason, I do not say that no virtue can arise in a society that is purely military. I would be contradicted by events, and the bands of robbers themselves offer us examples of courage, energy, devotion, a scorn of death, generosity, etc. However, I claim that, like these bands of plunderers, these nations of plunderers, from the point of view of self-renunciation, do not win out over industrious nations, and I will add that the enormous and continuous vices of the former cannot be erased by a few dazzling exploits, which are perhaps unworthy of the name of virtue, since they work to the detriment of humanity.

3. T.289 "The Poetry of Civilization" (c. 1830)↩

Source

T.289 (1830.??) "The Poetry of Civilization" (La Poésie de la Civilisation). Ronce says he found this in Bastiat's papers and thinks it was written sometime before 1830. In Ronce, Appendix VI, pp. 302-3.

Editor's Introduction

Bastiat was about 29 when he wrote this short piece sometime during 1830 when the July Revolution took place. 106 For someone who disliked ancient Greek and Roman culture so much, he dropped a lot of classical references in this short essay, perhaps to show that he was not ignorant of it, but rather opposed it for moral and economic reasons.

It is also interesting for the kind words he has to say about his friend, Étienne Vincent Arago (1802-1892), with whom he probably went to the same progressive school in the town of Sorèze. 107 Étienne was the youngest brother of the famous Arago family, and like Bastiat, he was elected after the Revolution to the Constituent Assembly and served as Director General of the Post Office where he began implementing reforms which were very dear to Bastiat's heart. During the 1820s he was active in Carbonari circles and in the 1830 Revolution he took part in the fighting on the barricades as an ally of Lafayette's group, while Bastiat remained behind in Bayonne where he too played a small role in helping the new "constitutional monarch" Louis Philippe come to the throne. While Étienne was on the barricades in Paris, Frédéric was drinking red wine and singling political songs with the officers of the Bayonne citadelle, thus helping them decide to side with the revolution and oppose the deposed King Charles X. As he wrote to his friend Félix Coudroy:

The 5th at midnight

I was expecting blood but it was only wine that was spilt. The citadel has displayed the tricolor flag. The military containment of the Midi and Toulouse has decided that of Bayonne; the regiments down there have displayed the flag. The traitor J—— thus saw that the plan had failed, especially as the troops were defecting on all sides; he then decided to hand over the orders he had had in his pocket for three days. Thus, it is all over. I plan to leave immediately. I will embrace you tomorrow.

This evening we fraternized with the garrison officers. Punch, wine, liqueurs, and above all, Béranger contributed largely to the festivities. Perfect cordiality reigned in this truly patriotic gathering. The officers were warmer than we were, in the same way as horses which have escaped are more joyful than those that are free.

Farewell, all has ended. 108

Étienne Arago made a name for himself as a prolific and successful playwright throughout the 1820 and 1840s writing very political plays such as Mandrin, mélodrame en 3 actes (1827), about Louis Mandrin (1725-55) the famous 18th century brigand and highwayman, and Les Aristocraties (1847), which was a strong republican attack on the privileges of the aristocracy.

Bastiat also knew the oldest Arago brother François (1786-1853) who was a famous astronomer and physicist whose work was noticed by Laplace who got him the position of secretary and librarian at the Paris Observatory. In one of the sophisms he wrote in 1847 109 Bastiat appealed directly to François Arago to help him develop the more sophisticated mathematics which he needed in order to calculate more precisely the losses imposed on the economy by tariff protection and subsidies, thus making his arguments more "invincible." We do not know if François ever replied to his letter.

Text

… There are two kinds of poetry. One is the product of the imagination; the other is the story of human feelings.

I am quite inclined to think that materialism, or to put it better, "Pryrrhonism," 110 destroys the poetry of the imagination. But one can say the same of all truth. It is quite evident that as the circle of science expands that of the imagination contracts, since one can only imagine what one doesn't know. The latter explains why the people of antiquity had more imagination that modern people. Not knowing anything about causes they imagined them to be their own creation. It was not only poets who created things but philosophers as well , and the people too.

Even in our own time, rough and ignorant men, because they are ignorant, revel in chimeras, because only the man who has reflected a great deal and who is often mistaken can say " I don't know. " Peasants explain all phenomena which they are aware of, as being under the influence of the moon, the stars, sorcerers, and saints, etc. By enlightening them you dry up these springs of the imagination.

Think of the time when Christianity replaced Paganism. Didn't we see the same fears about the pleasures of the imagination? If your religion dominates all beliefs, the Pagans said, what will become of poetry? Olympus will now only be an ordinary hill, Parnassus only a lump of dirt and granite, rivers will be denuded of Naiads, and trees of Dryads, fauns, and wood nymphs. 111 Beauty (Aphrodite) will no longer be the daughter of the day and the waves; she will be stripped of her belt and Love (Cupid) will no longer have his arrows and blindfold. 112 You will no longer have dwelling places of the gods but fences and hedges; you will no longer have divinities of the hearth but a gloomy fire place. Peace, Concorde, Victory, Filial Piety, Modesty will no longer be gentle deities. The Dawn, Iris, will lose their colors and their charm. 113 The Sun will no longer be a chariot pulled by Apollo's chargers across the sky; 114 and the Moon will now only be a mundane satellite of the Earth. This is what they will no doubt say.

After this mythology has disappeared other mythologies will have their turn; but if the poetry of the imagination has been lost, that of the heart will replace it; and I am truly surprised that you, in order to convince me, so often call upon the marvels of nature, that you don't want to let me believe that, after all is said and done, the truth, the simple truth, is more beautiful than the most brilliant products of the human imagination.

Believe me, my friend, there is more poetry in the head of Arago that in that of Homer.

4. T.104 "Letter to M. Saulnier, Editor of La Revue britannique , (on the cost of government in the U.S. and France)" (c. 1831)↩

Source

T.104 (undated, possibly 1831) "Letter to M. Saulnier, Editor of La Revue britannique (on the cost of government in the U.S. and France)." Paillottet included this letter in a footnote with the pamphlet Peace and Freedom or the Republican Budget (Feb. 1849). He states in was written "in his retreat in Mugron many years ago" but gives no specific date. It was most likely written as the debate was being conducted in the pages of La Revue britannique or shortly thereafter . [OC5, pp. 443-45] [CW2, pp. 308-10].

Editor's Introduction

For the classical liberals of Bastiat's day, the United States was seen as an excellent example of a working limited, decentralised, and low cost government, in contrast to the highly centralised, bureaucratic, and expensive French state. In 1831 a debate took place in La Revue britannique which was edited by Sébastien-Louis Saulnier 115 who took issue with a speech given by General LaFayette in the Chamber on the relative costs of the French and American governments to their respective citizens. James Fenimore Cooper (who had lived in France for two years in the late 1820s) took the side of Lafayette who argued that the American government was the lowest cost government in the world. 116 This view was challenged by the editor Saulnier and an American diplomat, Mr. Harris, in La Revue britannique and some of the articles were published as separate pamphlets. 117 Bastiat must have read this exchange with considerable interest as his own political interest was beginning to show itself at this time: he played a small part in the July Revolution in 1830 which brought Louis Philippe to the throne, he was appointed Justice of the Peace in Mugron in May 1831, stood unsuccessfully for election to the local legislature in July 1831, and in November 1833 he was elected to the General Council of Les Landes.

In this letter to the editor (which Paillottet says was never sent) we see evidence of Bastiat's interest in economic data concerning tax rates and his belief in a very limited government as embodied in the American example. It also shows that he kept abreast of events in Britain and America by reading La Revue britannique which would become even more important to him when he discovered the activities of Richard Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League in the early 1840s.

Text

To M. Saulnier

Editor of La Revue britannique

Dear Sir,

You have filled with transports of joy in all those who find the word economics absurd, ridiculous, unacceptable, bourgeois, and mean. The Journal des débats extols you, the president of the council quotes you, and the favors of government are waiting for you. However, what have you done, sir, to merit so much applause? You have established through figures (and everyone knows that figures never lie) that it costs the citizens of the United States more than the subjects of France to be governed. 118 This gives rise to the harsh consequence (harsh for the people in fact) that it is absurd to wish to place limits on the lavishness of power in France.

But, sir, and I ask your pardon and that of the centres for economics and statistics, your figures, assuming they are correct, do not seem to me to be unfavorable to the American government.

In the first place, to establish that one government spends more than another does not give any information on their relative goodness. If one of them, for example, is administering a nascent nation that has all its roads to build, all its canals to dig out, all its towns to pave, and all its public establishments to create, it is natural that it spends more than one that has scarcely more to do than maintain its existing establishments. Well, you know as well as I do, sir, that spending that way is to save and create capital. If it were done by a farmer, would you be confusing the investments that an initial establishment requires with his annual expenditure?

However, this major difference in situation leads, according to your figures, to an additional expenditure of only three francs for each citizen of the Union. Is this excess genuine? No, according to your own data. This may surprise you, since you have set at 36 fr. the contribution by each American and 33 fr. that of each Frenchman. 119 Well, 36 = 33 + 3 is good arithmetic.——Yes, but in political economy, thirty-three is often worth more than thirty-six. See for yourself. Money, in comparison with labor and goods, is not as valuable in the United States as it is in France. You yourself set a day's pay at four francs fifty centimes in the United States and at one franc fifty centimes in France. The result, I believe, is that an American pays thirty-six francs with eight days' work, whereas a Frenchman needs twenty-two days' work to pay thirty-three francs. It is true that you say that people buy forced labor (corvée) 120 from each other in the United States for three francs and that consequently the price of a day's work ought to be set at three francs there.——There are two answers to this. Forced labor is bought in France for one franc (for we also have forced labor, about which you do not speak) and then, if a day's work in the United States is worth only three francs the Americans no longer pay thirty-six francs since, to reach this figure, you have raised to four francs fifty centimes all the days that these citizens devote to fulfilling their military obligations (militia), 121 their forced labor, their jury service, etc.

This is not the only subtle difference you have used to raise the annual contribution of each American to thirty-six francs.

You impute to the government of the United States expenses that it is not concerned with in the slightest. To justify this strange method of proceeding, you say that these expenses are no less borne by the citizens. But is it not a question of determining which are the voluntary expenses of the citizens and which are the expenditures of the government?

A government is created to fulfill certain functions. When it exceeds its functions, it has to appeal to the citizens' purses and thus reduce the portion of revenue that was freely at their disposal. It becomes simultaneously a plunderer and oppressor. 122

A nation that is wise enough to force its government to limit itself to guaranteeing security to each person and that spends only what is absolutely essential to this consumes the remainder of its revenue in accordance with its particular talents, its needs, and its inclinations.

But in a nation in which the government interferes in everything, nothing is spent by itself and for its own benefit, but it is spent by the government and for the government, and if the French public thinks as you do, sir, if it cares little that its wealth goes through the hands of functionaries, I have resigned myself to that fact that one day we will all be lodged, fed, and clothed at the State's expense. These are things that cost us something and, according to you, it is of little importance whether we get them through taxation or through direct purchase. The importance that our ministers give this opinion convinces me that we will soon have clothes produced by them, just as we have priests, lawyers, teachers, doctors, horses, and tobacco of their fashioning. 123

Yours, etc.

Frédéric Bastiat

5. T.318 "Election Manifesto" (c. 1832)↩

Source Info

T.318 "Election Manifesto" (c.1832). Quoted in part by Bastiat in a later Election Manifesto: 1846.07.01 "Aux électeurs de l'arrondissement de Saint-Sever (Mugron, 1 July, 1846)" (To the Electors of the Arrondissement of Saint-Séver (Mugron, July 1, 1846)) [OC1.14, p. 461] [CW1]. Also quoted by Molinari in his obituary of Bastiat: Gustave de Molinari, "Nécrologie. Frédéric Bastiat, notice sur sa vie et ses écrits," JDE, T. 28, no. 118, 15 Feb. 1851, pp. 180-96.

We have not been able to locate the original.

Editor's Note

Bastiat had political ambitions after his brief participation in the "Three Glorious Days" in July 1830 (27-29th) which overthrew the Bourbon monarch Charles X and brought his cousin Louis Philippe (of the Orléanist branch of the Bourbon family) to the throne. He wrote his first "election manifesto" or statement of principles in November 1830 in support of a candidate, M. Faurie, 124 in the election for Les Landes. In it there are already strong hints of the positions he would defend some 25 years later: his desire for lower taxes, the dangers of political lobbyists and vested interests seeking benefits at taxpayer expence, the tendency of government to constantly grow in size and thus absorb more taxes to fund their activities, and the self-interest of politicians and bureaucrats who inflate their salaries and their benefits. Concerning the latter, what he termed "this vast machine" of government, he warned:

Abuses, sinecures, exorbitant pay, irrelevant positions, damaging jobs, and administrative structures substituted for competition will have to be strictly investigated; I have no fear in stating that this is the worst plague from which France is suffering. 125

Possibly as a reward for his political activity he was appointed a Justice of the Peace in the canton of Mugron (in spite of not having any formal legal training) on 28 May 1831, and he then stood for election (unsuccessfully) to the legislature of the Arrondissement of Dax on 6 July 1831. He tried again (unsuccessfully) the following year for the Arrondissement of Saint-Sever on 11 July 1832, when the Election Manifesto below may have been written. He had better luck the following year when he was elected to the General Council of Les Landes on 17 November 1833, which may have helped develop his interest in economic matters as he wrote several memoranda for the Council and other regional bodies on subjects like the local land tax, the tax on wine, and public works. 126 He was reelected to the General Council on 24 November 1839 and continued in this position until he died.

He was certainly persistent in his efforts as he tried again to get elected to the legislature in the Arrondissement of Saint-Sever on 9 July 1842 (unsuccessfully) and again in 1846 when he wrote yet another manifesto "To the Electors of the District of Saint-Sever" 127 explaining why they should elect him in spite of him being "too progressive" for some and not progressive enough for others. One reason why he faced opposition was for his very strong criticism of the conquest and colonization of Algeria. 128 Another was his belief in very limited government which the following passage makes clear:

But, even if there were agreement on the limits of public authority, it is no easy matter to force it and maintain it within those limits.

Government power, a vast, organized, and living body, naturally tends to grow. It feels cramped within its supervisory mission. Now, its growth is hardly possible without a succession of encroachments upon the field of individual rights. The expansion of government power means usurping some form of private activity, transgressing the boundary that I set earlier between what is and what is not its essential function. Government power departs from its mission when, for instance, it imposes a particular form of worship on our consciences, a particular method of teaching on our minds, a particular direction for our work or for our capital, or an impulse to invade in our international relationships, etc.

Gentlemen, I would bring it to your attention that government becomes all the more costly as it becomes oppressive. For it can commit no encroachments otherwise than through salaried agents. Thus each of its intrusions implies creating some new administration, instituting some fresh tax, so that our freedom and our purse inevitably share a common destiny.

Consequently, if the public understands and wishes to defend its true interests, it will halt authority as soon as the latter tries to go beyond its sphere of activity; and for that purpose the public has an infallible means, which is to deny authority the resources with which it could carry out its encroachments.

Once these principles are laid down, the role of the opposition, and I would even say that of parliament as a whole, is simple and clearly defined.

It does not consist in hindering the government in its essential activity, in denying it the means of administering justice, of repressing crime, of paving roads, of repelling foreign aggression. 129

Towards the end of this manifesto of 1846 Bastiat quotes himself, from an earlier unpublished election manifesto from 1832, to prove to the electors in 1846 that his views about the role of the state had barely shifted over the years and thus they could be confident that he would remain a steadfast opponent of growing government and heavier taxes should they decide to vote for him now.

In spite of all his efforts, Bastiat did not succeed in getting elected to political office until the April elections of 1848 when he became a Deputy representing Les Landes in the Second Republic.

Text:

[Bastiat introduces his long quotation from the 1832 manifesto with the following:]

As for me, when I consider how I have persisted in defending a principle that is making no progress in France, I sometimes wonder if I am not a maniac possessed with a fixed idea.

To enable you to judge whether I have changed, let me set before you an extract from the declaration of policy that I published in 1832, when a kind word from General Lamarque 130 attracted the attention of a few voters in my favor:

In my view, the institutions that we have already obtained and those that we can obtain by lawful means are sufficient, if we make enlightened use of them, to raise our country to a high degree of freedom, greatness, and prosperity.

The right to vote taxes, in giving citizens the power to extend or restrain the action of the government as they please, isn't that management by the public of public affairs? What might we not achieve by making judicious use of that right?

Do we consider that ambition for office is the source of many contentions, intrigues, and factions? It rests with us alone to deprive that fatal passion of its sustenance, by reducing the profits and the number of salaried public offices." …

Do we feel that industry is shackled, the administration overcentralized, education hampered by academic monopoly? There is nothing to prevent us from holding back the money that facilitates those shackles, that centralization, those monopolies.

As you can see, gentlemen, I shall never expect the welfare of my country to result from any violent change in either the forms or the holders of power; but rather from our good faith in supporting the government in the useful exercise of its essential powers and from our firm determination to restrict it to those limits. The government has to be firm facing enemies from within and from without, for its mission is to keep the peace at home and abroad. But it must leave to private activity everything that is within the latter's competence. Order and freedom depend on those conditions.

[Bastiat then concludes by saying:]

Are those not the same principles, the same feelings, the same fundamental way of thinking, the same solutions for particular problems, the same means of reform? People may not share my opinions; but it cannot be said that they have varied, and I venture to add: they are invariable. It is too coherent a system to admit of any alterations. It will collapse or it will triumph as a whole.

6. T.285 "On Certainty" (c. 1833)↩

Source

T.285 (1833.??) "On Certainty" (De la certitude). Ronce says this was sketch written around 1833 and found in his notebooks. In Ronce, Appendix II, pp. 284-87. [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

Is these seemingly random musings Bastiat is concerned about the difficulties of rationally determining the scientifically "perfect" weight of a coin which he believes is impossible because of experimental error in weighing and measuring objects in the real world. He then applies similar reasoning to the problem of the moral perfectibility of mankind which he believes can only be approached "asymptotically" and never actually reached. Bastiat began talking about the "perfectibility of mankind" early in 1845 in his articles "On the Book by M. Dunoyer. On The Liberty of Working" and "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine" (JDE Feb. 1845), and then in earnest in 1846 in his articles "On Competition" (JDE May 1846) and "On Population" (JDE, October 1846), after which it became a central part of his social theory. 131

He concludes somewhat cryptically that "Where one understands little about the effects of drunkenness there will be more drunkards." Given his later interest in the unchanging nature of the "natural laws" of political economy, he is foreshadowing his future claim that if mankind refuses to understand and recognise the power of these laws they will be doomed to suffer the consequences of bad economic policies.

Text

In moral philosophy, a fact is the asymptote of what is right , just as in physics, what can be measured is the asymptote of what is rational in theory .

A fact tends to approach continuously what is right. It is the result of our human nature which is perfectible but not perfect.

That which can be measured tends to approach the theoretically perfect because our senses are also perfectible but imperfect.

One understands that a new kind of exercise makes an organ more practiced and that a new kind of force adds to its strength.

But these new exercises and these new forces only ever add a finite amount to a finite amount, while the theoretical is infinite.

I challenge you and I challenge all the scientific and technical experts to tell me what is the rational weight, the mathematically exact weight, for a piece of money.

Firstly, do they (the experts) have a standard and mathematically determined weight with which they can compare it?

If you tell me that a gramme has theoretically an exact value, I will say no, it doesn't, since one would have to have measured just as precisely the earth's arc of meridian. 132 Now, there would have been in this operation only an error in measurement. A metre would have an error of one ten millionth in its length. This is quite small but it is enough to make your standard, which is very reasonable, not rational.

However, I will admit that it might be. It remains to be seen whether this small piece of copper which you claim is a gramme, has been made with infinite perfection.

You have compared it to a given volume of distilled water, but water weighs more or less according to how much it has expanded, etc.

I will further admit that your piece of copper is a gramme which has been mathematically determined.

You will still have to place the two objects to be compared in the two pans of a balance. But who can tell me that these pans weigh the same? You will say you have weighed them, but in other balances, and my objection therefore will move back to infinity.

However, I will admit the mathematical accuracy of your balance, but the objects which we are comparing, when they have reached equilibrium, do not have an equal weight as a result. They displace more or less air according to their volume. Therefore we have to weigh them in a vacuum and we don't know if there is any vacuum.

Therefore, you can only ever show me an approximate weight.

You can do this operation a thousand times and take the average, and you will give me a more probable result. But a series of probabilities is not a certainty.

Thus it is quite true that in physics complete certainty cannot be acquired by us who have incomplete senses. To say that "I am sure" is to say that "I am infinite."

In order to be sure of one thing it is necessary to be sure of everything.

Therefore, in order to know the weight of this piece of money it is necessary to have measured exactly the quater of the earth's meridian, to have have had perfect instruments in order to carry out this operation, and still more perfect instruments to make the first instrument; it would be necessary to have had a perfect cube of water, to have perfectly distilled the water and not to have allowed, for example, a single atom to have escaped from this organised mass of atoms, a thousand of which could sit on the point of a needle; it would be necessary to have made the perfect vacuum, to have a perfect barometre, in other words to know perfectly its freezing point; it is necessary to determine exactly the movement of the air, not to touch the objects being compared because the warmth of one's hands and the steam deposited on these objects by touching them will change their weights; it is necessary to have perfect scales, and after all that has been achieved, you would still only have the standard of weight.

Everywhere the measurable is the asymptote of the theoretical.

Facts are the asymptote of that which is right.

That which is right is perfection. Perfection is incompatible with human nature; since mankind cannot achieve that which is right either by his thoughts nor by his acts. But he can approach them continuously.

In fact, it is absolutely essential that error and vice constantly lose their influence upon mankind.

Vice is the daughter of error. Not always the error of those who give themselves up to it, but the error of those who suffer from it and those who have the opinion that they should tolerate it.

There are as many fewer corrupters as there are fewer corruptible men. There are fewer of both to the degree that there are fewer men who are inclined to suffer the effects of corruption.

In a society where one doesn't know that all bodies which are not supported will fall down, lots of misfortune will occur.

It is the same for matters of morality. Where one understand little about the effects of drunkenness there will be more drunkards.

Again, this is true for the morality governing social relations, and all the more true , in this case, as the correction comes from a double source, that is in the mind of the perverted man and in that of the society which protects itself from vice …

7. T.4 "On a Petition in Support of Polish Refugees" (c. 1834)↩

Source

T.4 (1834.??) "On a Petition in favor of Polish Refugees" (D'une pétition en faveur des réfugiés polonais). In an unnamed local Bayonne paper. [OC7.1, pp. 1-4.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

In 1830 the Kingdom of Poland was part of the Russian Empire. On 29 November 1830, an uprising broke out in Warsaw. The Polish independence movement was not supported by other European powers, France included, although public opinion in France was very favorable to it. On 8 September 1831, Russian troops retook Warsaw and numerous Poles went into exile, mostly in France. Between 1830-48 France received nearly 20,000 Polish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German refugees, including socialists such as Karl Marx. 133 The law of April 1832 guaranteed them some financial assistance but only in exchange for the onerous conditions which Bastiat describes later in the article.

In order to help the refugee Poles overcome some of the bureaucratic restrictions they faced in moving about the country and finding jobs, liberals like Bastiat organised petitions, wrote articles in the local press, and lobbied influential friends to help them get residence permits and jobs suited to their areas of expertise. As examples we have this newspaper article by Bastiat from 1834 and a letter he wrote to organise assistance for a particular Pole he knew who was an engineer (Sept. 1835). It shows another side of Bastiat's commitment to political liberty, in that he sometimes took a personal interest in the affairs of those who were harassed by the state and took steps to assist them.

Paillottet believes the article dates from 1834 and was published in an unnamed local Bayonne paper. We, however, have not been able to locate it.

Text

At this moment, a petition to the Chamber of Deputies is being signed in Bayonne to ask for the law dated 21 April 1832 134 relating to refugees not to be renewed when it expires.

We are pleased to learn that people of all shades of opinion are offering to sign this petition. In fact, it is not a question here of asking the Chamber for an act to satisfy this or that clique, nor to favor freedom at the expense of order nor order at the expense of freedom (if indeed these two things can be anything other than inseparable). It is a question of justice and humanity toward our unfortunate brethren. It is a question of not pouring absinthe and bile into the cup of exile, which is already bitter enough.

During the Polish War, a variety of opinions and projects was to be found in France about this war. Some would have liked France to come to the aid of the Poles with arms, others with money, and still others through diplomacy, while yet others thought that all forms of assistance were useless. However, although opinions varied, there was one single wish, one hope, totally in favor of Poland.

When some survivors of this unfortunate nation came to France to escape the hatred of absolute monarchs, this warmth toward hapless courage remained.

However, what has been the fate of the Poles in France in the last two years? You can judge this by reading the law that placed them under the discretionary power of the Government, the wording of which is as follows:

Article 1: The Government is authorized to restrict foreign refugees to living in France in one or more towns of its choosing.

Article 2: The Government may compel them to move to those towns as it chooses for them; it may order them to leave the Kingdom if they do not go to this destination, or if it considers their presence likely to disturb public order and peace.

Article 3: This current law may be applied to foreign refugees only by virtue of an order signed by a Minister.

Article 4: This law will remain in force for just one year from the day it is promulgated.

Now we ask whether it would not be unworthy of France to make a law like this permanent or, which amounts to the same thing, to prorogue it indefinitely through successive renewals.

It seems probable that the most ardent wish an exiled person can cling to, after the longing to see his exile come to an end, is to engage in some form of work and build up a few resources for himself through his industry. But, in order to do this, he has to be able to choose his place of residence. Those refugees who might be useful to commercial establishments have to reside in commercial towns; those who have an aptitude for a particular manufacturing industry have to be able to go to the regions in which such factories are located, while those of artistic bent have to live in the towns in which fine arts are encouraged. Finally, they have to have the right not to be expelled from one day to the next, and to expect that the sword of a despotic government will not be constantly held over their heads.

The law dated 21 April is calculated to prevent the Poles who are unable to receive either news or help from their own country, whose families are oppressed and dragged off to Siberia, or whose fellow-countrymen are dispersed and wandering all over the world, from doing anything for themselves to improve their lot. They are no longer refugees but genuine prisoners of war, huddled in their hundreds in villages that offer them no resources and where the uncertainty in which they find themselves prevents their taking steps that might decrease their expenditure. We have seen them at 9 o'clock receiving an order to leave town at mid-day, etc.

This system of persecution is based on the necessity of maintaining public order and peace in France. But all those who have had the opportunity of meeting Poles know full well that they are not the instigators of trouble and disorder and that they are fully aware that the interests of France have to be discussed by Frenchmen. Finally, if any one of them does not understand his position and duty sufficiently, the courts are there, and it is not in the least necessary for a minister two hundred leagues away to judge and condemn without hearing and seeing or even ascertaining the facts, or at least being obliged to ensure that he is not mistaking the name or the identity of individuals.

The result of this is that it is enough for a Pole to have a well connected personal enemy for him to be thrown out of the country without a hearing, an enquiry, or the guarantees that the lowliest of miscreants would obtain in France.

And what is more, are those who fear that the presence of Poles disturbs public order in good faith? We do not accept that they wish to disturb the peace, and if they had any such intention, we would be disposed to believe that it is the stringent measures taken against them that have annoyed them and led them into error. But is our Government on such unsteady foundations that it has to fear the presence of a few hundred exiled people? Is it not satirizing itself by claiming that it cannot guarantee public order unless it is armed with arbitrary powers against these people?

It is therefore perfectly clear that the petition that is being signed at this moment is not and should not be the work of one party, but that it should be welcomed by all the people of Bayonne, no matter what their political views, provided that there is some spark of humanity and justice in their hearts.

8. T.6 "A Letter to "Charles" in Support of a Polish Refugee" (Mugron, 1 Sept. 1835)↩

Source

T.6 (1835.09) "Letter to "Charles" in Support of a Polish Refugee" (Lette à un ami non identifié pour la défense d'un refugié). Mugron, 1 Sept. 1835. [JCPD]

Editor's Introduction

This letter was acquired by M. Paul-Dejean at an auction in 2012 and is here published for the first time. It follows nicely the previous article where Bastiat writes a newspaper article urging public support for a petition to liberalise the restrictive 1832 law which controlled the movement and activities of refugees. In this letter we see Bastiat's private actions to organise practical help for a Polish engineer he knew personally, M. Michalewsky, by lobbying his political and business contacts to contribute their weight and support to his efforts. Note that one of the names he refers to is an influential Landais general and Peer Antoine Simon Durrieu.

Text

My Dear Charles

I cannot find the way to express my gratitude for the speed and pleasure with which you took into your protection the unfortunate Pole whom I had recommended to you. Your last letter made him a happy man, especially since we were not expecting any success as prompt and complete as that.

I thought it preferable to send you M. Michalewsky's petititon. I am including a certificate from the Mayor of St.-Sever and another engineer from the arrondissement. The chief engineer also wanted me to send you his, but because of a misunderstanding it has not been included. I will get it if it is necessary, but I think that what we have is sufficient. M. Michalewsky has several others at hand from some of the villages where he has lived, and from a mathematics professor at a college in St-Sever. I think it would be better if he brought them to you himself. The position he now occupies here was obtained as a result of a personal recommendation from the Director General of the Bridges and Highways Department. Concerning the steps about which you spoke at the beginning of your letter, I'll thank you for them as if they had already been crowned with success. Personally, I have no interest in the matter. I hope that M. Durrieu 135 has not been taken advantage of.

Here, the word is that you might be appointed a Councilor at the Royal Court in Paris, or Procurer-General of the Province. Not having read anything about this in the newspapers I presume all this talk is premature. However, now that the appointment process has finished, I hope that your position will soon be confirmed.

But returning to my Pole, as you might think, he wants as little uncertainty as possible. After his arrival in Paris he will need to find some accommodation and to begin preparing for his interview which will be held on 5 September. The journey is a little long and all these factors will, I hope, encourage you to make immediate use of the kind services of M. de Gasparini.

You said nothing about your Portuguese litigation. 136 Your father, when he was in Paris, also neglected to talk to me about the Arias-Quivigne trial. The soundness of your case seems to me to be as clear as the midday sun. I cannot wait to see the end of it.

Adieu, my dear Charles. I write in haste as I feel an attack of the fever which has afflicted me these past three years returning. But I will always make the time to assure you of my sincere friendship and, on this occasion, of my deep gratitude.

Your friend

Frédéric Bastiat

Mugron, 1 September, 1835

9. T.7 Five Articles on "The Canal beside the Adour" (18 June 1837, La Chalosse )↩

Source

T.7 (1837.06.18) "The Canal beside the Adour" (Canal latéral à l'Adour), 5 articles, 18 June 1837 - 20 Aug. 1837, La Chalosse , nos. 28-37. [JCPD]

Editor's Introduction

La Chalosse is a wine-growing region in the Département of Les Landes which has Dax as its major town. It lies in the foothills of the Pyrénées to the south of the Adour river. Bastiat's home town of Mugron is located there.

La Chalosse was a local weekly newspaper published in the town of Saint-Sever. It appeared between December 1836 and March 1876. Bastiat's first published piece in the journal was this series on "The Canal beside the Adour" (18 June-20 Aug. 1837). He then published two more in 1838 on "Reflections on the Question of Dueling" (Feb. 1838) 137 and "On the Basque Language" (April, 1838). 138 Bastiat went to a school in Saint-Sever for a year in 1813 and stood unsuccessfully for election to the local council in 1832 and 1842. 139

When Bastiat wrote these articles in June 1837 he was a relatively young man of 36 years and had described himself a couple of years earlier as "un simple agriculteur" (a simple farmer). 140 This was not entirely true as he had inherited land from his grandfather in 1825 in the wine growing region of La Chalosse and had acquired more property by means of a dowry when he married in 1831. His total estate of about 250 hectares (617 acres) was used for wine growing on the south side (left bank) of the Adour river, some general farming, and sharecropping by 150 farmers. The income he received from this pushed him into the top 5% of income earners, thus giving him the right to both vote and to stand for election under the very restricted franchise which existed during the July Monarchy.

During his late 20s he had been involved in liberal politics in the last years of the Restoration which reached a high point with his late-night assistance on August 5, 1830 in persuading the officers of the Bayonne garrison to side with the new King Louis Philippe (from the junior Orléanist branch of the family) and not with the overthrown Bourbon King Charles X, thus making it impossible for the overthrown King's Bourbon relative King Ferdinand VII of Spain to come to his military rescue via the south of France. Following the installation of the new monarchy which had some liberal inclinations, Bastiat had hoped to get some position in the new regime, either as an elected representative for the arrondissement of Dax (failed 6 July 1831) or St. Sever (failed 11 July 1832, and again 9 July 1842), or as a local magistrate (Justice of the Peace) in the canton of Mugron (successful 28 May 1832), and finally election to the General Council of Les Landes (successful 17 November 1833; reelected 1839).

It was as a General Councillor that Bastiat had the opportunity and the means to begin commenting in detail on economic matters which came before the Council. He had easy access to government reports and economic data, an audience of 27 other Councillors, and a brief to discuss local economic matters such as local roads, railways, canals, and other public works; the regulation of local fairs and markets; the administration of departmental property; and the collection of direct taxes such as the land tax. He did this with both formal memoranda he wrote and presented to the General Council as well as articles he published in the local press in which he spoke as a respected Council member to various local interest groups. Before he made his breakthrough into the world of the Parisian political economists with his article on "French and English Tariffs" in October 1844 141 he wrote half a dozen other works on specific economic topics which show his gradual development as an economic analyst, especially his skill at handling economic data. These essays were on tariff reform, the building of public works such as the Adour canal, the taxation of wine, the reform of the Post Office, and the direct tax on land:

"Reflections on the Petitions from Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Lyons Relating to the Customs Service" (April 1834) (in CW2, pp. 1-9.)
"The Canal beside the Adour" (June 1837) (CW4, below pp. 000)
"The Tax Authorities and Wine" (Jan. 1841) (CW2, pp. 10-23.)
"Memoir Presented to the Société d'agriculture on "The Wine-Growing Question" (Jan 1843) (CW2, pp.25-42.)
"Postal Reform" (Aug. 1844) (CW4, below pp. 000)
"On the Division of the Land Tax in the Department of Les Landes" (c. 1844) (CW4, below pp. 000)

As a group, the essays show a growing ability over a period of 10 years to use and analyse economic data which Bastiat gets from government reports and other official publications. He seems to have been an advocate of free trade right from the beginning as his 1834 analysis of the inconsistencies of the petitioners from Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Lyons demonstrate. Bastiat argues that if free trade in agriculture is good for consumers (and the nation), then free trade in manufacturing will also be good for exactly the same reasons of lower costs, greater efficiencies, and the expansion of trade in general. In "The Tax Authorities and Wine", the "Memoir Presented to the Société d'agriculture on Wine-Growing," and "On the Division of the Land Tax" he argues that existing government policies on tariffs on wine, other indirect taxes, city tolls (octroi), and the tax on land seriously hamper economic development in Les Landes and impact ordinary working people the most. In "Postal Reform" we see him beginning to argue that the radical reforms introduced in England can and should also be applied in France and he uses very detailed French economic data on the costs of letter delivery to make the case.

Although Bastiat is becoming a skilled analyst of economic data during this period he is still not yet the master of economic theory he was to become later and we only see brief glimpses here of some of the original insights that he was to develop between 1847 and 1850 when he was working on his treatise, Economic Harmonies . These are indicated in the footnotes when they appear. We do see however, some of his earliest uses of French literature to make his economic points which was to become so much a part of his work in the Economic Sophisms which were written between 1845 and the end of 1847. See for example, "The Tax Authorities and Wine" (Jan. 1841) in which he cites La Fontaine and Molière, and "Memoir Presented to the Société d'agriculture on Wine-Growing" (Jan 1843) in which he cites his favourite radical poet Béranger twice. This would become what I have called his distinctive "Rhetoric of Liberty." 142

Some of the economic ideas expressed here in "the early Bastiat" are quite conventional and only hint at the original and very interesting ideas he would develop in his later works. For example:

he still talks a great deal about the interests of "the nation"; he was to downplay this later in order to focus more on the interests of individual consumers
in his discussion of the Adour canal there is an attempt to provide a cost benefit analysis of government expenditure but no sense of the "opportunity cost" of this kind of government activity. The idea that the money spent by government funded public works projects ("the seen") is money that is taken from and thus not spent by consumers ("the unseen") would become central to his chapter 5 on "Public Works" in What is Seen and What is Not Seen (July 1850). 143
also in this essay is an older and more limited understanding of what constitutes productive labour (or what he would later call "effort"). Here he limits "productive labour" to agriculture, manufacturing, and trade, and makes no mention of other activities which create "non-material" goods or services which are also of value to consumers. He was to greatly expand this idea of "services" in Economic Harmonies . He also dismisses as "unproductive" the living off rents from land. When he later came to argue with Proudhon over this matter at the end of 1849, he was to completely reverse his position. 144
related to this, is his use of the term "la classe" (class), especially in the phrases "la classe laborieuse" (the working or labouring class) and "la classe oisive" (the idle class). This notion of class is one increasingly used by socialists throughout this period and which would reach a climax in the 1848 Revolution when steps were taken to limit the power or even outlaw by legislation those who lived from "unproductive" or "exploitative" activities such as rent on land, interest on capital, and profits from employing wage labour. There was another theory of class which was also current at the time Bastiat wrote this essay, namely the "industrialist theory" 145 of class developed by classical liberals whom Bastiat had read, such as Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and Augustin Thierry. 146 Bastiat would take this up in earnest in his later writings about "plunder", but here for some reason he ignores this tradition and uses the more common, socialist version.

It is interesting to speculate when Bastiat changed his mind about the nature of productive work (and the part played by services) and adopted the "industrialist" theory of exploitation and class which plays such an important part in his later work. I believe that there are hints of this new way of thinking towards the end of his long introduction to his book on Cobden and the League (1845) 147 which suggests that his research on Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League which he had undertaken in 1843-44 made him view classical economic theory in a new light. Cobden very much viewed the ruling and agricultural elites which benefited from the protectionist corn laws as an "oligarchy" which plundered ordinary English workers and consumers. Bastiat soon came to view the French political system in a very similar light.

Bastiat mentioned canals and canal building in several of his works. This is not surprising as the building of transport infrastructure, whether roads, canals, or railroads, was a crucial aspect of the industrial revolution. The question was not whether or not this infrastructure building was needed or not, but how it should be owned, financed, and run. The three main options were fully privately owned, funded, and operated roads, canals, and railways (which were more common in England); government owned, financed, and run operations (the eventual European model); or government licensed, private monopolies which were privately run but ultimately backed by government loans or bail-outs in case of failure (or a mixture of the last two). The latter was commonly used in France and the United States. As we can see from Bastiat's essay here, the building and financing of canals was a major concern of regional governments like Les Landes during the 1820s and 1830s. In the late 1830s and 1840s attention shifted to the building and financing of railways, and the decision to plan and build the 6 major lines (and their corresponding stations) which radiated out from Paris into the provinces, became a major topic of debate (as well as financial scandal at times).

Some examples of his references to canals include:

There is an amusing fragment which was probably written at the same time as his articles on the Adour canal in which he wryly comments on the mania for speculation in shares in canal building companies which was sweeping France. 148
in a letter to the editors of Le National (Nov. 1846) he states that an example of a "good tax" is one that taxes 1 franc from each citizen to fund the building of a canal which reduces transport costs by 5 or 6 millions francs for the entire nation 149
there are references to canals in several economic sophisms: ES1 9 "An Immense Discovery" (Oct. 1845); ES1 10 "Reciprocity" (Oct. 1845); ES1 16 "Blocked Rivers pleading in favor of the Prohibitionists" (late 1845); and ES2 7 "A Chinese Tale" (late 1847). 150 The latter in particular, is a lengthy and amusing story about a Chinese Emperor who decides to increase "employment" for his people by ordering that a fully functioning canal be filled in with large boulders in order to stimulate economic activity in building a new road alongside the canal. Bastiat would later apply this same witty reasoning to railways in "A Negative Railway." 151

First Article

I am proposing to submit to readers of La Chalosse a few thoughts on the proposed canal which would run parallel to the Adour, concerning which the government has just ordered some surveys. 152 It seemed to me useful to devote this first article to an account of the facts which led to this decision.

A few years back the Engineers of the Departement of the Landes produced a plan with respect to navigation on the Adour. 153

This plan consisted in improving or strengthening with a network of supporting stakes:

1. The bed of the Lower Adour as far as the mouth of the Midouze:

2. That of the Midouze as far Mont-de-Marsan;

3. That of the High Adour as far as Mugron and eventually on to St. Sever.

With regard to this third and last part of the project, however, the engineers drew attention to some serious difficulties and could not proclaim the benefits involved as anything more than uncertain.

It was no doubt in view of this consideration, that the government and the Chambers decided to deal only with the Lower Adour and the Midouze, to whose improvement a sum of 900,000 francs was allocated. 154

This decision brought protests from those who dwelt beside the High Adour. They recalled that in former times the navigability of the river had made their ancestors prosperous and they could not without distress see it about to be abandoned.

In fact, however, M. Durrieu, the spokesman for their grievances, managed to get their voices heard. The government granted 60,000 francs, but only for the improvement of the worst stretches of the Higher Adour between Hourquet and Mugron, with the further reservation that 10,000 francs be employed in advance for preliminary investigations. At the same time it instructed M. de Baudre, 155 Divisional Inspector of the Royal Corps of Bridges and Roads, to visit the places in question and make an official report on the controversy between engineers and local complainants.

Unfortunately, the reports of M. de Baudre coincided overwhelmingly with those of the Engineers. They were even more unfavorable to us, for, having seen the rapid descent of the river, the enormous beds of gravel that it sweeps along, its sides devoid of all embankments to which the various works could be secured, he declared himself not only against the improvements envisaged, but even against the investigations which were then being carried out.

Was it really necessary, however, to abandon for good the High Adour Basin, a region enriched by navigation which in times past had reached as far up as Aire, and later on to Grenade and recently to St. Sever? Would there no longer be the hope of keeping it going even to Mugron? Surely M. de Baudre and M. de Silguy 156 could not be thinking on any such lines.

Indeed it would have been less distressing for the High Adour Basin never to have enjoyed navigable access than to see that access gradually cut off across the centuries until in our time it was blocked entirely.

There is one misfortune for people worse than lacking markets for their trade, namely losing ones which they have enjoyed since time immemorial. In the first case a population will adjust. It will produce little but seek to provide for all its needs. When, however, access to trade has led it to expand indefinitely on a very restricted range of production, it is easy to see that should its markets happen to vanish, it will suffer terribly, deprived as it is of goods on which it depends, whilst its own production is of no use either for local consumption or trade.

This is exactly the situation of the Chalosse, which for this reason, and for others outside the scope of this article, endures all the pains of a decline rendered all the more frightful in that there appears no hope of an end to it.

Naturally another thought presents itself: if the bed of the High Adour could not be improved, at least its waters could be used by a parallel canal.

This thought had sprung in the first instance from the patriotic mind of the famous General Lamarque, 157 who had developed it in a report in which it was hard to know whether most to admire the opinions of the expert administrator, the foresight of the great officer, or the talents of the brilliant writer.

Soon the thought had taken on in M. Galabert's projects 158 those colossal dimensions which aroused so much hope and gained so little support.

The famous engineer Brisson 159 reduced the idea to a less monumental scale, but one still huge enough to seem to be dealing with proposals rather than realities.

Finally, M. Silguy, Chief Engineer of the Departement of the Landes, has transformed it into a plan which has the merit of being easily and immediately put into operation, without excluding future amendments conceived on a much larger scale, this plan being at once complete in itself but also the basis for the realization of the much grander schemes of its predecessors.

This plan consists in opening a shipping and irrigation canal parallel to the river Adour, from the point where the river Arros flows into it, as far as the point where its utility for shipping is assured by the allocation of the 900,000 francs already spoken of in our text.

It is research into the feasibility of this project, one favorably received by the General Council of Les Landes, which has just been commissioned.

Second Article

Any productive enterprise is to be evaluated by the comparison of the expense it incurs with the benefits which it produces. We may think it useful, before trying to establish the benefits the people may expect from the Canal parallel to the Adour, to call the reader's attention to the probable costs of this operation.

It is true that it is impossible at this time to set an overall figure. This is an unknown, the determining of which is reserved for the preliminary studies which the government has ordered only very recently.

If we do touch on this question, however, it is because it subsumes another of extreme importance, one which is particularly vital to the Chalosse and the answer to which, it seems to us, ought to serve as the rule, even in the studies which are at present underway.

We said in the previous article that the question at issue was a canal both for navigation and irrigation. Certainly irrigation is in our view an essential condition of the project, since it is what makes its carrying out possible by assuring entrepreneurs an income. Indeed the next thing we will attempt to prove is that it will bring about a complete revolution in our agricultural system.

The more evident the benefits of irrigation, however, the more it is to be feared that the Corps of Engineers for Roads and Bridges will let itself be drawn into wishing to spread them too widely.

Is the projected canal to be far away from the Adour? This is a very serious question which it behooves public opinion to bring to a head.

If it is distant, this will permit a much vaster extent of land to be irrigated, but it will also increase costs by some indefinite amount, because to carry a larger volume of water, the canal will have to be built with much larger dimensions.

To build it closer to the river will restrict the benefits but also contain the costs.

Without hesitation we plump for the latter plan, because we are quite convinced that any project requiring very sizeable capital would be destined to be buried in the government files.

Locating the Canal far from the Adour would also involve the immense inconvenience of disrupting all the customary activity and of violently uprooting, if I may dare to speak thus, the entire flow of economic activity which takes place there at present.

We should not lose sight of the aim of the Canal, which is to offer an alternative to the shipping on the Adour, which has provided an occupation for riverside populations from time immemorial. It is the impossibility of improving the bed of the river that has led to the idea of opening up a parallel water-way. To take away this shipping from the natural entrepots of the Chalosse — Aire, Grenade, St. Sever, Mugron — would be to wander away entirely from the purpose in hand.

We will return later to this subject; but we have had to make haste to note these reflections here, because we have been given reason to fear that the formerly extremely modest ideas of the engineer who has been charged with the management of these studies, may have taken off in a new direction, since the government has given signs of an interest in this enterprise.

In the past the talk was of a canal with rather small traffic. Its dimensions had to be very modest. It had to supply irrigation to a small stretch of land only, which entailed its being close to the Adour. We think we even know the evaluation put on the costs of the project: some three million .

We are engaging M. de Silguy to continue with this project, and to resist that desire which all distinguished men have, to attach their names to some monumental achievement. We repeat that a canal too far from the Adour would do much good only after it had done much that was bad, and, which settles the matter, would be unfeasible.

As for the figure of three million which we spoke of above, we are aware that in the absence of prior investigations, it can be only an approximation, at least if one holds to the idea of not letting oneself be dragged into vast schemes.

If one cannot determine yet, however, the precise amount of the expenses, one can at least have some notion as to whether it will exceed the average of what canals with modest shipping have cost in France, or stay below that figure. All one needs for that is to work out whether the territory to be crossed must be ranked with those which present the most difficulty or those which present the least.

Well, between Plaisance and Le Hourquet, no serious obstacle presents itself. No water needs to be searched for a long way off; no reservoir has to be built; no mountains needs to be penetrated, no troughs need filling in, no rivers to be bridged, no roads to be crossed.

Materials are there in abundance the whole way.

The land involved, the manpower, and the means of transport can be obtained at the most modest of prices.

Finally, the soil is of the kind most favorable to the conservation of the water.

M. de Brisson 160 has shown that canals with limited shipping have cost, on average , 57,000 francs per kilometer and 15,000 francs per metre of gradient.

Using these guides, the cost of the Canal alongside the Adour would amount to,

72 kilometres at 57,000 francs per km	4,104,000 Fr
7 metres of gradient at 15,000 fr per metre	105,000 Fr.
Total	4,209,000 Fr.

Given what we have said about the absence of difficulties along the whole route, we are justified in hoping that the figure of three million is very close to the mark.

Third Article

There are only three direct sources of wealth: agriculture, manufacturing, and trade. To create primary materials, to make changes in their shape and location: such is more or less the whole circle of productive activity.

Another aspect of the matter is that no agent can exert a more favorable influence on each one of these three elements of national prosperity than water does.

No modification of agriculture could be more lasting than irrigation, no motors could improve factories more than waterpower does, and no means of transport could be more powerful for commerce than navigable waterways.

Production is not the sole function of society; society also has both an interest and a duty to conserve and defend that production. 161

We could thus think about the canal alongside the Adour from the agricultural, manufacturing, or military point of view.

Most of these questions have been dealt with by General Lamarque, so superbly, indeed, as to impose a rule of silence on his successors. So I will not deal with them.

I ask only that I be permitted to draw the attention of the readers of La Chalosse to the question of irrigation. This is where, as I see it, M. de Silguy's ideas are exceptional . This subject, moreover, will give me the chance to point out a few ideas, not entirely new, but rather commonly scorned or neglected.

To get an idea of the importance of water to agriculture, all you need is to compare the value and productivity of two different hectares of land, located moreover in the same circumstances, save that only one of them has been irrigated . It is well known in all countries that the result is a doubling of output.

One would be making a great mistake, however, if one were to judge on the basis of irrigation defined in this way, what it might be when carried out on a grand scale and supplied to a whole country.

In the first case one can evaluate only the direct influence of the water; in the second, in addition to this immediate result, there develops a whole series of mutually generated effects, some of which are perhaps more important than the one which gave birth to them. 162 Let us be the judges.

A country which is not watered, above all if it is exposed to the influence of burning heat, always possesses little grassland, and is consequently short of fodder, while livestock and consequently fertilizer are scarce. In consequence, in order to put livestock to pasture and obtain fodder, it must keep a lot of land vacant and resort to leaving land fallow. This already represents an immense loss in the value of the land. Necessarily there is added to this a no less considerable loss of labor-power, in the care of flocks and herds, the upkeep of fencing, the transport of enormous masses of fodder, endless weeding, etc, a condition which remains until the country has access to irrigation.

Then the pastures multiply, and with them the livestock and the manure. The good land improves and the unused land is cleared under the triple influence of water, fertilizer, and crop rotation. The costs of cultivation fall relative to the value of the products. The soil grows in value and fertility. The population increases in number and well-being.

Such are the general effects of irrigation. There are others which make themselves felt most markedly on the farms on the banks of the Adour, because of their exceptional situation – which is something I must explain. The right bank of the Adour presents initially a strip of good soil produced by the alluvium of the river. Behind this good soil vast heaths or moors stretch away. For the most part these two types of terrain are separated by marshland, formed by rainwater, which, falling on the moors, is prevented by the alluvial strip from draining into the river.

Most of the farms are composed of these three types of land in varying proportions.

This mix of different kinds of land, along with the hot climate and the sandy nature of the soil, makes it clear to the inhabitants what kind of agriculture is required.

On good land people produce as much cereal as possible. On this kind of terrain the fields would soon be exhausted and invaded by weeds . But the first difficulty could be circumvented by bringing in enormous masses of compost from the surface layer of the moorlands and the second by weeding and fallow farming. An agriculture so simple and based exclusively on manual labor could be, and in fact was, abandoned to share-cropping. 163

To describe here all the fatal consequences of share-cropping would be to pile article onto article. I will limit myself to indicating them in a very general way, leaving the reader to apply them at will.

Good agriculture like good anything else, requires the combination of three things: will, knowledge, and power .

Will is bound to be sluggish in the case of share-croppers, since all expenditure of effort over and above what is absolutely indispensable, is an undertaking in which all the costs fall on them and half the profit goes to someone else.

As for scientific knowledge , it would be absurd to look for it in a class of men lacking in everything, even will.

Sharecropping is equally deficient in power . Only the master could devote some capital to the land; but he reasons in respect of such expenditure in the same way as the share-cropper does in respect of labor, and he knows that he will get back only half of the profit from investments he would have to finance entirely on his own.

Thus all agriculture under share-cropping is apathetic, humdrum, and poor. 164

If we switch our attention from the work to the worker, we will be struck by a no less deplorable spectacle.

A uniform agriculture produces a uniform diet: bread and water and some salted meat, such is the food regime of the Landais peasant.

Clothing is not comfortable either in a country which lacks the raw materials and the means of making them .

It suffices, if one wants to get an idea of the dwellings, to remember that they are in the exclusive charge of the proprietor, who does not use them.

Finally, this badly nourished, badly clothed, and badly housed population, is further decimated by the endemic fever which the marshland produces and spreads to the countryside.

I could round off this sad account if I added to it a sketch of the intellectual and moral state of this unfortunate class, but this would take me too far from my subject.

I will summarize therefore, in order of their causation, the obstacles which, on the right bank of the Adour, stand in the way of agricultural progress and the well-being of the inhabitants:

Burning sun, arid soil.

Inevitable lack of pasture, livestock, and fertilizer.

An immense proportion of uncultivated land.

An agriculture which drains and wastes alluvial soils.

Share-cropping; lack of energy, knowledge, and capital.

A population badly fed, badly clothed, badly housed, and ravaged by periodic illness.

Fourth Article

Thus far I have considered the Canal by the Adour only in its connections with the right bank of this river.

In trying to establish that it was conducive alike to manufacturing by way of waterpower, to commerce by facilitating shipping, and to agriculture by means of irrigation, I wanted to show it, if I may put it thus, as an immense and versatile motor, 165 at work across the whole length of our region, bringing a powerful forward momentum to all the activity which takes place there.

It remains for me to consider its effects on the left bank of the Adour or on the Chalosse. 166 My initial thought is that it would be hard to understand how all types of production could be undergoing a sizeable development all around us, without our taking some share in that growth in well-being and prosperity.

Some worthy souls, however, without exactly denying the general benefits of the Canal, have expressed the fear that it might be more hurtful than helpful to the particular interests of the Chalosse. "To create a means of communication," they have said, "which puts our vineyards up against the Madiran, is to subject them to ruinous competition".

Fear of competition is the eternal stumbling block of all economic progress. 167 If this were the prevailing question with regard to the shipping on the Adour, I have to ask, where ought it to start? Grenade could establish that competition from Aire is to be feared and that the navigability of the river will be a scourge if the boats just sail past their storehouse doors. St. Sever could say the same about Grenade; Mugron could about St. Sever; Laurede about Mugron; and if such an argument is absurd on a district to district basis, I cannot work out why it should become decisive from province to province.

What a strange contradiction! We want roads and we do not want canals, which are only much improved roads. The ability to engage in economic tran sactions, however, is either useful or disastrous. If the former we must welcome the canals; in the latter case we must reject the roads. If competition is in itself a bad thing, the isolation of empires, provinces, and districts must be the aim and outcome of all civilization.

Moreover, one should not be surprised at the fears, even the exaggerated ones, of the Chalosse. The process of decay which is dragging the place down is so rapid that we must take seriously even its fears, which resemble those of an ill person whom real dangers make scared of imaginary ones.

Two interests, so it seems to me, must be the concern of the Chalosse: to win new markets for its wines; and to improve all its other sources of income.

To know whether the Canal will help or hinder the distribution of its wines, we have to look into the causes which have brought their distribution to a halt, and when we undertake this examination, we will find all these factors operating in a region where the canal would have no impact on them. It is not by perfecting our means of transport that we succeed in modifying the system of the prohibition of trade, the thousand shackles created by indirect taxation, the thousand barriers caused by municipal taxes on merchandise (the octroi), 168 or the apparently fixed preference consumers have for red wine.

Among the causes of our distress, however, there is one which will inevitably be affected by the Canal beside the Adour, namely, competition. It is important therefore to see what brought about this competition, what kind of future it is preparing for us, and how it can be modified by the Canal which is our present concern.

Two principal issues seem to me to make competition frightening with regard to the present and above all for the future of my native region. The first is the question of ease of communication and the second concerns the raising of beef cattle.

Those to whom I address my remarks are well aware that we encounter in places such as Dax and Bayonne a great deal of rival production other than that from the Madiran. Bordelais, Saintonge, Languedoc, the province of Salies, and even the Ile de Ré have recently driven out our products. How do wines from so far off come to invade our habitual trading centres ? It is because we live in an era when transport is cheap and our agriculture is based on crude manual labor and is very costly.

If this is the case, are our problems approaching their end? Far from it. On all sides there are being prepared means of transport vastly more powerful than those which these fearsome rivals of ours have introduced. The time is coming when distances are going to disappear, when one will be able to count the advantages of proximity for nothing, when canals and railroads will be able to shift the heaviest of loads from the North to the South, and from the South to the North, from the centre to the periphery and from the periphery to the centre, with prodigious economy. Whether this is a blessing or a curse matters little. The world marches on and our complaints will not stop it. What are we going to do, however, in the face of this fearsome competition, we who are already complaining that it is killing us? How will we defend ourselves, in our isolation and with our miserable farming practices ? This is what, it seems to me, should be the focus of serious thinking, rather than the obsessively minute calculation of the harm which competition from the Madiran can do us.

Now that I have shown the owners of the vineyards the future that awaits them, 169 I must show them how that future can be changed by the Adour Canal.

The thing which caused and as it were set in stone the manual labor-based agriculture of the Chalosse, was the high cost of raising cattle, a cost which reflects the barren character of the resources available in our area for education and the raising of live-stock. It would mean giving up for all time the idea of competing with our rivals on an equal basis, if, blindly sticking to the status quo , we were to repudiate the innovations which would put within our reach that economic agriculture which they have generally adopted. Now what is more likely to favor this revolution, one that is moreover imminent, than an irrigation Canal, a canal which will turn over fifteen thousand hectares of land, in the centre of the Département, almost exclusively to the production of fodder?

I am well aware, of course, that a revolution in the growing of vines is fraught with difficulties; that a whole region cannot easily change all its habits, and that our forecasts in this respect look utopian in the extreme. One cannot deny, however, that we are being drawn towards this revolution by irresistible forces, forces which it does not fall within our powers to control. We must prepare for these circumstances or be crushed by them. We must produce under the same conditions as the others or succumb under the weight of the competition. If we must of necessity move from one regime or perish, is it not wise to give a very favorable welcome to the project by which the transition will be facilitated?

It is not enough for us to produce at the same prices as our rivals; we also need the same means of having our products arrive at the centers of consumption. Doubtless these routes, these canals which are the means for the export for our wines are also a means of entry for wines from outside. To reject them for this reason would be a puerile act, comparable to that of the would-be country gentleman who keeps his house boarded up for fear that thieves might get in.

They say that the wine of Madiran will come to the Chalosse. So why should not the wine of the Chalosse go to Madiron? Madiran's wines do not all make their way down to our departement. The great majority are spread out across the Bearn, the Bigorre and the plain of Tarbes. We know that these wines are blended, something which our own are eminently capable of as well. It may well be therefore that the Canal would open up this new possibility for our vineyards.

Whatever is the case, it is certain that the latter can only gain from easy access for our trade with Dax and Bayonne, from the growth in population and wealth which the canal is bound to lead to across our entire navigable area, and that, accordingly, even when the case is discussed from the narrowest point of view, it is far from justifying the fears the project has inspired. I began by saying that the Chalosse had a double interest, first in having markets for all its wines, and secondly, in the improvement in all its other areas of economic activity. Although the question of wines is the only one I have touched on, I have no space to give an account of the likely effects of the Canal on all our other productive undertakings and interests. Perhaps that will be the subject of a fifth article.

Fifth Article

To finish what I had to say about the Canal beside the Adour, after having explored its influence on the wine industry, I still have to consider it in terms of its connections with other industries. Such a subject, if I dealt with the details, would yield me nothing more than a series of commonplaces. Perhaps I may be permitted to cast an eye more generally, on the probable future of the Chalosse. The results will speak for themselves to the reader.

The population of the Chalosse can be divided into two classes:

1.Those who live from rents;

2. Those who live by working. 170

The first has enjoyed until the present time virtually exclusive importance. It is clear, however, that this preponderance will soon begin to wane. A constant process is reducing the size of the great landed fortunes and forcing the small proprietors down into the ranks of the working class. 171 This is incontestable, and in witness of it, our countryside is dotted with ruined and deserted houses, attesting to the disappearance of as many once comfortable families.

The working class, by contrast, have virtually taken over our region. Already we can see this class growing everywhere. I am not very old, 172 yet I have seen a lot of shops invade a lot of living-rooms. I have seen the increase in the numbers of lawyers, doctors, solicitors and notaries. 173 I have witnessed the springing up of numberless artisans.

There are clearly laws in operation which reduce continuously the numbers of the idle class, 174 and increasing those of the working class, laws which tend to modify profoundly the face of our cities.

These laws are not hard to uncover. I will cite two of the principal ones: the growth of luxury and the fragmentation of inherited wealth .

The idle class has a thousand ways to ruin itself; it has only one of enriching itself, which is by saving. The landed fortunes which spread prodigality, carelessness, and misfortune are bound to be more numerous than those which engender good order and economy.

The division of inherited wealth works even more actively in the destruction of landed riches. One holding, no matter how extensive it may be, which goes on dividing and sub-dividing from generation to generation, dissolves eventually into a multitude of fragments, quite incapable of maintaining as many families in luxury. 175

If these are the causes which entail the decline of the idle classes, it is clear that the decline will stop only when the causes cease to exert their influence. It is most unlikely, however, that this will happen. Far from diminishing in their force, these causes seem to draw new vigor from their own effects, such that it is correct to say that the decline of the idle classes is subject to the same accelerating force as the fall of physical bodies.

In fact, civilization, travel, and frequent communications between men, awaken in us new needs, new desires, new temptations, new habits, and new pleasures.

If our fathers had a thousand ways of ruining themselves, we have ten thousand, and our descendants will have a hundred thousand. What was a unnecessary a hundred years ago, is today a necessity and the luxuries of our time will be indispensable a hundred years from now. 176 Perhaps it is only the privately owned (and worked) part of a limited area which will prove to be a constant; from which one has to conclude that the idle bourgeoisie is destined to vanish.

Besides all this, the division of inherited wealth is far from having run its course. On the contrary it has been given a new impetus by the recent changes which have affected our laws and way of life. One knows that there is the equal division of inherited property 177 a force which in very few generations would prevail against the strongest of aristocracies. So how long can it be thought that our small bourgeoisie could resist it?

We are thus drawn irresistibly towards work. Work is the law of mankind. It is the only refuge open to the inhabitants of the Chalosse, and we can readily see that they all have some feeling of embarrassment towards it, since they all aspire to leave to their sons a profession, instead of an inheritance of land rents.

These are, doubtless, incontestable truths. If this is so, however, by what strange reversal of ideas do we accept with such indifference and often with such disfavor these great improvements which are sure to open up an immense prospect of work for the generation to follow? What do we really want for this next generation, then? That it should be reduced to the alternative of looking for work far from the land which witnessed its birth or leading in its own country a life of idleness, and lacking in dignity? It is incontestable that the Canal beside the Adour offers powerful inducements to all forms of work. It will open to the enthusiasm of the young of today a multitude of careers in farming, manufacture, and commerce. A more lively system of production, and economic transactions multiplied many times over, can not fail to magnify the business opportunities of lawyers, solicitors, and notaries, indeed of all the professions, to increase the size of our markets, and to give much encouragement to the work of our artisans. The prosperity of each class reacts on all the others, and that is how general prosperity is fostered.

10. T.286 "Proposals for an Association of Wine Producers" (15 Jan. 1841)↩

Source

T.286 (1841.01.15) "Proposals for an Association of Wine Producers." Documents relating to an Association for the Defence of Wine Producers planned by Bastiat. In Ronce, Appendix III, pp. 287-95.

According to Ronce they were written shortly after Bastiat returned from a trip to Spain and Portugal in 1840. In three parts: 1. Une Association; pp. 287-88; 2. Statuts de l'Association, pp. 288-92; 3. Prospectus du Journal de l'Association, Le Midi , pp. 292-95. In Ronce, Appendix III, pp. 287-95.

Editor's Introduction

This piece is interesting because of the light it shines on an early plan Bastiat drew up to organise an anti-tax, free trade movement in France some five years before he helped found the Free Trade Association in February 1846, first in Bordeaux and then a national body a few months later in Paris.

Bastiat first wrote on free trade in April 1834 in "Reflections on the Petitions from Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Lyons Relating to the Customs Service" 178 in which he called himself "a simple farmer" which belied his already deep reading in economic literature and his growing interest in the economic affairs of his Département of Les Landes. The new July Monarchy (which came to power in August 1830) launched an initiative to review French tariff and tax policies after the increases enacted in the 1820s during the Bourbon Restoration. 179 Given the unpopularity of the taxes on alcohol these were reduced somewhat but there was less success with tariff policy.

In France at this time there were a bewildering array of restrictions on goods allowed into the country. Some were prohibited outright, many raw materials were lightly taxed, while other finished goods had very high tariffs imposed upon them. In 1836 the average tariff rate imposed by the French government was about 12%. In Britain at this time it was about 15%; in the U.S. it was about 33%. To police this complex system a veritable "army" of public servants worked for the Customs Service. 180 According to the Budget Papers of 1848 the French state raised fr. 202.1 million from tariffs and import duties out of total receipts of fr. 1,371 million, or 14.7%. 181

Very few individuals or groups called for free trade across the board, but various groups, like the merchants in the port cities of Bordeaux and Le Havre and the important regional city of Lyon, called for free trade for some sectors of the French economy but not for their particular industries. Bastiat condemned them for their intellectual inconsistency and argued that:

I have come not to defend the protection that they are attacking but to attack the protection that they are defending. Privilege is being claimed for a few; I come to claim freedom for all. 182

Although he pointed out their errors in some detail and showed how French agriculture would benefit from a policy of free trade, he seemed to realise that his proposals were premature, since he opened the essay with the statement that "Free trade will probably suffer the fate of all freedoms; it will be introduced into our legislation only after it has taken hold of our minds." 183 And France, Bastiat understood very well, had not yet reached that stage.

His next significant essay on economic matters came three years later with an essay "The Canal beside the Adour" (June 1837) 184 in which he discussed the financing of public works in his Département. However, his next foray into free trade did not occur for another two and a half years after that with a pair of articles which he wrote at the end of 1840 or in early January 1841 on "The Tax Authorities and Wine" 185 and the essay republished here, "Proposals for an Association of Wine Producers." These essays began a period of growing interest in tax and tariff reform in Les Landes and its impact on both French agriculture and foreign trade, especially with the Netherlands and England. Between these two essays and his breakthrough essay on "On the Influence of French and English Tariffs on the Future of the Two People" (written in June or July 1844 and published in the JDE in October) 186 which brought him to the attention of the economists and free traders in Paris, Bastiat wrote the following pieces on the wine industry, taxes, and free trade:

"Memoir Presented to the Société d'agriculture, commerce, arts, et sciences du département des Landes on the Wine-Growing Question" (Jan. 1843) 187
three 3 essays on "Free Trade. State of the Question in England," published in the Bayonne Sentinelle des Pyrénées , May-June 1843 188 in which he describes the activities of the Anti-Corn Law League for the first time and wonders why the French press continues to ignore it.
and 2 undated pieces from 1844 on "Freedom of Trade" published in an unnamed newspaper in the south of France, 189 and
another Report "On the Allocation of the Land Tax in the Department of Les Landes" possibly written for the General Council of Les Landes, of which he was a member. 190

Returning to the "Proposals", Ronce tells us that they were written in late 1840 after Bastiat returned from a business trip to Spain and Portugal to set up an insurance company which never eventuated. 191 He was on his way to England (perhaps to meet Cobden and other members of the Anti-Corn Law League which had began its free trade agitation in 1838) when he was taken ill and returned to Le Havre and then to Paris. He arrived in the middle of a debate which had spring up about the Minister of Finance Georges Humann's efforts 192 to reform the taxation system in order to meet a looming budget deficit.

This was caused by Adolphe Thiers' plans for a massive public works program to erect the so-called "fortifications of Paris," or what would later be known as "Thiers' wall or enclosure" (l'enceinte de Thiers). 193 The international crisis which arose in 1840 over France's support for the Pascha of Egypt and opposition by Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia led to growing fears in France, led by Thiers, that Britain might one day plan a new invasion and occupation of the capital as the victorious powers had done in 1815. Thiers therefore planned to build a military wall which would surround and supposedly protect Paris, along with a series of 16 massive star-shaped forts laid out in an outer perimeter beyond the wall. 194 Thiers' critics, such as the astronomer and mathematician François Arago 195 and the economist Michel Chevalier, 196 objected to its construction because it was so expensive, that military technology would soon make it obsolete, and that the wall would one day be used to "imprison" the citizens of Paris if they ever rose up in rebellion to demand much needed political and economic reforms (which they did of course in February 1848, and were duly down by troops stationed in the forts around Paris). In other words, the wall would result in the "embastillisation" of Paris (the Bastillisation of Paris). 197 To pay for the wall, budgeted at Fr. 150 million, Humann had to "rationalise" (i.e. increase) tax collection, which he did by undertaking a new survey of land and business ownership and more vigorously collecting the direct taxes which were levied upon them, as well as increasing indirect taxes on such things as wine and alcohol. As we know from a letter to Felix Coudroy 198 Bastiat opposed the building of the Thiers' wall as well as the consequent new taxes Humann imposed on the wine industry which had a significant impact on Bastiat's home region which depended heavily on wine production. These measures were the immediate cause for Bastiat writing his paper on "The Tax Authorities and Wine" and his ambitious "Proposals for an Association" to organise the wine producers of his region to oppose these tax increases.

Bastiat was so moved to oppose these mesures that he wrote the pamphlet, drew up the statutes for a broadly based anti-tax organisation, and a prospectus for its journal to be called Le Midi ("The South"), and took them personally to a print shop to be printed and distributed. This would not be the last time Bastiat would do something like this. He would do the same thing three times again, once in November 1846 when he became the editor of the magazine of the French Free Trade Association, Le Libre-Échange , 199 and twice more during the 1848 Revolution with two small publications which he and some close friends handed out on the streets of Paris, La République française (February-March, 1848) and Jacques Bonhomme (June-July, 1848). 200 If nothing else, Bastiat was an inveterate founder of small magazines to support a cause he passionately believed in.

These plans to build a large, organised anti-tax movement in the major wine growing areas of the south (around the regional cities of Orléans, Angoulême, and Bordeaux) came to nothing since he was met with indifference by most of the landowners and wine merchants he approached. In a letter to Felix Coudroy dated 11 January, 1841 201 Bastiat complains that the southern Deputies he spoke to had "interests to protect" or were "seeking government positions" and did not wish to jeopardise their chances of success. Thus the detailed plans he drew up concerning the structure and operation of the Association were largely wishful thinking on his part at this stage. Bastiat would have more success in creating a free trade association with a second attempt in early 1846 after he had made contact with the political economists in Paris who were part of the Guillaumin network. 202 The first branch of the Free Trade Association 203 was started in Bordeaux in February 1846 and a national organisation was created in Paris in July 1846. Bastiat would lead the Free Trade Association until ill health forced him to resign in February 1848. The Association would be closed down soon after the February Revolution so the economists could focus on the more pressing problem of the rise of socialism in the new Second Republic. But here, in January 1841 we see Bastiat in the full flush of enthusiasm for the cause of free trade.

It is interesting to compare this Proposal with a very similar one he drew up in February 1846, a "Plan for an Anti-Protectionist League," when the first Free Trade Association was being launched in Bordeaux. 204 He still asserts the importance of forming committees in every town, the need to take a principled stand in favour of complete and not partial free trade, and to avoid unnecessary political partisanship in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. This "Proposal" and his remarks about the activities of the English Anti-Corn Law League 205 in the introduction to his book on Cobden and the League (July 1845) reveal the strategy for radical economic and social change he was developing at this time and which he would attempt to put into practice in 1846.

Also of note is his use of sarcasm and expressions of anger in the face of these new taxes and regulations, which prefigures what was to become his hallmark "rhetoric of liberty" with its use of "harsh language" and wicked humour in the Economic Sophisms which he wrote in 1845–47 at the height of the campaign against protectionism.

Text 1. An Association.

There are in France 2 million hectares 206 of land planted with vines.

Each hectare produces on average 50 hectolitres 207 of wine.

Total production is 100 million hectolitres.

Granting that a reform, even a partial one, of the laws which govern the collection of indirect taxes, 208 the system of octroi taxes (city taxes) 209 and that of customs duties, would have the effect of increasing the value of each hectolitre by 2 francs, resulting in a increase of 200 million francs in income for the producers, which represents, at an interest rate of 4%, a capital value of 5 billion francs .

It is estimated that this reform would produce at least a similar amount in additional profits for the traders, merchants, bar owners, and consumers.

Thus it is thus a matter of TEN BILLION FRANCS which can be won by introducing freedom of industry and the equalisation of tax rates. 210

There is only one means to achieve this: ORGANIZATION. 211

It is necessary that all those interests march to the beat of the same drum in order to reach the same goal, and they will be able to do this only when they are organised .

Every industry provides examples of this.

Producers of sugar, manufacturers of cloth, the maritime and colonial interests all have representatives .

We alone are always defeated because we do not know how to defend ourselves.

If the truth be told, it is difficult for millions of citizens who are spread across a vast territory, to organise themselves.

But nothing is impossible for an Association united in a public campaign.

This is what has lead us to found at the same time an Association for the Defence of Wine PRODUCERS and a Journal of the Association .

Both institutions are only in an imperfect embryonic form, but with time and the good will of our fellow citizens they can be developed further.

2. Statutes of the Association.

Article 1. A Society has been formed, with the government's authorisation, 212 comprising owners of vineyards, wine traders, merchants, and bar owners engaged in the wholesale or retail sale of alcoholic beverages, and all other persons who agree with these statutes.

Is is not necessary for this support to be explicit; it comes from the mere fact of having paid the subscription which will be discussed below.

Article 2. The aim of the Association is to seek, by constitutional means, the progressive reform of the legislation governing indirect taxation, the system of octroi (city tolls), and customs duties, where it causes harm to the production, distribution, sale, and consumption of wine and spiritous liquor.

The Association is formally to refrain from engaging in all other activities. especially any intervention in political matters.

Art. 3 To be a member of the Association one has to agree to an annual payment of 2 francs.

Art. 4. The wine growing land of France is divided into 5 districts, each of which will have one representative, namely: 213

Western District Administrative Centre: Nantes
Charente	110,000
Lower Charente	100,000
Vendée	17,000
Deux Sèvres	20,000
Lower Loire	30,000
Maine-et-Loire	38,000
Vienne	28,000
Upper Vienne	4,000
Indre	18,000
Indre-et-Loire	35,000
Cher	12,000
Loire-et-Cher	26,000
Loiret	38,000
Hectares of vines	476,000

Southwestern District Administrative Centre: Bordeaux
Gironde	138,000
Dordogne	90,000
Lot-et-Garonne	70,000
Lot	58,000
Tarn-et-Garonne	36,000
Gers	88,000
Landes	20,000
Upper Pyrénées	15,000
Lower Pyrénées	24,000
Hectares of vines	539,000

Southeastern District Administrative Centre: Marseilles
Bouches-du-Rhône	40,000
Var	68,000
Vaucluse	28,000
Drôme	24,000
Isère	27,000
Ardèchre	26,000
Lozère	26,000
Rhône	30,000
Loire	14,000
Upper Loire	6,000
Upper Alps	14,000
Lower Alps	6,000
Puy-de-Dôme	30,000
Hectares of vines	339,000

Southern District Administrative Centre; Montpellier
Upper Garonne	48,000
Eastern Pyrénées	45,000
Ariège	12,000
Aude	51,000
Tarn	31,000
Hérault	103,000
Aveyron	34,000
Gard	71,000
Hectares of vines	395,000

Central District Administrative Centre: Dijon
Côte-d'Or	26,000
Saône-et-Loire	37,000
Nièvre	9,000
Yonce	37,000
Aube	22,000
Marne	18,000
Upper Marne	13,000
Upper Saône	11,000
Doubs	8,000
Jura	21,000
Allier	17,000
Ain	17,000
Seine-et-Oise	16,000
Hectares of vines	252,000

The number of districts, and consequently the number of representatives, can be increased if the interests of the Association require it.

Art. 5. There will be created:

One Committee per Department,

One Committee per district,

One Central Committee,

One General Administrative body.

Art. 6. The members of the Association from the same Commune will choose from among themselves a Financial Officer.

The Assembly of Financial Officers from the Communes will meet in the main town of the Department and elect one of their members to the Subscription Committee.

This Committee will elect the representative of the Wine Growing Industry , or the member of the Central Committee.

All elections will be conducted using a plurality of votes, whatever may be the number of voters, according to the customary practices and at times announced in the Journal of the Association .

In the case where an election is not held the representative chosen at the preceding election will continue to carry out his duties.

Art. 7. The function of the Representatives of the Wine Producing Industry will be to make themselves available in Paris during the sessions of the Chambers in order to support the petitions and demands of their constituents.

To seek the progressive reform of the laws which regulate the distribution and the market for wine.

To judge the order in which each reform ought to be proposed, in order to bring about the common goal determined by the entire Association.

To determine and to develop the means of levying the tax in a way which is compatible with the liberty of industry and the principle of the equality of the tax burden.

Art. 8. The general Administrator is in charge of everything concerning financial accountability and publicity.

Art. 9. The Representatives of the Wine producing Industry will receive a monthly payment which will be set at a later date, either by the Subscription Committees or by the Central Committee itself.

This Central Committee will also set the salary of the General Administrator.

Art. 10. The Agent General will submit the financial accounts to the assembly of representatives and these accounts will be published in full in the Journal of the Association .

Art. 11 ( for the time being ). For the year 1841, it being expected that it will be practically impossible to organise a delegation by the methods stipulated above, we call upon the Committees which already exist in Bordeaux, Nantes, Dijon, Montpellier, and Marseilles, so that they can immediately nominate a Representative of their District.

In those towns where no Committee exists at the moment, wine producers, traders, and other interested parties ought to get together and proceed to elect a Representative without delay. This election is quite urgent and will be confirmed at a later date by the Subscription Committee.

Paris, 15 January 1841.

The Provisional Administrator of the Association

Frédéric Bastiat

Member of the General Council of the Department of Les Landes.

3. Prospectus for the Journal of the Association, Le Midi (The South),

Journal of the Association for the Defence of Wine Producers.

Without doubt, one of the most valuable sources of wealth which France possesses is the cultivation of vines.

This plant extends over 50 Départements, it covers 2 million hectares of land, and employs several million people.

It is not only the people who live in the countryside who are interested in the prosperity of the wine industry, since who could say to what level of development it might take our foreign trade and our merchant marine, if there were a more normal state of trading relations with foreign countries?

Unfortunately, the geniuses in the Ministry of Finance seem to have undertaken the task of snuffing out this branch of industry by restricting the market for wine, outside France with the regime of trade prohibition, and inside the country by the increase in the octroi (city tolls) and the legislation concerning indirect taxes.

One might have thought that, having reached its limits, the suffering endured by our port cities and our countryside would no longer be contested, and that the government, even if it backed away from introducing any reforms in the face of these difficulties, at least would recognise the justice of them.

But here we have it preparing for us a series of new taxes and new economic shackles.

And according to the customary tradition in these matters, the Fisc (Fiscal authorities) throws sarcasm in our faces as it oppresses us.

As proof, isn't it a cruel irony that the Minister of Finance (Humann), after having proposed, among other measures, to treat the vineyard owner under the same law which taxes and regulates a cabaret owner, 214 when he writes "thus we will see disappear a privilege which nothing can justify and which violates the principle of the equality of tax burdens"?

My goodness! Just because the law places an exceptional and onerous burden upon cabaret owners, does this exception become the rule, does a common right become then a privilege ? And to impose this exceptional burden on millions of citizens, does this make the principle of equality reign across the country?

And this is not all. The Minister has let it be known that he will not wait long before increasing the tax on alcohol to the levels of 1829. 215

So then, what will ten years of struggle and complaints have produced? The re-establishment of all our old tax burdens, with new taxes piled upon old, and new shackles imposed.

This only goes to show that, for whatever reason, the government is either deaf to our complaints or scorns them.

So, what is this reason?

In our opinion, it is not necessary to look any further than the lack of continuity, cooperation, and unity in the lobbying efforts of the owners of vineyards.

What is missing from their cause is not justice, not strength, but that which puts strength into the hands of justice, namely organisation .

Lacking organisation, we go from exaggerating things to being indifferent. Yesterday, we wanted to reform everything; today we abandon all hope of reform; we have instincts rather than willpower; we are not a single body, but a crowd.

This is not the path which the owners of the iron forges, those who raise cattle, or the sugar producers teach us to follow. They are not very numerous, but we are countless; their interests are hard to see compared to ours; they demand privileges while we demand a common right. However, in spite of our superiority in numbers, our interests, and justice, we fail while they triumph. Where does this difference come from? It is that they are organised and we are not.

These thoughts have made us dream of creating a huge Association for the defence of Wine Producers .

But, with that thought in mind, we thought it was necessary to prepare the way for this association with the creation of a Journal.

It is easy for a few manufacturers to get organised, but how, without having access to a means of communication, can we organise simultaneous mass protests in thousands of Communes across the country, all carried out in the same spirit and aiming at the same end? How do we create a shared vision and common method of action among all these individuals, Communes, and Départements?

Thus, a Journal is required in order to bring this Association about.

A Journal will be just as necessary once the Association has been formed.

Today it has to have an engine to drive it forward; tomorrow it will require a voice .

This then is the double task which we have imposed on ourselves:

Firstly, to bring such an Association into being, and by proposing its by-laws, to inspire us with its principles in order to help it spread;

Then, to serve as a way to connect the members of the Association with each other, to gather their opinions, to bring important facts and documents to their attention;

And finally, to bring all their activities together into a unified movement .

But, and we are the first to admit it, we will fail in our efforts if we are not supported by our fellow citizens.

And why not say it? Our task demands a moral force and even material resources which we would only be able to find in the encouragement and support of all men who have the prosperity of the south of France in their hearts.

Please allow me a final thought.

The path which we have traced out presents two pitfalls: partiality and exaggeration. It is difficult to be an impartial judge in a cause for which one is an advocate. It is no less difficult to be fair in expressing one's complaints which have often been provoked by the disdain and sarcasm of one's opponents.

But we believe we have the strength to resist this double temptation because we have always thought that prejudice and violence hinder the triumph of a cause just as much as they harm the honour of its defenders.

Frédéric Bastiat.

Member of the General Council of the Département of Les Landes

The price of subscribing to the Journal is fr. 6 per annum in Paris and fr. 7.50 in the Départements.

The temporary office (of the Association) is located at the printers Guiraudet et Jouaust , rue Saint-Honoré, 315.

11. T.298 (1843) "On the Cost of Being Governed"↩

Source

T.298 (1843) "On the Cost of Being Governed" (1843). This previously unpublished sketch was discovered by the original French editor Paillottet among Bastiat's papers and inserted in a footnote to "Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" (Dec. 1849). He says it was dated 1843. [OC5, pp. 483-85] [CW2, pp. 339-41] </titles/2450#lf1573-02_label_408>

Originally published as a footnote to T.244 (1849.12.12) "Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" (Discours sur l'impôt des boissons). Speech given in the Legislative Assembly on 12 Dec. 1849. [OC5, pp. 468-93] [CW2, pp. 328-47].

Editor's Introduction

We know very little about Bastiat's personal life, including the nature or amount of his income. We do know that he inherited land near Mugron from his grandfather in 1825 (both his father and mother had died when he was quite young and he was raised by his grandfather and an aunt), that he owned about 250 hectares (617 acres) of land, some of which was farmed by sharecroppers, 216 and that he paid enough in direct taxes (over 500 francs p.a.) to not only vote but to stand for election, which he did unsuccessfully in 1831, 1832, and 1842 (the year before this piece was probably written).

Paying this amount of direct tax each year put Bastiat the top 5% of income earners in France, thus making him a member of "la classe électorale" (the electoral or voting class) who were eligible to vote and stand for elections - about 240,000 men out of a population of 35 million - until the Revolution of February 1848 introduced the Second Republic and universal manhood suffrage. 217

This short sketch may well be based upon Bastiat's own financial situation, since Monsieur "N." also pays fr. 500 in direct taxes, and is a kind of rumination by a frustrated taxpayer about what he pays to the government in the form of taxes and fees for service, and what he gets in return. Bastiat tells us that he has the 1842 Budget Papers 218 in hand as he compiles this fictitious "system of individual accounts" which he hopes the government might provide each tax payer. He says that Monsieur "N." paid a total of fr. 1,162 to the French state (in taxes and fees for services) out of an annual income of fr. 2,400 to 2,600 or 46% (if his income was fr. 2,500).

The idea that the government would give each tax payer an itemised annual "account" of their payments to and services or benefits received from the government is a very radical one. Bastiat's purpose was to use this as a way of showing in much greater detail what the relationship was between taxpayers and their government, perhaps with the added notion of showing them whether or not they were net "tax-payers" or net "tax-receivers" along the lines of Calhoun's theory. 219 In this instance, Monsieur "N" pays in fees and taxes a total of 1,162 francs to the state, or 46.5% of his income of 2,500 fr., but comes out as a net tax receiver since he receives 89 fr. 17 c. more from the government in services and benefits than he pays to it. Since the "sums paid out for the benefit" of M. "N" are an average which includes all French tax payers it is not at all clear that this particular taxpayer would "benefit" from government expenditure on the Civil List, subsidies to dancers, aid to colonists (to encourage settlement in Algeria), and so. But of course this was probably part of Bastiat's intention to show tax payers how little they directly got back from the government but which went to particular vested interests which had the government's ear.

Text

It can be said that taxpayers cry out instinctively against the weight of taxes, for few of them know exactly what it costs them to be governed. We are fully aware of our share of land tax, but not what taxes on consumer goods take from us. I have always thought that nothing would be more favorable to progress in our constitutional knowledge and customs than a system of individual accounts , through which each person's attention could be focused on their contribution, concerning both the amount paid and the purpose to which it was put.

While waiting for the day when the Minister of Finance sends us our current account with the Treasury along with our yearly assessment of direct taxes, I have endeavored to design such a form with the 1842 budget to hand.

Here is the account of Monsieur "N", a landowner paying 500 fr. of direct taxes, which implies a revenue of 2,400 to 2,600 fr. at the most.

THE PUBLIC TREASURY'S CURRENT ACCOUNT WITH M. "N".

D EBIT . Sums received from M. "N" in 1843
	fr.	c.
Through direct taxes	500	0
Registration, stamps, use of public land	504	17
Customs and salt	158	0
Forestry and fishing	30	10
Indirect taxes	206	67
Post Office	39	0
The (state) University	2	50
Sundry products	21	87
TOTAL	1,162	31

CREDIT . Sums paid out for the Benefit of M. "N" .
	fr.	c.
Interest on the public debt	353	0
Civil List	14	0
Law Courts and Justice	20	0
Religion	36	0
Diplomacy	8	0
State education	16	0
Secret expenditure	1	0
Telegraphs	1	0
Subsidies to musicians and dancers	3	0
The needy, sick, and handicapped	1	10
Aid to refugees	2	15
Subsidies to agriculture	0	80
to deep-sea fishing	4	0
to manufacturing	0	23
Stud farms	2	0
Sheep pens	0	63
Aid to colonists	0	87
to those suffering from fire and flood	0	90
Departmental services	72	0
Prefects and subprefects	7	20
Roads, canals, bridges, and ports	52	60
Army	364	0
Navy	114	0
Colonies	26	0
Tax collection and administration	150	0
T OTAL	1,251	48

Between the debit of 1,162 fr. 31 c. and the credit of 1,251 fr. 48 c. the difference is 89 fr. 17 c. This balance means that the treasury has spent 89 fr. 17 c. more on behalf of M. "N" than it has received from him. However, M. "N" should be reassured; Messrs. Rothschild and company 220 were willing to advance this sum and Mr. "N" will have to pay only the interest in perpetuity, that is to say, to pay in the future 4 to 5 fr. a year more.

12. T.17 "On the Allocation of the Land Tax in the Department of Les Landes" (July 1844)↩

Source

T.17 (1844.07) "On the Allocation of the Land Tax in the Department of Les Landes" (De la répartition de la contribution foncière dans le Département des Landes). [OC1, pp. 283-333.]. Bastiat mentions this report in a letter to Félix Coudroy where he says he has not quite finished writing it. Eaux-Bonnes, 26 July 1844. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 46-49)

Editor's Introduction

This detailed article is the sixth and last essay Bastiat wrote on a very specific economic topic 221 before he made his breakthrough into the world of the Parisian political economists with his article on "French and English Tariffs" in October 1844. 222 It contains the most economic data of any of the previous essays and in places is quite heavy going for the reader, but it clearly shows his gradual development as an economic analyst who was becoming increasingly at ease with figures. It also provides Bastiat with an opportunity to show off the depth of his reading in the theory of political economy, in addition to his grasp of economic data. He mentions by name a fairly formidable collection of 14 theoretical works in the final section on Malthusian population theory. 223

Bastiat draws upon a number of sources for his economic data, not all of which is available to us today, such as:

National government data, such as a 1836 report by the Director of Direct Taxation (not available to us); official publications containing statistical information, such as the Statistique de la France (1841), and national census data
local data, such as the records held at the local Land Registry Office (Cadastre), and as a member of the General Council of Les Landes he was able to ask local mayors to provide him with the specific information he needed
his own personal experience over a period of 20 years as a landowner, farmer, wine producer, and manager of sharecroppers on his estate (from 1825 when he inherited his grandfather's estate to the time this essay was written possibly in early 1844). This is particularly useful when it comes to knowledge of the local prices of agricultural products and the changing economic conditions of ordinary farmers and workers. 224

The issue he takes up here is the land tax, 225 which was the most important of the direct taxes used by the French government to raise revenue. 226 According to Budget data from 1848-49 227 the government had revenue of about 1.4 billion francs, the main sources of which were (in order of importance):

421 million francs from direct taxes such as the land tax, personal and property taxes, the door and window tax, and trading licences
307 million francs from indirect taxes on alcohol, salt, sugar, tobacco, and gunpowder
263 million francs from registrations, fees, stamp duty, etc.
202 million francs from tariffs and import duties

The biggest single sources of revenue for the state were the land tax (279 million francs), registrations, fees and levies (216 million francs), the tax on tobacco (120 million francs), import duties (106 million francs), and the tax on alcohol (104 million francs).

Thus the issue of the land taxes was doubly important to Bastiat: it was the biggest component of the single biggest source of revenue to the state; and he himself was a land tax payer. In fact, he paid sufficient direct taxes (like the land tax) to place him the top 5% of income earners in France, thus making him a member of "la classe électorale" (the electoral or voting class) who where eligible to vote and stand for elections until the Revolution of February 1848 introduced the Second Republic and universal manhood suffrage.

Unlike the other items subject to a direct tax, like doors and windows, and trading licenses, the land tax was not a fixed amount or a fixed percentage of a value. It was based upon the presumed income which a property owner received from the use of his property. During the first French Revolution, the law of 23 November 1790 created a tax on property which replaced several previous taxes. It was based upon the anticipated future revenue which a piece of land or a building would generate for the owner. To determine what this amount would be required a meticulously maintained registry of land (the Cadastre or Land Registry Office) and building titles in which an army of bureaucrats would register the sale of land and buildings, keep a record of the prices the land and buildings sold for, what crops or other items were grown, produced, and sold, and the income those buildings and land had generated on average over the years. Each year the central government would pass a budget which specified that a certain amount of revenue had to be collected. This amount was divided or "apportioned" among the various regions and Départements across France, the amounts being based upon that region's or Département's capacity to pay, which was based upon what that region or Département had been able to pay in the past. The share of revenue which had to be collected was passed down the hierarchy of the French administration from regions, départements, arrondissements (districts"), cantons ("municipalities" or "counties"), communes ("villages" or "towns"), and then finally to individual property owners such as farmers and shopkeepers.

Each arrondissement, like Bastiat's in Dax, used a complex formula or "matrix" to determine each district's share of the revenue which had to be collected, based upon such factors as the type of crops a particular canton grew, the average price those crops sold for over a previous period of time, the number of households or businesses which were engaged in economic activity, and so on. Because the tax assessment was not based on actual income earned it became the local bureaucrat's "best guess" of what a particular land or business owner might earn in his given location, based upon the kinds of crops grown in that area over the previous, say 15 years. Naturally, economic and political conditions had changed considerably in France since 1790, so the government passed a law on 31 July 1821 which created a committee in each Département whose job it would be draw up a new formula or "matrix" to determine what tax property owners should pay in the future. The Département in Dax passed onto the General Council of Les Landes the task of periodically advising them on how to change this formula for assessing tax, which is why Bastiat became involved as a member of that Council.

By 1844 when Bastiat wrote this essay, conditions had changed radically again and Bastiat skillfully uses the economic data he has gathered to show exactly how the land tax regime had got out of kilter with actual economic reality. He shows that the mix of economic activities in his Département had been changing and was even accelerating in the 1840s. Wine growing on the southern hills and slopes was declining, becoming less profitable, and employing fewer people; the growth of pine forests (producing wood and pine resin products) to the north was expanding, becoming more profitable, and employing more people; general farming on the alluvial soil beside the rivers (crops like wheat, rye, millet; meat from cattle, sheep, and pigs) remained stagnant; and sheep farming on the northern heathland was declining as more heath was converted to pine forests. The larger cities were growing as people left the land in order to work in commerce or light industry. Population levels in the countryside were changing as some economic regions declined economically, and so did their populations, and vice-versa. Also, the kind of labour undertaken in the countryside was changing away from sharecropping (which Bastiat favoured for a number of reasons) as it was becoming less profitable and towards more small privately owned or rented farms, which had their own problems caused by high debt levels and the decreasing size of farms caused by the inflexible inheritance laws which required an equal division of the property among the heirs. Bastiat documents these changes carefully and in great detail in over a dozen large tables of data and many more smaller ones.

His overall conclusion is that the current formula the bureaucrats used for determining the land tax was seriously out of date, inflexible and incapable of rapidly changing to new circumstances, placed too heavy a tax burden on economically declining areas like his home town of Mugron which produced wine, and under-taxed areas which were becoming more prosperous such as the pine forest industries further to the north. Bastiat not only showed up the nonsense of a bureaucratically determined assessment of a land owner's probable income but he also inserted into the essay a number of interesting insights which he would develop later in his career.

Most notably, he went beyond the brief set down by the Département and the General Council to examine the land tax "allocation" and looked at other factors which were impeding economic development in the region, namely the high rate of tariffs which made it difficult for his region to expand its market and sell wine outside of France, the onerous city tolls (octroi) which impeded the flow of goods within France, and the restrictions on individuals which prevented them from engaging in certain trades without all kinds of government permits and licences. He concludes with some advice the Council probably did not want to hear, namely that " Legislation is killing us in the most literal sense of the word" and that unless the political system was opened up to "the lowest social strata" by giving them the right to vote, they might just rise up in rebellion and run things for themselves. Or, if the mortality tables at the end of his essay are correct, many of them will simply die off.

He also devotes several pages to analysing the population theory of Thomas Malthus 228 who had come under increasing criticism by socialists like Proudhon who accused him, and by implication the other political economists, of being "heartless" towards the poor and disadvantaged. Here, Bastiat is still an orthodox Malthusian in many respects but he is beginning to develop a new way of thinking about the problem of the relationship between the size of a population and "the means of subsistence." The latter was Malthus preferred term and referred to the minimum number of calories required to ensure the survival of a human being. As Bastiat would develop in more detail later in an essay and a chapter in Economic Harmonies , he began thinking instead of "the means of existence" which referred to the level of income or, to use a more modern phrase, the standard of living, of individuals. The latter could vary because of a range of economic, political, geographic, or climatic conditions, the most of important of which according to Bastiat was economic liberty, especially free trade, which could dramatically increase the productive power of human activity, and thus break free of the Malthusian population trap.

Other essays in which Bastiat discusses tax include the following:

T.12 (1841.010 "The Tax Authorities and Wine" (Le Fisc et la vigne) [OC1, pp. 243-59] [CW2, pp. 10-23]
T.17 (1844.07) "On the Allocation of the Land Tax in the Department of Les Landes" (De la répartition de la contribution foncière dans le Département des Landes). [OC1, pp. 283-333.] [CW4]
T.30 (1845.07.15) "Our Products are weighed down with Taxes" (Nos produits sont grevés de taxes), JDE , July 1845, T. 11, no. 44, p. 356-60; also ES1.5. [OC4.1.5, pp. 46-52] [CW3 - ES1.5]
T.118 (1847.04.04) "Two Methods of Equalizing Taxes" (Deux modes d'égalisation de taxes); original title: "Le libre échange demontré par l'example du sucre de betteraves" (Free Trade makes its point with the example of Beet Sugar), LE , 4 April 1847, no. 19, p. 152. [OC2.40, pp. 222-25.] [CW4]
T.166 (late 1847) ES2.10 "Le percepteur" (The Tax Collector) [n.d.] [OC4, pp. 198-203]
T.136 (1847.06.20) "The Salt Tax" (L'impôt du sel), LE , 20 June 1847, no. 30, p. 237. Not signed by Bastiat. [OC2.41, pp. 225-28.] [CW4]
T.139 (1847.06.27) "The Single-Tax in England. The Proposal of Mr. Ewart" (La taxe unique en Angleterre, proposition de M. Ewart), LE , 27 June 1847, no. 31, pp. 245-46. [OC2.37, pp. 209-16.] [CW4]
T.200 (1848.03.06) "Impediments and Taxes" (Entraves et Taxes) (Untitled Article), La République française, 6 March 1848, no. 9, p. 1. [OC7.55, pp. 234-35] [CW1, pp. 432-33]
T.273 (1848.10.10) Bastiat's comments at a "Meeting of the Political Economy Society" (Séance de 10 oct. 1848) (on tax). In "Chronique," JDE, T. 21, no. 90, 15 Oct. 1848, pp. 339-40; also ASEP (1889), pp. 68-69. Not in OC. [CW4]
T.232 1849.01.01 "The Consequences of the Reduction in the Salt Tax" (Conséquences de la réduction sur l'impôt du sel), Journal des Débats, 1 Jan. 1849, pp. 3-4. [OC5.9, p. 464] Included with Peace and Freedom or the Republican Budget (Feb 1849) in CW2, pp. 324-27.
T.235 (1849.02) "Peace and Freedom or the Republican Budget" (Paix et liberté ou le budget républicain), published as a pamphlet, Paix et Liberté, ou le Budget républicain (Peace and Freedom, or the Republican Budget) (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849). [OC5, pp. 407-67] [CW2, pp. 282-324]
T.240 (English) and T.283 (French) (1849.08.22) A speech on "Disarmament, Taxes, and the Influence of Political Economy on the Peace Movement." A speech at the Friends of Peace Conference in Paris, 22 Aug., 1849. A short version (1 1/2 pages, 1,300 words) is in French in Joseph Garnier, Congrès des amis de la paix universelle réuni à Paris en 1849, pp. 25-26; a longer longer version in English (3 1/2 pages, 2,600 words) in Report of the Proceedings of the Second General Peace Congress, held in Paris, on the 22nd, 23rd and 24th of August, 1849 (translator unknown), pp. 49-52. It is untitled in both versions so we have given it one. [DMH] [CW3] [CW4]
T.244 (1849.12.12) "Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" (Discours sur l'impôt des boissons). Speech given in the Legislative Assembly on 12 Dec. 1849. [OC5, pp. 468-93] [CW2, pp. 328-47]

Text

I intend establishing a few facts, ones that are capable of shedding some light on the following two questions:

1. Were the taxable capacities of the three major agricultural activities of the Department of Les Landes, namely the cultivation of pines, of vines, and the working of arable lands equitably evaluated when the tax was allocated among the three arrondissements (Mont-de-Marsan, Saint Sever, Dax)? 229

2. Since this allocation was made, have circumstances arisen to change the relationship between these various activities?

If in the light of such changes it is now the case that:

From the outset, the region growing pines has been lightly taxed and the one growing vines overcharged;
And ever since, one region has constantly prospered and the other constantly declined;

Then the conclusion must be drawn that the latter region is now paying too much for two reasons:

Perhaps because its taxable potential was overestimated in 1821;
Or because since 1821 this potential has decreased;

And that the former region is not paying enough:

Perhaps because its income happened to be low in 1821;
Or because since 1821 its income has increased.

I can express my ideas more clearly by using a hypothetical example.

Take two areas, P and V, which together produce a net income of 10,000 francs, with each section producing half.

Let taxation stand at 1,000 francs, or 10% of income, to be shared between them.

This division should take place fairly as follows:

On an income of 5,000 francs P will pay 500 francs in taxes or 10 per cent.

On an income of 5,000 francs V will pay 500 francs in taxes or 10 per cent.

However, if P's taxable capacity is underestimated by a fifth, it should be reduced to 4,000 francs,

And if V's is overestimated by a fifth, it should be raised to 6,000 francs,

The apportionment will be made as follows:

For a real income of 5,000 francs, deemed to be 4,000 francs, P will owe 400 francs of tax or 8%;

For a real income of 5,000 francs, deemed to be 6,000 francs, V will owe 600 francs of tax or 12%.

As long as the taxable capacities of these two areas of land continue to be equal, the injustice will be limited to removing one quarter of P's contribution and having V pay it instead.

However, if after a number of years, P's real income rises from 5,000 francs to 6,000 francs while V's decreases from 5,000 francs to 4,000 francs,

The apportionment becomes the following:

For an assumed income of 4,000 francs that is in reality 6,000 francs, P pays 400 francs or 6.7 %.

For an assumed revenue of 6,000 francs that is in reality 4,000 francs, V pays 600 francs or 15%.

This example shows that a region may, without its being noticed, transfer more than half its burden onto another.

First Question: Was apportionment carried out fairly in 1821?

The general rule is that tax should be based on income.

To establish the income from the land, the average price of commodities over the fifteen years prior to 1821 was used to calculate its output.

However, one single method of operation may lead to error. An effort was made to reduce this error by establishing income using a different procedure. Bills of land sales revealed the capital value of certain estates and interest at 3 1/2 percent of the capital was deemed to represent the income.

Thus, for the same estate, two different totals of income produced by two different procedures were found, and so the tax was based on the average income in accordance with the axiom that reality is to be found in averages.

Unfortunately, it is not truth but falsehood that is found in averages when the data on which they are based all lead to the same error.

Let us therefore examine the use made of these two bases for the apportionment of tax: the average price of commodities and bills of land sales .

§I The prices of commodities, according to the Director of Direct Taxation, were recorded in the land registry records for an average year as follows:

Wheat - 18 francs 77 centimes per hectolitre

Rye - 12 francs 76 centimes per hectolitre

Corn - 11 francs 33 centimes per hectolitre

Red wine - 28 to 60 francs per barrel

White wine - 10 to 22 francs per barrel

Resin - 2 francs 50 centimes per 50 kilograms

I am convinced that this initial basis for evaluation involves several errors of fact and theory that all favor the cultivation of pines to the detriment of field crops and vines.

Cereal prices are obviously extremely high. I do not mean to say that the data supplied by market price records have not been accurately followed, but the period from 1806 to 1821 produced data that did not much favor agricultural communes, either because it included times of troubles and invasions, or for some other reason. Proof of this is that in the following fifteen years, from 1821 to 1836, and according to the Director himself, these average prices fell to 17.13 francs for wheat, 11.27 for rye, and 9.17 for corn.

For all kinds of cereals, the first series had provided an average of 14 francs 28 centimes. The second provided one of only 12 francs 32 centimes, a difference of 1 franc 96 centimes or 14 percent.

If therefore the apportionment had been carried out in 1836, revenue from cultivatable land would have been evaluated at 14 percent less that it was in 1821.

As for the prices allocated to white wines, that is to say 10 francs and 22 francs, depending on quality, I do not consider them to be exaggerated. 230

But this is not the case for red wines. If there are a few vineyards that produced wines of a sufficiently high quality to be sold straight from the press at 60 francs (something I do not know about), I can at least state that lower qualities are far from achieving an average price of 28 francs, which implies 35 francs three months following harvest and sold in the cask.

However, it is above all the price of resin that I consider is the most liable to criticism. By accepting the obviously low figure of 2 francs 50 centimes per 50 kilograms, the authorities and the special commission doubtless foresaw that this was to expose all their operations to the suspicion of partiality. This suspicion was not misplaced. Farming and wine-producing communities in the department are all influenced by a distrust that it would be difficult to eradicate. People complain about this distrust and say that it is an obstacle to the reform they are working on, but does the responsibility for this not arise entirely from the administrative procedures that created it?

I will now make a few comments on what I have entitled theoretical errors, that is to say on the faulty method used to arrive at the averages and on the flawed consequences deduced from these.

First of all, in order for the prices of high quality produce combined with the prices for lower quality to produce a genuinely average price , consistent with real income , an equal quantity of both would have to be harvested, which in the case of wine is contrary to the truth. The Department of Les Landes produces a great deal more mediocre wine than good and if you disregard this fact, you reach an exaggerated average. For example, given 100 barrels 231 of wine at 28 francs and 10 barrels at 60 francs, the average of the prices taken on their own is rightly 44 francs. However, the average of genuine prices which make up income, that is to say the sums earned for each barrel taken together, is only 31 francs 91 centimes.

Subsequently, when a high price is included in the series of prices used to calculate an average, the average rises, from which the conclusion is drawn that there is a corresponding rise in income. However, this conclusion is neither accurate in theory nor true in practice.

Let us suppose that for four years a commodity is sold at 10 francs; its average is 10 francs. If in the fifth year this same commodity is sold at 20 francs, the average for the five years is 12 francs. The arithmetic cannot be faulted. But if you conclude from this that, over this five-year period, the figure of 12 instead of 10 represents the income, the economic conclusion would at the very least be very dubious. In order for it to be true, the quantity of the product in this fifth year would need to be equal to that of the preceding years, which cannot even be imagined in normal circumstances, since it is precisely the decrease in harvest that leads to an increase in price.

To obtain averages that reflect reality, and from which income can be deduced, we therefore have to combine the prices obtained with the quantities produced, and it is precisely this procedure that has been neglected. If in the new apportionment being undertaken, the average price of wines over the last three years were taken as a base, the following are the different results produced by the method used by the Land Registry Office and by mine:

The Land Registry Office would reason as follows:

1840 - 10 barrels at 25 francs, providing an income of 250 francs

1841 - 10 barrels at 25 francs, providing an income of 250 francs

1843 - 10 barrels at 50 francs (a wild guess), providing an income of 500 francs

Total - 30 barrels, at an average price of 33 1/3 francs, providing an income of 1,000 francs

Whereas this should read:

1840 - 10 barrels at 25 francs, providing an income of 250 francs

1841 - 10 barrels at 25 francs, providing an income of 250 francs

1843 - 5 barrels at 50 francs (actual price), providing an income of 250 francs

Total - 25 barrels, at an average price of 30 francs, providing an income of 750 francs

This is how one arrives at an imaginary income, on which, nevertheless, tax is unhesitatingly levied.

Doubtless it will be said that apportionment is an operation that is difficult enough without complicating it further with such fine considerations. People will also say that since the same procedures are used for all forms of product, any errors are cancelled out and offset one another, since all are subject to the same economic laws.

But this is exactly what I do not agree with, and I maintain that our Départment is subject to such specific conditions that the causes of error that I have just pointed out have to be taken into consideration if we aspire to even a semblance of equality in the apportionment of state charges. It remains for me to prove that the application of average prices , taken abstractly from the proportion between the differing qualities and the annual quantities, has been disadvantageous to cereal and vine growing regions.

An increase in the price of an item may have two causes.

Either there has been a fall in the production of this item; in this case, the price rises without it being at all possible for us to infer an increase in income.

Or the production of this item has remained stationary, or even increased, but demand has increased to a greater extent; in this case the price of this item rises and an increase in income can be inferred.

Well, it would be a very great injustice, in either case, if the average price of the item were taken as an index of income.

If the high price of 50 francs that La Chalosse gets this year for its wine has occurred without a decrease in the quantity produced, for example, because England, Belgium, and our major towns have removed the barriers of custom duties and city tolls with the result that the consumption of wine has doubled and prices with it, I would say "Record 50 francs in your list of annual prices and include this information in calculating an average, for it reflects a genuine increase in revenue."

In the same way, if the high price that we have seen resin products reach was due to a decrease in the productiveness of the pignadas 232 , if pine forest owners lost more on the quantity of their products than they gained on the prices obtained, I could quite properly say "Do not conclude from these high prices that revenues are proportionally high as well; this would be untrue and would constitute an act of plunder."

As it turns out, the opposite has happened. Les Landes has been fortunate enough to benefit from an increase in price; La Chalosse has been unfortunate enough to find that the increase in price has not allowed it to achieve even its normal revenue. Have I not good reason to demand that this profound change in situation be taken into account?

Let us conclude that the initial basis for evaluation has been damaging to both field crops and vines.

§II The second set of data used to determine taxable income is taken from individual sales of land .

The market value of a piece of land is quite an accurate indication of the income it generates. Two properties that are sold for 100,000 francs each are assumed to generate the same income, and this has to be equal to the interest generally yielded by capital in a given region and at a given time . The negotiation that takes place between the seller and the purchaser, in which one takes care to see that the income is not exaggerated and the other that it is not understated is better than any form of administrative survey on this subject and in addition offers a guarantee of wisdom, attention to detail, and self-interest that no zeal by inspectors, tax assessors, or experts can equal. For this reason, if it were possible to establish the market value of each tract of land, I for my part would not wish for any other basis for evaluating incomes and the allocation of taxes, for this market value summarizes all these circumstances that are so difficult to estimate and which influence the average income from land, as I have shown in the preceding section. 233

But we should not lose sight of the strong qualification encompassed in these words: in a given region and at a given time .

The interest on capital varies, in fact, according to the time and the place.

For identical incomes to be produced by equal sums of capital, changes in ownership have to have taken place at times and in places in which interest is uniform. This is as true for land as it is for public funds.

Treasury bonds 234 paying 5,000 francs in 1814 were worth just 60,000 francs; today their capital value is 120,000 francs.

In the same way, 100,000 francs invested in land may provide just 2,500 francs of rent in Normandy and yield an income of 4,000 francs in Gascony.

If the Chamber of Deputies took no account of these differences when it undertook the general standardization of tax assessment, it would not establish equality of taxation but inequality.

This is the fault that was committed in our Départment when the measurement of revenue was attempted on the basis of bills of land sales.

At the time this operation was carried out, land was not sold at a uniform rate all around the Départment. It was well known that money was invested for higher returns in Les Landes than in La Chalosse.

Even the Land Registry Office acknowledged the truth of this, for they offered to use three figures for the rate of interest, namely, 3, 3 ½ and 4 percent.

According to this data, an estate worth 100,000 francs would be presumed to yield an income of 4,000 francs in one canton while in another it would be deemed to produce just 3,000. Tax would be levied in accordance with this variation.

The Special Commission set up by the law dated 31 July 1821 235 rejected this distinction and adopted a uniform rate of 3 ½ percent.

The fact is, that the Commission committed an injustice by doing this if at that time interest over the entire territory was not uniform.

The Director himself acknowledges this.

"This uniform application of a rate of interest", he said, " has incontestably influenced the results produced by one of the two bases of apportionment, and it goes without saying that it has favored to a slight extent the areas in which the rate of interest is highest." 236

The slight extent mentioned by the Director can easily be translated into figures.

Let us imagine two estates that were sold for 100,000 francs each, one situated in an area in which the rate of interest is 4 percent and the other in one where interest is at 3 percent.

The first yields 4,000 francs of income and the second 3,000 francs, and tax should follow this proportion fairly, since it is levied on income.

According to the government procedure, each hundred francs of tax would be apportioned between these two properties as follows:

Portion relating to the property in Les Landes - 57 francs 15 centimes on 4,000 of revenue

Portion relating to the property in La Chalosse - 42 francs 85 centimes on 3,000 of revenue

Total - 100 francs 00 centimes

However, according to the Commission's approach, one hundred francs would be apportioned thus:

Portion relating to the property in Les Landes - 50 francs 00 centimes

Portion relating to the property in La Chalosse - 50 francs 00 centimes

Total- 100 francs 00 centimes

That is to say that Les Landes has been granted tax relief of 14 percent, which the Commission charged to La Chalosse. 237 Doubtless it will be said that, since bills of land sale are just one of two elements of the apportionment, this result may have been diminshed by the influence of the other element. This would be true if the farming and wine-producing cantons were favored by the application of the average prices for commodities, but we have seen that they were no more relieved by the first than by the second basis for evaluation. It is far from true that the errors tainting these two procedures cancel each other out and offset one another; it can be said that that they multiply one another, and always to the disadvantage of the same areas.

Thus, the two bases for the apportionment of tax have been invalidated and distorted and always for the benefit of one type of property, the pignadas (the pine plantations), to the detriment of the two others, farming-land and vineyards.

Let us move on to the results.

If we asked an impartial man what were the cantons that paid the highest taxes relating to vines, he would doubtless reply, those with the greatest acreage devoted to this type of cultivation, the cantons of Montfort, Mugron, Saint-Sever, Villeneuve, and Gabarret, and he would not be wrong. These five cantons alone pay three-quarters of the tax levied on vineyards. And if he were asked which ones pay the highest taxes relating to heath land, he would unhesitatingly reply, those that include vast stretches of heath, such as Sabres, Arjuzanx, Labrit, etc. But here our interlocutor would be sadly mistaken and probably greatly surprised to learn that it is La Chalosse and the Armagnac, wine-growing regions, that pay not only the majority, but almost all of the tax assignable to the heath lands.

The following is a table of our twenty-eight cantons listed in decreasing order of their shares of taxation relating to heath land. 238

Table, page 294, G1, ed. 1855

	fr.			fr.
Saint-Sever	6,296	Saint-Esprit	1,593
Grenade	5,599	Sabres	1,561
Mugron	3,904	Geaune	1,287
Roquefort	3,579	Dax	1,207
Hagetmau	3,327	Arjuzanx	1,168
Amou	3,000	Labrit	1,074
Montfort	3,000	Tartas (ouest)	914
Pouillon	2,883	Castets	600
Aire	2,852	Soustons	522
Saint-Vincent	2,663	Tartas (est)	495
Mont-de-Marsan	2,465	Pissos	166
Gabarret	2,272	Parentis	141
Peyrehorade	2,061	Sore	107
Villeneuve	1,817	Mimizan	94

Is it not odd to see in the first half of this list all the wine-producing cantons: Saint-Sever, Mugron, Amou, Montfort, Villeneuve, etc., as well as all the farming cantons: Hagetmau, Aire, Peyrehorade, etc., and in the second half all the cantons making up Les Landes and Maransin? 239

Here is another comparison that is no less curious.

The canton of Saint-Sever alone pays more taxes on its 5,583 hectares of heath than the following nine cantons together: Mimizan, Sore, Parentis, Castets, Soustons, Labrit, Arjuzanx, and Sabres, which together have an area of 203,760 hectares, and when you add nine other cantons the same size as Mimizan to these nine, under the current rules of apportionment, you still do not manage to extract from these tremendous stretches of land what is levied on the heath in the single canton of Saint-Sever, as can be seen in the following table:

LANDES
Main Tax		Main Tax
	fr.		fr.
1	canton ;	Sabres	1,561	Saint-Sever	6,296
1	—	Arjuzanx	1,168
1	—	Labrit	1,074
1	—	Castets	600
1	—	Soustons	522
1	—	Pissos	166
1	—	Parentis	141
1	—	Sore	107
1	—	Mimizan	94
9	cantons similar to Mimizan at 94 francs each	846

18	cantons		6,279		6,296

We also learn from the report of the Director of Direct Taxation that the canton of Mimizan, whose territory feeds close to 5,000 inhabitants, that is to say, about one third of the population of the canton of Saint-Sever, pays the following taxes:

1,223 francs for field crops

8 francs for vines

4,212 francs for pines

94 francs for heath land

Total: 5,537 francs, a sum less than that which has to be paid for the heath alone in Saint-Sever.

Montfort's share is 40,771 francs. It exceeds that of Soustons and Castets, which are:

Soustons - 22,338 francs

Castets - 18,108

Total: 40,446 francs

Yet, according to the last census, the population of Montfort is only 13,654 inhabitants. The population of the two cantons of the Maransin is 18,027 inhabitants:

Castets - 9,006 francs

Soustons - 9,021

The share of the canton of Mugron is 34,790 francs. It exceeds the share of the following three cantons combined:

Sabres - 13,448 francs

Pissos - 11,694

Parentis - 9,103

Total: 34,245 francs

and, to within 355 francs, it equals the share of the following four cantons:

Labrit - 10,286 francs

Parentis - 9,103

Sore - 7,937

Mimizan - 7,819

Total: 35,145 francs

And yet, compared with our population of 10,038 inhabitants, these four cantons have a population of 20,784 inhabitants (more than double). Compared with our 4,486 hectares of field crops, they have 9,584 hectares, (more than double). Compared with our 1,887 hectares of vines, they have 43,894 hectares of pignadas , (23 to 1). Finally, compared with our 3,250 hectares of heath, they have 88,719 hectares (27 to 1).

I do not wish to say that the field crops and heath in these cantons are as valuable as ours, nor that their pines can equal our vines, taken by the hectare. The question is to see whether between them there is the huge disproportion we have just set out. If this is so, if revenues raised in Mugron equal those of Labrit, Parentis, Mimizan, and Sore, it remains to be explained how it is that they provide a living for just 10,000 inhabitants in La Chalosse, whereas they keep 20,000 inhabitants in Les Landes. This phenomenon can be explained away only by the proposition that those in La Chalosse are basking in luxury compared to the Les Landes. But then in this case I would ask why the population is decreasing in number in the former while it is increasing significantly in the latter.

I have no intention of stirring up conflict between the arrondissements. I think that discussion can take place with regard only to the various crops whose taxable capacity has been badly assessed. For this reason, I have not hesitated to compare not only cantons situated in various arrondissements but also cantons included in the same districts but which are devoted to other crops. This is why I contrasted Montfort with Soustons and Castets. I could equally have compared Villeneuve, a wine-producing canton in the first arrondissement, with Arjuzanx or even Mont-de-Marsan, and we would still encounter the same disproportion. The first of these cantons, with 8,887 inhabitants, pays much more than twice as much as the second, with 7,075 inhabitants, and as much as our chief town, which has a population of 15,915 inhabitants.

I could point out anomalies that are even more striking if I wished to abandon the comparison of cantons for that of communes; that would take me too far, so I will limit myself to two facts.

In the second arrondissement, there is a commune such as Nerbis that pays 1 franc 51 centimes for each hectare of heath. In the first arrondissements, communes, such as Mimizan, Pontenx, Aureilhan, Bras, Argelouse or Luxey that pay half or one third of a centime. Calen in the canton of Sore pays its share with 3/10 of a centime, from which it follows that one hectare of heath at Nerbis is valued at the level of 500 hectares at Calen. It is said that in the former arrondissement, each hectare of heath feeds one sheep and farming statistics, published by the Ministry of Agriculture confirm this claim 240 since we see that this arrondissement, which has 292,000 hectares of heath, maintains 338,800 sheep. Have the authorities considered that in Nerbis a flock of 500 animals can survive on one hectare of heath?

The quantity of wine produced by one hectare of vines is in fact the product of:

1 hectare of vineyard that, in the commune of Montfort, pays	7	fr.	34	c.
1/2 hectare of fenced land	2		02
1/2 hectare heath land	2		30

Total	9	fr.	66	c.

There are twenty communes in the former district that are taxed at only 27, 26, 24, or 20 centimes per hectare of pines and there are some, like Laharie (in the canton of Arjuzanx) that pay only 17 centimes. For an apportionment like this to be considered fair, the net product of one hectare of vines, established at Montfort, would have to be equal to the net product of fifty-seven hectares of pines at Laharie.

I will not pursue these comparisons any further. I think I have demonstrated two things, namely:

that the two methods used to estimate the revenue of each of the crops in our Départment were calculated, doubtless unintentionally, in a way that hurts field crops and vines to the benefit of pines,

that numerous irrefutable facts establish that this has been the effective result of the use of these procedures, with the consequence that the apportionment of tax has been inequitable from the outset.

It remains for me to prove that this inequity has increased since then and is increasing with every passing day following the changes that have been made in the proportions of the taxable capacity of these crops.

Second Question: Have the taxable capacities of the various crops in the Départment retained the proportions they had when the tax was apportioned?

When the tax revenues from land were being determined in 1821, the facts relating to that year were not examined. The dates of the leases and bills of land sales that were consulted were more or less old and the average prices applied were based on market-price lists that went back fifteen years. Thus, these various elements did not reflect a current state of affairs but the situation of the country during a period whose starting point must be set at the beginning of the century.

It is therefore with this period that I have to compare the present time, and across this period of approximately forty years I have to inquire into the phenomena that science has taught us to consider as being the surest evidence of increase or decrease in populations.

The first one that comes to the fore is the movement of the population itself. If it is true, as all political writers acknowledge, that the number of human beings increases or decreases according to their incomes, it is enough to observe the movement of the population in regions in which pines, cereals, and vines are grown to recognize what each of them has gained or lost with regard to taxable capacity. Let us therefore busy ourselves with this investigation, which I consider to be of the greatest interest even beyond the question of the apportionment of tax.

The Population of the Three Districts of Les Landes at various times.

	1801	1804	1808	1821	1826	1831	1836	1841	% increase
Mont-de-Marsan	71,707	74,115	77,225	82,364	86,869	91,595	93,292	94,145	31.8%
Saint-Sever	77,467	80,834	80,602	82,364	86,869	91,595	93,292	94,145	31.8%
Dax	75,098	80,601	82,486	90,362	93,959	90,463	101,126	105,303	40%
Total	224,272	235,550	249,313	236,311	265,314	272,504	284,918	288,077	28.5

Table, page 300, G1, ed. 1855

This table shows us that there was an increase in population of 28 ½ percent for the entire Départment. This average was exceeded by 11 ½ percent in the third arrondissment and 3 percent in the first, while the second ended by being 14 percent below this average.

The arrondissment of Saint-Sever was the most populated at the beginning of the century. It moved down to second place in 1806, to third place in 1831, and finally, during the period 1832 to 1841, its absolute population decreased.

This initial overview appears to show that the arrondissment that provides the greatest production and sales of resinous products is the one that has prospered most quickly. The arrondissment that lies second for this crop is also second with regard to population increase. Finally the arrondissment in which the cultivation of pines is insignificant and whose principal source of revenue is in vineyards has remained stationary.

However, this teaches us nothing very precise about the influence of pines, field crops, or vineyards with regard to the population, since each of our arrondissment includes these three crops in varying proportions. Assuming that the cultivation of pines has brought prosperity and vineyards poverty, it is clear that the first and third arrondissment would have shown a more significant increase in population without the wine-producing cantons of Villeneuve and Gabarret and Montfort and Pouillon, with the second showing a lesser increase without the cantons of Tartas (West) which includes a great deal of pine.

It is therefore essential to examine the movements of population in the districts of those cantons that show us a much clearer distinction between the three types of crop whose influence we are comparing.

Here is the list of our twenty-eight cantons listed in decreasing order of prosperity as shown by the increase in their population:

Table, page 302, G1, ed. 1855

Population Changes by Canton

CANTONS.	1804	1844	% Increase	% Decrese
Castets	5,760	9,006	56	"
Dax	13,224	20,951	51	"
Mimizan	2,700	4,870	43	"
Sabres	4,994	7,144	43	"
Saint-Esprit	10,907	15,612	43	"
Parentis	4,287	5,870	37	"
Pissos	4,693	6,342	37	"
Soustons	6,625	9,021	36	"
Arjuzanx	5,304	7,095	33	"
Saint-Vincent	7,780	10,334	32	"
Sore	3,251	4,268	31	"
Labrit	4,541	5,776	27	"
Roquefort	7,453	11,501	27	"
Tartas (ouest)	8,391	10,571	25	"
Peyrehorade	10,664	13,028	21	"
Hagetmau	10,587	12,462	20	"
Mont-de-Marsan	13,301	15,915	19	"
Tartas (est)	4,595	5,335	16	"
Geaune	8,183	9,197	13	"
Montfort	12,209	13,654	11	"
Aire	10,829	11,992	10	"
Amou	12,438	13,579	10	"
Grenade	7,173	7,872	9	"
Gabarret	8,122	8,746	7	"
Villeneuve	8,296	8,887	7	"
Pouillon	13,332	14,294	7	"
Saint-Sever	15,762	15,322	"	2 1/2
Mugron	10,343	10,038	"	3

I consider that this table sheds considerable light on the question. It can be clearly seen that increased prosperity correlates with the cultivation of pines and that a slow increase, stationary, or even decreasing prosperity has been the fate of the regions with field crops and vines.

In fact, if we divide this table into two series, the first includes all the cantons in which pine cultivation is predominant and ends with the cantons of Roquefort and Tartas (West), as though to demonstrate that where the pines stop, the prosperity of the region also stops. The second series of 14 cantons shows a smaller increase and includes exactly all the farming and wine-producing cantons in the department. The "Grande Lande 241 " and Maransin are no more present in this series than La Chalosse and the Armagnac are in the first.

These two series produce the following results:

	CROPS	POPULATION
	VINES	PINES	1804	1841	INCREASE
	Hectares	Hectares	Inhabitants	Inhabitants	Inhabitants
1st Series	2,160	150,022	89,910	127,463	37,553	42%
2nd Series	18,093	16,821	145,640	160,049	14,449	10%
Total	20,233	166,843	235,250	287,552	52,022	22%

In the population table for the cantons, a few facts will be noted which appear not to agree with these deductions:

Dax and Saint-Esprit, which have no pines, are at the top of the scale, as they show increases in population of 56 and 43 percent.

Mont-de-Marsan, which would have been expected to figure in the first series, comes in third place only in the second and shows an increase of just 19 percent.

Montfort, which is a wine-producing canton and which for this reason should be one of the last on the table, nevertheless has eight cantons beneath it and shows an increase of 11 percent.

However, as we shall see, these apparent anomalies, far from undermining it, confirm the argument I am putting forward.

Let us note first of all that these are cantons that include the towns of Dax, Saint-Esprit, and Mont-de-Marsan, whose industrial population is not as directly influenced by farming as those of the countryside, which is the main object of this research.

Saint-Esprit had only 4,946 inhabitants in 1804; it now has 7,324. Its situation at the mouth of the Adour, its commerce, garrison, military establishments, and proximity to Bayonne explain this development.

Dax does not produce any resinous goods but it is the warehouse to which residents of Maransin come to carry out his sales and purchases. Dax has therefore prospered for the same reasons that would cause Bordeaux to do well if the sales of wine flourished and spread wealth around the Gironde, even though the commune of Bordeaux itself cannot produce wine.

Let us move on to Mont-de-Marsan. First of all, it would be a mistake to consider this canton one of those in which pines predominated. It has only 9,828 hectares of pines compared with 8,147 hectares of field crops and 428 hectares of vines. The tax it pays on its pines is only 1/8 th of its share. It therefore has to be ranked among the farming cantons, which already feel the influence of the cultivation of pines and, from this point of view, its place in the table is not far from the one that, a priori , might have been allocated to it. But one is easily convinced that it is not the fault of the pines if this canton is not included in the first rank. In effect, if we remove from the nineteen communes that make it up the six communes that have the greatest acreage of pignadas , we find that although in these six communes there is a significant proportion of cultivated land, the population has increased by 33 percent while that of the canton as a whole has increased by only 19 percent.

Table, page 305, G1, ed. 1855

	RURAL PRODUCTS	POPULATION
	FIELD CROPS	PINES	1804	1841
Saint-Pardon	659	906	596	788
Saint-Martin	591	985	578	699
Geloux	578	1,321	600	815
Campagne	744	743	881	1,052
Saint-Avit	418	787	435	501
Saint-Pierre	903	1,037	746	1,344
Totals	3,893	5,779	3,896	5,199	Increase 33%

From which it is clearly seen that, in the canton of Mont-de-Marsan, the cultivation of pines has had the same consequences as in the rest of the Départment. What has reduced the increase in population in this canton to 19 percent is the influence of the town of Mont-de-Marsan, which in 1841 has no more inhabitants than it did in 1804. If we set the town aside, the canton would occupy tenth place in the table on page 302, ["Movement of Population by Canton"] between Arjuzanx and Saint-Vincent. But what are the reasons for the stationary condition of our chief town? It is not part of my brief to look for them. Perhaps the decrease in the sales of spirits has something to do with it, or perhaps it also is hiding part of its population from us.

It remains for us to examine the canton of Montfort. Overall, this canton shows an increase in population of 11 percent. This is not much, compared with the pine-growing region but it is still more than would be expected from a wine-producing canton, according to what is happening at Villeneuve, Gabarret, Saint-Sever, and Mugron. But while the canton of Montfort includes a few wine-producing communes, it also includes a great many farming ones.

What factors have caused the canton as a whole to achieve population growth of 11 percent? This is what we are going to see in examining these two categories separately.

Table, page 307, G1, ed. 1855

Breakdown of the Canton of Montfort

FARMING COMMUNES .	CROPS.	POPULATION.
Field Crops	Vines	1804.	1841.
	hect.	hect.	pop.	pop.
Clermont	450	20	825	913
Garrey	140	15	219	228
Gousse	110	6	151	216
Hinx	500	50	656	776
Louer	120	4	112	149
Ouard	330	1	321	370
Ozourt	240	22	287	350
Lier	420	1	371	509
Sort	480	30	826	943
Vicq	250	"	290	344
Cassen	170	43	348	466
Gibrel	110	76	237	292
Goos	310	60	487	566
Préchacq	410	60	491	584
Total	4,040	388	5,621	6,706
Ratio of Vines to Field Crops 1/10
Population increase 19%

FARMING COMMUNES .	CROPS.	POPULATION.
Field Crops	Vines	1804.	1841.
	hect.	hect.	hab.	hab.
Montfort	190	350	1,574	1,644
Gamarde	480	310	1,194	1,336
Laurède	100	195	844	769
Lourqueu	180	120	380	416
Nousse	80	110	390	393
Poyanne	100	140	563	558
Poyartin	590	170	970	983
Saint-Geours	240	310	773	849
Total	1,960	1,700
Ratio of Vines to Field Crops 1/2.
Population increase 4%

Thus, just as by breaking down the canton of Mont-de-Marsan into its elements we have ascertained that if it does not occupy a higher rank in the scale of prosperity in the Départment, it is not the cultivation of pines that has limited it; in the same way, through an analysis of the canton of Montfort, we are convinced that it has held its twentieth place only through its large number of farming communes. If we removed these communes, it would go down to one of the lowest in the rankings and would be exceeded in poverty and population only by the cantons of Saint-Sever and Mugron.

These two examples warn us that the cantonal district is still too extensive, including too great a variety of crops, to show us in a satisfactory manner the influence of each of these crops on the population, since these influences are visible to us only in combination. They have to be separated out as far as possible; the truth has to be pursued down to the level of the communes. This is what the five tables at the end of this article will endeavor to do.

From the report by the Director of Direct Taxation, I have taken the twenty-two communes that include the greatest proportion of pines and the twenty-two communes that offer the greatest proportion of vineyards, without distinguishing either cantons or districts. Between these two classes there is a third, which includes only cultivated land. Finally, two other classes record the transition between pines and field crops on the one hand and between field crops and vineyards on the other. Beside each commune, I have put the size of the population in 1804 and 1841. In this way, we will discover how the population has been affected, not only by each of the three major crops in the region but also by the combination of two of these crops. ( See pages 329 to 333 ). [329-30 - Région des pins; 331- Région des labourables; 332-33 - Région des vignes]

How can we not be struck by the remarkable results shown by these tables?

They show us that in our department, population movement has occurred as follows:

Increase: 60 percent in the region growing pines

Increase: 34 percent in the region divided between pines and field crops

Increase: 16 percent in the region growing field crops

Increase: 2 percent in the region divided between field crops and vines

Decrease: 4 percent in the region growing vines.

And you must not think that these two figures, 60 percent increase and 4 percent decrease, express the extreme effects produced on the population by the two crops we are comparing. For this to be so, we would have to be able to study them in isolation. However there are no communes in which one element, field crops, is not present, whose slow and progressive action either flattens out somewhat the increase shown in the region growing pines or likewise diminishes the effect of depopulation that has decimated the region growing vines. If we wanted to isolate the proper influence of these two crops quite separately from that of field crops, we would have to resort to a proportionality rule. I think that we would reach a close result using an intrinsically rigorous form of reasoning, which we would be able to challenge only by calling into question the official data on which it is based.

This is the problem to be solved:

The twenty-two communes in which pines are predominant show an increase of 8,998 inhabitants from a base of 13,573, or 60 percent.

The twenty-two communes in which vines are predominant show a decrease of 899 inhabitants from a base of 20,224, or 4 percent.

If we accept that in these communes, as in the rest of the Départment, field crops favored the section of the population corresponding to them to the tune of 16 percent, what is the proportion of increase and decrease that should be attributed exclusively to pines and vines?

The size of the population depends on the standard of living 242 and this in turn is nothing more than the level of income; and we know the proportion of income relating to each form of crop through its workforce's contribution to taxation. From this data it is easy to calculate the size of population that corresponds to each form of crop.

The fiscal contributions of the twenty-two communes in the first category are as follows:

27,483 francs for pines

7,043 francs for field crops

Incomes are in proportion to these contributions.

The size of population is in proportion to these incomes.

Therefore, the 13,573 inhabitants who make up the 1804 population can be broken down thus:

	Population
To pines	10,815
to field drops	2,758
Setting aside the increase found to be produced by pines, the increase due to field crops has to be added, namely 16 percent of 2,758 which is	441
So that if pines had no influence, the present population of these twenty-two communes would be	14,014
However, it is	21,771
The difference due exclusively to pines is	7,757

Well, an increase of 7,757 on 10,815 is 71 percent.

The share of the twenty-two wine-producing communes is 22,880 francs relating to vines, which corresponds to	11,709 inhabitants
16,742 francs relating to field crops, which corresponds to	8,515
Level of population in 1804	20,224
Through the effect of field crops, which implies an increase of 16 percent on 8,515 inhabitants, this level would have increased to	1,373
So that, without the influence of vines, the level of population in 1841 would be	21,597
However, it is	19,325
Deficit due exclusively to vines	2,272

A deficit of 2,272 on 11,709 is equivalent to 19 percent.

The only conclusions that can be drawn from these figures is that in a commune in which there are only pines, the population would have increased by 70 percent, that in one in which there are only vines it would have decreased by 19 percent and that in reality , the positive and negative changes have taken place within these two limits in each district in line with the proportions in which these crops are combined with a third element, field crops.

The following is thus at the end of the day the law governing the changes in population in the Department of Les Landes:

Pines only	an increase of	71%
7/8 pine and 1/8 field crops (table on p. 329)	an increase of	60
4/5 pine and 1/5 field crops (table on p. 330)	an increase of	34
Field crops (table on p. 331 )	an increase of	16
2/3 field crops and 1/3 vines (table on p. 332)	an increase of	2
½ field crops and ½ vines (table on p. 333)	a de crease of	4
Vines only	a de crease of	19

The result of this is that if a stretch of pines and a stretch of vines each providing a livelihood for one hundred people were subjected to the same tax burden at the outset, this burden would still exist today even though the same pines would provide a living 243 for 171 people and the same vines would no longer be able to provide for any more than 81 people, namely less than half.

This is very unfair. But if from the outset the apportionment was badly done how much more blatant is the injustice, as I think I have demonstrated in the first part of this article!

I don't wish to weary the reader's attention with weighty, arid figures. However, I cannot leave this question without showing the reader the details of the phenomenon of depopulation which has affected not only the wine-producing region but also a fairly wide area surrounding this region, in order to show the connection between the number of people and the reduced level of incomes as established by the legislation on Customs and indirect taxation. My heart bleeds when it is confronted with the deep distress implied by this depopulation.

Obliged, as I am, to restrain myself, I will go no further than to state the number of births and deaths in a period of thirty years (1814 to 1843) in the fifteen wine-producing communes at the top of the table on page 333 (Region des vigne - second column of figures). With regard to the other seven communes, I have asked the Mayors for statements but have not received them. The period of thirty years has been divided into two periods of fifteen years in order to facilitate a comparison between the current state of affairs and the situation of the region in previous times.

Table, page 312, G1, ed. 1855

COMMUNE	FIRST PERIOD	SECOND PERIOD
Births	Deaths	Excess of	Births	Deaths	Excess of
Births	Deaths	Births	Deaths
Mugron	1,173	959	216	"	949	1284	"	335
Nerbis	283	229	54	"	179	267	"	88
Laurède	414	287	127	"	304	333	"	29
Gamarde	611	433	178	"	545	655	"	110
Donzacq	669	362	307	"	541	531	10	"
St-Geours	492	401	85	"	404	498	"	94
Ranos	202	175	27	"	180	155	25	"
Baigts	469	303	166	"	400	367	33	"
Lourquen	172	127	45	"	176	162	14	"
Montaut	548	424	124	"	464	490	"	26
Poyanne	250	225	25	"	269	273	"	4
Hauriet	291	187	104	"	224	234	"	10
Montfort	702	462	240	"	137	138	"	1
Nousse	159	103	56	"	404	470	"	66
St-Aubin	432	343	89	"	404	470	"	66
Total	6,869	5,026	1,843	"	5,814	6,445	132	753

I ask the reader to pay great attention to these figures. From 1814 to 1828, there were 6,869 births and 5,026 deaths. The population grew, with each 1,000 inhabitants providing 33 births against 24 deaths.

However, from 1829 to 1843, births fell to 5,814, or 27 ½ per 1,000 inhabitants and deaths increased to 6,445 or 30 ½ per 1,000 inhabitants.

So that, and this is worth noting, this decrease in the wine-producing population, which I had already noted from the censuses, is not the work of forty years, as one might have thought, but in fact that of the last fifteen years. What is more, in order for its absolute density to have diminished, it was necessary for it to lose, either by death or emigration, not only the difference shown in the censuses of 1804 and 1843 but also everything it had gained in the first twenty-five years of this period. 244

In this way, the best recorded facts come to give dismal confirmation to the law of population growth revealed by science.

The checks to population that keep the number of inhabitants at subsistence level", says Malthus, "can be categorized under two headings: the first act by anticipating an increase in population and the second by destroying it in proportion as it takes shape. 245

On which Mr. Senior makes the following comment:

Mr. Malthus has divided the checks to population into the preventive and the positive . The first are those which limit fecundity, the second, those which decrease longevity. The first diminishes the number of births, the second increases that of deaths. And as fecundity and longevity are the only elements of the calculation, it is clear that Mr. Malthus's division is exhaustive. 246

Criticisms of this doctrine have been raised recently. 247 It has been criticised for being sad and discouraging. Doubtless, it would be better if the means of existence (standard of living) could decrease and even disappear without people being any the less well fed, clothed, housed, and cared for in childhood, old age, and sickness. But this is neither true nor possible; it is actually contradictory. I cannot really understand the outcries against Malthus. What has this famous economist really revealed? After all, his theory is only a methodical commentary on this quite ancient and well known truth: when mankind can no longer get in sufficient quantity the things which feed him and sustain his life, it becomes necessary to reduce their numbers; and if they can't do this through acts of prudence, then suffering will change things for them.

We can clearly see this law in operation in our Chalosse. Sharecropping farms no longer yield the same income or, to put it another way, the same means of existence (the same standard of living), and immediately an instinctive sense of prudence reduces the number of births. 248 People reflect deeply before marrying. Heads of households understand that the property can no longer sustain the same number of people and they postpone the time they set up house and have children, or else the increasingly harsh exigencies of life make marriages more difficult, that is to say, more rare, and the number of unmarried people thus increases. This is how a region that recorded 33 births per 1,000 inhabitants now produces only 27.

However, prudence, or what Malthus calls a preventive check, is not powerful enough to reduce the population as rapidly as (falling) income can; a repressive check, 249 namely mortality, has to contribute to re-establishing a balance. Since the abundance of things has decreased, privation must ensue; privation brings suffering and suffering, death. Sharecropping farms are less productive, and consequently their acreage, which had been calculated with a view to a different order of things, tends to increase. Two sharecropping farms are combined into one or three into two. In the commune of Mugron alone, twenty-nine sharecropping farms have thus disappeared in our time, 250 and as many families have inexorably been condemned to a slow destruction. Finally, the ones that remain have fewer means to ensure themselves against hunger, cold, damp, and sickness; average life expectancy decreases, and in the end where there were 24 deaths per 1,000 inhabitants there are now 30½.

But is this decrease in population, which is certainly the effect and the indicator of poverty, also the measure of its extent? Listen to the judicious comments of Mr. de Chastellux 251 on this subject:

It is said that subsistence levels are an index of population; if they are lowered, the number of people has to decrease in the same proportion. Doubtless this decrease has to happen; whether it does so in the same proportion is another matter, or at least it is only at the end of a lengthy period of time that this proportion is found to be accurate. Before people's lives are shortened and the source of life declines, poverty has to have reduced physical strength and increased the number of diseases. When it takes hold of a region, when the supply of food decreases by a certain amount, by one sixth for example, the result is not that one sixth of the inhabitants die of hunger or emigrate, but these unfortunate people consume in general one sixth less. Unfortunately for them destruction does not always follow destitution, and nature, which is more thrifty than tyrants, is even more fully aware of the few resources men need in order to survive. Their numbers may still be high but they will be weak and unhappy. It is at this stage that by taking a little away, you take a great deal. 252

Yes, the interpretation of the distress on the left bank of the Adour would be very incomplete if it were constructed on the basis of mortality tables. A fall in income does not strike only the particular class that cannot lose anything without being in danger of death. Before being overcome, how many families descend from affluence to slender means and thence, to hardship and from hardship to destitution? First of all, they reduce expenditure on luxuries, then they economize on the ordinary comforts of life, and finally they cut down on the basic decencies. Their social status declines accordingly. These houses in ruins, this furniture in disrepair, and these children whose education has been interrupted; tell us that conditions have declined both from the point of view of morale and of physical well-being. They will tell us that monopoly and the tax authorities, these tyrants over our industry, know how little people need to live on, and that unfortunately destruction does not always follow poverty . 253

According to Chastellux, this is when, by taking a little, you take a great deal. I would say, that this is when an apportionment that is faulty and unjust, even in better times, becomes intolerable and monstrous.

The facts that I have set out are irrefutable. However, I do not doubt that efforts will be made to undermine this conclusion by denying the principle that population levels vary with the standard of living. "We do not accept this doctrine of Malthus'", they might say, "In the region producing pines there are doubtless more of us than before, but it does not follow that the income from our forests has increased. Only that it is shared among a greater number of people."

I will not go into a long dissertation on the factors governing population. I know that they raise questions that are still controversial. But as for the factors themselves, and the axiom that an increase in population is the effect, proof, and indictor of an increase that corresponds to a particular standard of living or level of income, I am not aware that doubt has ever been cast on the matter by any political writer of any worth, and I think I cannot do better than to subject my case to the authority of a large number of writers who all agree on this point, whatever other differences there may be between their opinions and theories.

"And what is the surest evidence that they (the people) are so protected and prosperous? The numbers of their population." (Rousseau) 254

"Wherever a place is found where two people may live in comfort, a marriage occurs. Nature lends itself to this quite well when it is not hindered by the difficulty of subsistence ." (Montesquieu) 255

"Alongside a loaf, a man is born." (Buffon, Natural History . 1749) 256

"After a certain number of years, the population of an industrious and commercial country approaches the level of subsistence." (Necker) 257

"To live you have to eat, and as any growth has a limit, that is where a population stops growing." (James Steuart) 258

"Population levels are in line with the means of subsistence and need. According to this principle, there is one means of increasing the population, and only one. This is to increase national wealth, or to put it better, to allow it to increase." (Bentham) 259 260

"The only true criterion of a real and permanent increase in the population of any country, is the increase of the means of subsistence." (Malthus, Principle, 1st ed., chapter VII)

"Distress has a prodigious influence on mortality tables. As a general thesis, it may be said that in our species, there are always just that number of people as know how and are able to acquire the means of subsistence for themselves. … It is certain that an increase in the number of individuals is a consequence of their well-being." (Desttut de Tracy). 261

"The population of a country is limited only by its products; production is the index of the population." (J. B. Say) 262

"Income is the index of subsistence and prosperity. Income is an index of population increase both for society and for the family." (Simonde de Sismondi). 263

"Population grows naturally as the resources available for existence increase." (Joseph Droz). 264

"As long as the means available for living increase the population will multiply. When they remain stationary, the population also remains stationary. As soon as they decrease, the population decreases in the same proportion." (Charles Comte). 265

I hope I will be forgiven for this unusual number of quotations; I believed that I could not establish too solidly a principle that serves as the basis both for the complaints and demands of my region.

But after all, and leaving economic science out of this, can it be seriously maintained that there has not been any improvement in the incomes of Les Landes and the Maransin and no decline in those of the Condomois 266 and La Chalosse? Is there any mystery concerning the prices of resin products and wine? Or can they rise and fall permanently without the situations of landowners and sharecroppers experiencing the effects? Will it be claimed that 156 people now live in the canton of Castets on an income identical to that which in past times was declared to be inadequate for 100 people? They must therefore be wretchedly poor, obliged as they are to cut back on one third of their expenditure, that is to say reduce all their consumption by one third! Well then, let us examine the question once more from this point of view. Let us see whether the number of people has increased in one sector of the department merely through the cuts made by each person in his consumption. If we succeed in finding that the inhabitants of Les Landes are provided with all forms of goods to the same level and better than those in La Chalosse, we will have to acknowledge that this extra population has not come to share a fixed level of income, but to live on new income, which has been established as numbers increased and on which, in all justice, they owe their share of tax.

The Minister of Agriculture and Trade has had a statistical profile of France published. 267 I have carefully drawn from the publication details on the level of consumption in each of our three arrondissements (Mont-de-Marsan, Saint-Sever, Dax). Doubtless, it is to be regretted that we cannot establish similar data for each canton and even for each commune, for the more we can narrow the geographical focus that clearly shows a predominant crop, the more the effect will relate to the cause. Be that as it may, the following table will be enough to shed light on the question under examination.

Table, page 320, G1, ed. 1855

CONSUMPTION PER INHABITANT 268

	I e1ST ARRONDISSEMENT.	II 2nd ARRONDISSEMENT.
Quantity	Price	Total	Quantity	Price	Total.
CEREALS	hect. lit.	fr. c.	fr. c.	hect. lit.	fr. c.	fr. c.
Wheat	0,55	15,20	8,36	0,97	14,90	14,15
Wheat & Rye	0,09	11,20	0,90	0,10	10,40	1,04
Rye	2,25	7,93	17,92	6,37	9,21	3,42
Corn, millet	1,70	7,12	12,10	2,62	9,13	23,82
TOTAL	4,60		39,28	4,06		42,73
MEAT	kil.			kil.
Beef	1,66	0,70	1,16	1,52	0,65	0,99
Veal	0,55	0,70	0,38 1/2	0,22	0,70	0,15
Mutton	1,67	0,60	1,00	0,48	0,63	0,31
Lamb	0,63	0,65	0,43	0,30	0,65	0,19 1/2
Pork	10,64	0,65	6,92	10,31	0,65	6,70
Goat	0,09	0,30	0,27	"	"	"
Totaux …	15,24		16,16 1/2	12,84		8,37 1/2
DRINK	hect. lit.			hect. lit.
Wine	2,19	7,83	17,29	0,67	8,86	6,90
Spirits	0,00	45,00	0,25	0,00	50,00	0,11
TOTAL	2,19		17,54	0,67		7,01

SUMMARY
fr. c. fr. c. Cereals 39,28 42,73 Meat 10,16 8,37 Drink 17,54 7,01 Total 66,98 48,11

What should be compared above all is the consumption in the first and second arrondissements, which draw at least a significant proportion of their incomes from different sources, since one pays three times as much for its pines as for its vines and the other three times as much for its vines as for its pines.

Well, we see that the annual consumption of each inhabitant in the first district exceeds that of each inhabitant in the second by 54 liters for cereals, 2 kilos 40 grams for meat, 152 liters for wine and 31 liters for spirits.

In money the difference is less marked because, for reasons that I cannot identify, the official document records rye, corn, and wine at prices that are much higher in Saint-Sever than in Mont-de-Marsan. But this difference is still 8 francs 87 centimes in favor of the inhabitants of Les Landes and this sum, multiplied by the figure for the population of the first arrondissement in 1836 establishes a higher level of consumption and consequently of income, more than 800,000 francs, in the case of the arrondissement that pays, on an official basis, 35,000 francs less in tax.

This inequality in the apportionment of tax is more apparent still in the statement below, which sets out the total value of consumption for the three arrondissements.

Table, page 322, G1, ed. 1855

		MONT-DE-MAR.		SAINT-SEVER.	DAX.
fr.	fr.	fr.
Wheat	784,189	1,499,908	848,371
Mixed wheat & rye	93,251	97,573	60,375
Rye	2,175,885	357,016	775,705
Corn and millet	1,183,030	1,991,262	2,746,440
Wine	1,602,970	536,782	1,059,416
Spirits	22,000	10,000	84,000
Potatoes	34,164	35,405	35,627
Dry vegetables	28,888	37,969	47,708
Meat	906,764	749,828	1,159,689
Total	6,831,141	4,815,732	6,817,331

It can be seen how wrong the Minister of the Interior was when, in order to dissuade the General Council from revising the current re-apportionment, he wrote on 14 October 1836 269 that significant changes in the production of wine and pines would probably not occur. The facts show a severe and profound inequality. Thus in cereals, meat, wine, and spirits, the value of consumption is as follows:

72 francs 56 centimes per inhabitant in the 1 st arrondissement

64 francs 71 centimes per inhabitant in the 3 rd arrondissement

54 francs 60 centimes per inhabitant in the 2 nd arrondissement

However, in the cantons of Saint-Sever, Mugron, and Aire, each inhabitant pays 3 francs 24 centimes on average in tax, while in the cantons of Labrit, Parentis, Sore, Mimizan, Sabres, and Pissos each inhabitant pays only 1 franc 86 centimes, with the result that for the first group of cantons the ratio of tax to consumption is 5.93 percent whereas it is only 2.56 percent for the second.

And we should not lose sight of the fact that in each of the three major districts of the department where the three types of crop whose influence we are interested in are accepted staples, their share of consumption is mixed. It is clear that in the first district, the average of 72 francs 56 centimes (expenditure per person) has been exceeded in Parentis, Sabres, Arjuzanx, Pissos , etc., and is less in Gabarret and Villeneuve. What we have said in this regard in respect to population can also be applied, for the same reasons, to consumption.

If we summarized all the preceding considerations, these are the results we would find:

The share of each of the three major crops in the department is:

279,724 francs for field crops

66,396 francs for vines

75,888 francs for pines.

Total: 422,008 francs

Which implies that each of these contributes to an income of 1,000 francs in a ratio of: 663 : 157 : 180

This is the ratio that should be corrected in accordance with the comments in the two sections of this article.

In the first, we have seen that the tax evaluations were falsified by the application of inaccurate average prices and a uniform rate of interest.

For cereals, a common price of 14 francs 28 centimes was adopted, whereas the market prices from 1828 to 1836 were merely 12 francs 52 centimes. The prejudice against field crops: 12 ½ percent.

For red wine, action was based on a supposed average price of 42 francs. If you will refer back to what we said on this subject you will agree that it is certainly not an exaggeration to evaluate the injustice done to wine at 10 percent.

For pine resins, the price was set at 2 francs 50 centimes per 50 kilograms. If it were raised to 3 francs 50 centimes it would still be below the true price. Pines have therefore been favored to the extent of 40 percent.

If we correct the income from the three crops according to these figures, they would be in the ratio of 582 : 141 : 252 (for every 1,000 francs of income).

On the other hand, if interest at 3 percent for field crops and vines and 4 percent for pines had prevailed over the uniform rate of 3 ½ percent, the incomes of the first two crops would have been evaluated at 16 2/3 percent less and that of the third at 16 2/3 percent more, and their taxable capacities would have been in the following ratio, 553 : 131 : 210.

The average of these two sets of figures is, 567 : 136 : 231

Consequently the tax burden of 422,008 francs would be allocated as follows:

For field crops 256,189 francs instead of 279,724

For vines 61,448 francs instead of 66,396

For pines101,371 francs instead of 75,888

Total: 422,008 (in both cases)

This should have been the apportionment at the outset, assuming that similar errors to those we pointed out for the average prices and rates of interest were not made for the quantities produced .

This is what it should still have been if no change in the productive value of the three types of crop had occurred.

But in the second section of this article, we have noted that the population, and therefore the income, has changed as follows:

Field crops have gained 16 percent

Vines have lost 19 percent

Pines have gained 71 percent

The ratios quoted above, 567 : 136 : 231, should therefore be modified in accordance with this new data and replaced by:

657 : 110 : 395.

From which it follows that finally, the tax burden of 422,008 francs ought to be allocated thus:

Field crops 238,603 francs instead of 279,724 francs

Vines 39,964 francs instead of 66,396

Pines143,441 francs instead of 75,888

In other words, the tax is too high:

For field crops by one sixth

For vines by more than one third

and the tax for pines is too low by nearly half

In conclusion, I cannot refrain from putting a few reflections that are not too divorced from the subject under discussion.

Terrible distress has spread over a considerable portion of our department, and this has affected the standard of living so profoundly that the very sources of life have been altered. We do not have statistics for all forms of consumption in our arrondissement, but we know that the population devotes only 54 francs to groceries instead of the 72 francs which are spent elsewhere. However, groceries are the last things that people think of cutting down on. And since, moreover, we do have a prosperous class that has not yet been reduced to depriving itself of bread and wine, it must be concluded that to the same extent as this class exceeds the average of 54 francs, there is a section of the working class that is far from attaining it.

This is the explanation for the decrease in population recorded by the censuses and by records of births and deaths.

This sad phenomenon is linked to a revolution in farming which is happening before our eyes and which has not been sufficiently noted. 270

The acreage of sharecropping farms used naturally to be in proportion to what was required to ensure that the tenant's share provided a livelihood for a farming family.

When, because of the fall in the value of products, this share became inadequate, sharecroppers became a liability for landowners, who were faced with the alternative of either leaving the estate unfarmed or reducing their share still further in order to subsidize the tenant's share.

As soon as this happened, sharecroppers' food was weighed, measured, and restricted to what was strictly necessary. What is more, there developed a distinct tendency to enlarge sharecropping farms. In one place they were merged; in another vines were dug up to increase the acreage of field crops. All these expedients had a common result and even a common aim: to reduce the number of people and restore the balance between the levels of population and food supplies.

If this contingency and the consequences it entailed were the result of some physical catastrophe, we would have to weep and wail and hang our heads. But this is not so. Providence has not taken its gifts from us, the sky over La Chalosse has not turned to bronze, and the sun and dew have not ceased to make it fertile. Why then can it no longer feed its inhabitants?

You do not have to look far to find the reason. It is that they have been stripped of the freedom to trade , the freedom which is most immediately useful to man after the freedom of working . 271

It is therefore legislation that is the cause of our woes. Manufacturers have told us, "You will buy only from us and at our prices". The Fisc 272 has said, "You will sell only after I have taken half of your produce."

Legislation is killing us in the most literal sense of the word, and if we want to live the legislation has to be reformed.

Now reform of the legislation can come only from the electorate. 273

But how does it carry out its mission?

Faced with the countless harms that are causing the depopulating of our fields and towns, what is it doing to curb the action of the Fisc and to return to the people the ability to trade the things they have sweated to produce with each other, according to their interests,?

What is it doing? It is handing over the mandate to legislate to our opponents; it is going to look for its representatives in the foundries, factories, and even in the antechambers of the Legislature.

From all sides this doctrine is heard: "Favours are there for the pillaging; people must be mad not to do what everyone else is doing."

Among the people saying things like this, there are those who are thinking only of themselves; I have nothing to say to them. However, others cannot be suspected of a level of selfishness like this; their wealth sets them above the connivances of petty ambition. One unanswerable reason, besides, proves their personal disinterestedness; if they were seeking their own personal advancement, it is not the electoral law but the post of deputy that they would be using as a stepping-stone, and they have been seen to refuse to stand.

It is therefore not to themselves but to their love of their locality that they are sacrificing the general interest. The general interest is not attainable, they say. The political machine has been put in motion to exhaust our unfortunate fellow-citizens; it is not in our power to halt its action. At least let us return to them in the form of political favours, some part of what it is extracting from them.

But, I ask you, these hand-outs and favors, however much you might have imagined them to have increased, have they come anywhere near the scale of the harm that I have just described? What does it matter to these farmers now being decimated by starvation, these artisans with no work, or these landowners whose most bitter scrimping scarcely manages to postpone ruin, what does it matter to these victims of the Fisc and the monopolists that a sub-prefectureship or a seat in the Luxembourg Palace 274 is going in payment to the most prominent voter in the district as the salary for his apostasy? Give them back the right to trade and you would have done more for your country than if you had restored it to the favor of the Duke of Nemours 275 in person, or that of the King himself!

You call yourselves Conservatives. You oppose the lowest social strata 276 having the right to vote. In that case, be the responsible guardians of these people who are banned from participating. You do not wish to rule fairly on their behalf, nor allow them to legally rule for themselves, nor even allow them to rise up in rebellion against the things that harm them. What then do you want? There is just one possible end to their sufferings and this end is foreseen well enough in the mortality tables.

Table, page 329, G1, ed. 1855; Table, page 330, G1, ed. 1855; Table, page 331, G1, ed. 1855; Table, page 332, G1, ed. 1855; Table, page 333, G1, ed. 1855

PINE GROWING REGIONS
COMMUNES.		CROPS		POPULATION.
Field Crops.		Pines	1804.		1841.
	hect.	hect.	pop.	pop.
Mimizan	278	1,322	479	852
Onesse	367	4,728	687	1,098
Lesperon	670	5,490	683	1,060
Ponteux	392	2,661	740	1,486
Mezos	666	4,345	809	1,286
Saint-Paul en B.	259	1,736	348	772
Comenzacq	321	1,595	522	663
Escource	468	4,396	673	1,180
Pissos	600	3,500	1,477	2,056
Parentis	550	4,500	1,181	1,788
Sainte-Eulalie	180	2,000	271	475
Ichoux	300	4,000	542	841
Gourbera	194	979	206	303
Labenne	291	1,215	392	526
Moliets	154	1,643	293	404
Messange	226	2,332	321	430
Magescq	847	4,113	923	1,606
Seignosse	210	2,089	334	458
Leon	620	2,750	931	1,402
Linx	750	4,050	650	1,074
Lit et Mix	920	3,800	970	1,483
Vieille-Saint-Girons	580	2,400	131	608
TOTAL	9,849	65,344	13,573	21,771
Ratio of crops : 7/8 pines, 1/8 field crops .
Change in population : Increase, 60 % .

PINE GROWING REGIONS
COMMUNES.		CROPS		POPULATION.
Field Crops		Pines	1804.		1841.
	hect.	hect.	hab.	hab.
Geloux	578	1,321	660	815
Aureilhan	116	388	217	305
Bias	74	281	107	169
Argelouse	160	1,000	329	396
Calen	320	2,000	533	660
Luxey	1,000	3,500	1,244	1,532
Sore	1,000	3,000	1,145	1,780
Sabres	1,042	2,750	1,679	2,524
Lue	314	2,103	503	790
Trenzacq	335	1,203	610	727
Belhade	200	1,200	384	518
Moussey	350	2,000	659	945
Sagnac	700	2,500	1,178	1,636
Bichet	150	1,500	206	330
Biscarosse	500	4,000	1,367	1,547
Gastes	70	800	211	259
Sanguinet	300	2,500	715	960
Saint-Yaguen	671	1,311	479	892
Rion	1,019	2,717	1,280	1,537
Laluque	596	1,227	560	698
Saint-Vincent de Tyrosse	385	466	558	754
Herm	558	2,578	783	851
Cap-Breton	182	793	586	968
Soustons	1,358	2,513	2,516	2,783
Azur	164	901	190	304
Saint-Geours	717	1,321	899	1,420
Tosse	316	752	493	698
Sorts	139	599	217	266
Castets	650	2,450	977	1,615
Levignac	420	1,950	723	959
Saint-Julien	760	3,000	884	1,123
Saint-Michel	410	2,100	162	217
Taller	480	1,500	332	527
TOTAL	16,034	60,879	23,416	31,405
Ratio of crops : 4/5 pines , 1/5 field crops .
Increase in population : Increase, 34 %

FIELD CROP REGIONS
COMMUNES.		POPULATION.
1804.		1841.
	hab.	hab.
Vielle-Soubiran	273	471
Grenade	1,368	1,500
Vignau	605	601
Gazères	1,026	948
Bordères	159	524
Losse	711	1,027
Estigarde	267	307
Lubbon	361	420
Cauna	695	674
Bas-Mauco	223	202
Benung	1,110	945
Duhort	1,067	1,129
Bahus	549	533
Latrille	257	307
Saint-Agnet	352	385
Lacajunte	301	339
Arboucave	306	394
Philondenx	503	604
Miramont	832	827
Samadet	1,370	1,456
Gouts	538	475
Pomarez	1,765	2,115
Saint-Martin-Juza	1,974	2,515
Saint-Larant	664	855
Biaudos	694	834
Orthevielle	698	869
Lannes	921	1,131
Saint-Martin	1,101	1,340
Onard	321	370
Lier	371	509
Vie	290	244
Saint-Cricq	825	1,119
Sainte-Colombe	729	791
TOTAL	23,228	26,960
Ratio of crops : all field crops .
Change in population : Increase, 16 % .

VINE GROWING REGIONS
COMMUNES.		CROPS		POPULATION.
Field Crops		Vi nes	1804.		1841.
	hect.	hect.	hab.	hab.
Bascons	409	290	1,067	1,033
Saint-Julien	278	192	398	446
Arthez	284	214	408	449
Fréche	726	349	894	929
Perquie	764	272	748	775
Audignon	408	98	617	578
Montgaillard	1,446	314	2,126	1,977
Larbey	202	116	383	508
Lahosse	276	107	583	613
Saint-Loubouer	883	232	1,321	1,267
Vielle	638	140	858	895
Urgons	504	62	695	703
Castelnau-Turs	472	99	505	590
Bastennes	200	100	512	482
Pouillon	1,520	506	3,060	3,163
Gibret	110	76	237	292
Poyartin	590	170	970	983
TOTAL	9,710	3,337	15,382	15,683
Ratio of crops : 2/3 field crops, 1/3 vines.
Increase in population : 2%.

13. T.18 "Two Articles on Postal Reform I" (3-6 Aug. 1844, Sentinelle des Pyrénées )↩

Source

T.18 (1844.08.03) "Postal Reform" (La Reforme postale), La Sentinelle des Pyrénées , 3 August, 1844, pp. 2-3; and 6 August, 1844, p. 2. Not in the OC. [JCPD] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

La Sentinelle des Pyrénées was a newspaper which appeared three times a week and was published in the town of Bayonne between 1831-1848. Bastiat was born in Bayonne in 1801 and had business interests there. He published 9 articles in the paper between March 1843 and August 1844, with his first ever published articles on free trade, "Free Trade. State of the Question in England" appearing in May and June 1843. 277 In these articles Bastiat addressed the issue of postal reform which was a pet interest of his. He wrote on it several times before the Revolution of 1848 and then took an active part in introducing radical reforms in the Chamber of Deputies during 1848 and 1849, such as trying to open the government monopoly to competition, introducing a low priced uniform prepaid stamp for the delivery of mail anywhere within France, and ending the government tax on letters.

The background for this, as was so often the case, were the reforms which the English liberals had introduced a few years previously. The free traders around Richard Cobden had other items on their reform agenda, such as reducing the cost of sending mail through the government monopoly postal service, the Royal Mail. Richard Cobden believed that the existing system was another example of protection given by the government to the elite which imposed an excessive cost on business and made it too expensive for most working people to afford to send letters to friends and family. The pioneer of postal reform in England was Rowland Hill (1795-1879) 278 who had close ties to Robert Torrens in the South Australian Colonization Commission between 1833 and 1839, and other political economists in the Political Economy Club. In 1837 he published an influential pamphlet on postal reform, Post Office Reform; its Importance and Practicability (1837) 279 which led to the passage of the "Uniform Four Penny Post" reform act in 1839 and then a further reform which cut the cost of a prepaid stamp to one penny in 1842. 280 In the reformed system, the cost of sending a letter was prepaid by the sender and was the same regardless of the distance carried. Up to then the price had depended on the distance carried and was paid by the recipient. Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League (founded by Cobden with John Bright in 1838) were able to take advantage of the cheap mail rates by distributing large numbers of their pamphlets and other propaganda before they were successful in 1846 in having the Corn laws repealed by the British Parliament.

Postal reform was also an issue of great interest to supporters of the free market in France in the 1840s because it was an expensive government monopoly, it was used as a major source of revenue, and because the government used its privileged position to spy on people's mail. Before the 1789 Revolution the postal service in France was a privilege sold to the private investors who ran the Farmers General who had little interest in making it affordable to ordinary people. This system of private monopolies was abolished in March 1791 when the postal service was nationalised and dozens of the Farmers General were guillotined. During the Restoration Charles X passed the law of 1827 which made the government system even more complex and burdensome by inducing a system of duties which was based on weight (9 categories) and distance (11 zones). In order to send a letter one had to go to the post office in order to determine the cost of sending each letter one wished to send according to these complex bureaucratic rules, something which Bastiat wittily mocked in "Salt, the Mail, and the Customs Service" (May 1846). 281 The year before the Revolution of February 1848 125 million letters were sent at an average cost of 43 centimes. 282 According to the Budget Papers of 1848 the French state raised fr. 51.5 million from various taxes, duties, and other charges for delivering letters, parcels, and money. The tax on letters alone raised fr. 46.5 million. 283

There were reformers within the French government who argued for change along the lines of the English. A. Piron, the Deputy Director of the Postal Service, published an important study in 1838 advocating the use of prepaid stamps 284 and the conservative magistrate and politician Michel-Charles Chégaray presented a detailed Report on Postal Reform to the Chamber of Deputies in July 1844 on the idea of a French version of the "uniform penny post" in which he advocated a flat rate of 20 centimes per letter. 285 The Chamber voted narrowly to adopt the reforms recommended in Chégaray's Report on the first reading of the bill (130 votes to 129) and asked for comments from the regional General Councils before making a final decision. As a member of Les Landes General Council, Bastiat published these two articles in the local journal the Sentinelle des Pyrénées in early August 1844 hoping to persuade them to lobby Paris to pass the reform bill. This was ultimately unsuccessful as the bill was defeated at the second reading.

These two articles show Bastiat's skilled use of economic data which he has taken from Chégaray's Report to make his arguments about the need to drastically cut the cost of sending letters. He makes the economic argument that the variable costs of transporting letters across large distances is small when compared to the fixed administrative costs of running the postal service, as well as the moral argument that the government should not be using the postal service to raise revenue by placing a tax burden on the often poor recipients of letters.

The issue of postal reform arose again two years later in April 1846 when another proposal was presented to the Chamber by Adolphe Vuitry 286 and Bastiat wrote another series of commentaries for the local press, this time in Le Mémorial bordelais (April, 1846). 287 Again he shows skill handling the economic data but this time his criticism of the government is more radical than before. He openly criticises the government for having "seized control" of the postal service in order to exercise a monopoly of delivery of letters and to use this monopoly as a means of raising revenue for the state. Bastiat argues that, if the delivery of letters was a public good like building and maintaining the roads and thus should be a government monopoly (a conclusion which he questions), then it should only charge enough to cover its costs and no more. He shows in some detail how this might be achieved and he believes that a uniform rate for letters regardless of distance carried is the most efficient way to pay for this service. Again, he urges a rate of 5c (or perhaps 10c if absolutely necessary). He believes that there should be no "fiscal component" (i.e. tax raising) embedded in the price of sending a letter. Fiscal measures should be paid by direct taxes and low tariffs (5%) and not by indirect taxes on food or the mail.

Bastiat's second more radical set of arguments in these articles from 1846 concerns the criminalisation of the acts of private individuals who carry letters for third parties, in other words, who compete against the state's monopoly. He uses very harsh language to denounce the severe penalties which the government planned to impose (a fine of 6,000 francs) on would-be competitors. He cites in particular the arbitrary powers granted to Post Office bureaucrats under Article 10 of the proposed legislation to decide independently of a court of law what offences may have been committed and how they were to be punished.

In addition to the four articles published in this volume Bastiat also dealt with postal matters in some of his other writings. In "Salt, the Mail, and the Customs Service" (May 1846) he mocks the complex system of deciding mail charges based upon geographic zones and weights (mentioned above) and he has one his favourite characters, Jacques Bonhomme, challenge M. de Vuitry who was the Deputy who was the chairman of the Chamber's Committee on Postal Reform, to let him take over the postal service and run it at a profit. Jacques Bonhomme offers to sub-contract out the government postal monopoly, rationalise the business, cut the postal rate to 5-10 centimes per letter, and still make a profit. 288 Bastiat's next article on postal reform appeared in January 1847 in an article "The Utopian" which appeared in the journal of the French Free Trade Association, Le Libre-Échange . In it a politician (the Utopian) is granted dictatorial powers by the King to introduce whatever liberal reforms he liked. Among the key reforms he proposes is postal reform which would see the cost of a letter cut to 10 centimes from the current average rate of 43 centimes per letter. 289

When the Revolution did break out in February 1848 postal reform was high on the list of legislation the government wanted to introduce. Étienne Arago, Bastiat's friend from college at Sorèze, was part of the Provisional Government in February 1848 and was appointed head of the Postal Service and began planning to reform the system. After the elections of April 1848 (in which Bastiat successfully ran to represent his départment of Les Landes) postal reform was discussed in August and during the debate Bastiat proposed an amendment which sought to introduce a nation-wide postal system based upon the British model with a 5 centime stamp for letters. Article 4 of his motion stated "All laws concerning the transport of letters by all other means are repealed" (i.e. laws preventing private competition were abolished). 290 However, it was not until 1849 that the uniform letter rate was reduced to 20 centimes per letter because of budgetary problems caused by the chaos of the Revolution. The cut in rates led to a significant increase in the number of letters sent, from 125 million letters in 1847 to 157 million in 1849 (a 25.6% increase) and to a reduction in tax revenue to fr. 42 million (a 20.7% decrease).

First Article (3 August, 1844)

The various General Councils are going to be asked to give their opinion on a uniform price on all letters, of twenty centimes . I think I ought to call the attention of these gatherings to M. Chégaray's report on this subject. The most misleading objection leveled against postal reform is that apparently it diverges from strict justice. The p ostal administration would be acting most inequitably, it has been said, if it placed exactly the same price on letters which it carries for distances which vary from a single kilometer to nine hundred kilometers. It is impossible after one has read the truly illuminating report of M. Chégaray, to let oneself dally for an instant over such an objection.

We know that each Post Office is the centre of eleven concentric circles at various distances from the center. The price of an ordinary letter grows by ten centimes each time it crosses one of these circles, with twenty centimes being the lowest charge, and the highest 1fr. 20c.

There are, however, three elements in the cost of a letter.

1. The transport costs.

2. The general administrative costs.

3. A tax.

Of these three elements, the first is the only one which is variable by its very nature. It costs the Post Office more to take a letter from Paris to Bayonne 291 than from Paris to Orléans.

The general administrative costs are the same for all letters. Those which stop at Orléans do not incur any more expenses by way of management, inspection, sorting, taxing, and distribution etc., than those which go on as far as Bayonne.

It is the same with the tax . No one seems likely to say that the principle of the equality of prices would be violated if all letters contributed equally to public revenue.

The law of 1827 292 took no account of these different destinations. The result of this is that the price it established is the most unequally shared of all those which are part of our financial system.

M. Chégaray has tried to establish, for a given letter, the figures which correspond to the three types of costs we have just listed.

He has found that the transport costs rise from 1.75c. to 6.75c. depending on the distance.

The general administrative costs are 8c. per letter.

The difference between the sum of these two expenses imposed by the administration, and the price it actually receives, leaves us with the tax paid by the recipient.

With this in mind, let us look at a table which sets out precisely the components of the present system.

Present System	General Costs	Transport Cost	Tax	Total
Zone	Distance	Rate
1	< 40 km	20c	8 c	1.75 c	10.25 c	20 c
2	40-80	30	8	2.25	19.75	30
3	80-150	40	8	2.75	29.25	40
4	150-220	50	8	3.25	38.75	50
5	220-300	60	8	3.75	48.25	60
6	300-400	70	8	4.25	57.75	70
7	400-500	80	8	4.75	67.25	80
8	500-600	90	8	5.25	76.75	90
9	600-750	100	8	5.75	86.25	1fr 00
10	750-900	11	8	6.25	95.75	1fr 10c
11	> 900	120	8	6.75	1 fr 5.25 c	1fr 20c

People who reject postal reform for reasons of equity, will probably be surprised to see the truly monstrous inequality revealed in the foregoing table.

While that part of the price – the sum of the General Costs and Transportation Costs – which is a fair return for the postal services provided, rises by 50% only, that is from 9.75c. to 14.75c., that element in the price which must be regarded as pure taxation, rises from 10.25c to 1fr. 5.25c. or in a ratio of 1 to 11.

Let us look now, at what the inequality would be, from the tax point of view, if there were a uniform rate of 20c.

Zone	Combined General & Transport Costs	Tax	Total
1	9.75 c	10.25 c	20 c
2	10.25	9.75	20
3	10.75	9.25	20
4	11.25	8.25	20
5	11.75	8.75	20
6	12.25	7.75	20
7	12.75	7.25	20
8	13.25	6.25	20
9	13.75	6.75	20
10	14.25	5.25	20
11	14.75	5.75	20

Here the inequality goes in the opposite direction. The letter which goes the furthest pays the least duty. This inequality is only notional , however, so minimal is it, since is divided into minute fractions of a sou . 293

Notice in fact, that to get to perfect equality, starting on a basis of 20c. for the shortest journey, letters need to be priced as follows:

Zone	Total
1	20 c
2	20.5
3	21
4	21.5
5	22
6	22.5
7	23
8	23.5
9	24
10	24.5
11	25

Am I not right to describe as notional an equality which could not be practiced without entailing the creation of half-centimes?

Postal reform can raise a lot of serious questions. I claim no more than to have examined one of them, that of equal pricing. I wanted to show people who are dubious about accepting the uniform rate, in the belief that it offends principles of equity, that they are completely mistaken. Any graduated rate would hurt more, for the very simple reason that in the transport costs there is only a sou of difference between a letter that goes the minimum distance and one that crosses the whole realm. Habit alone has produced the illusion I am seeking to destroy. Why don't people, out of love of equality, demand that newspapers be subject to variable pricing? Why is there no demand that tobacco and gun powder be sold at progressively dearer prices the more distant they are from their origin? Because we understand that the costs of transport count for so little in the prices of these things, that it is better to take no account of them than embarrass management with the minutiae of an overly complicated system of accounting. The same reason militates, and with greater force, in favor of a standard price on letters.

Second Article (6 August, 1844)

I have shown that postal reform is consistent with a uniform price , rather than its opposite, as many people appear to believe.

Having shaken off this attempt at ruling me out of court intellectually, I still have to examine the question in its own right, that is to say in its connection with general and fiscal interests.

As to the advantages to the public of a standard, moderate rate for letters, there is no doubt about the matter.

"It takes a lot of philosophizing", says Rousseau, "Before we notice what marvels the phenomena which our observations constantly fall on, contain". 294 This remark is applicable to the business of corresponding by means of letters. What spectacle is more astonishing than that of two human beings, separated by immense distances, by rivers, mountains, seas, communicating on days and at hours pre-arranged, their most secret projects, their most intimate feelings, without anyone along the route being in a position to violate the secrets of their hearts. Then, one comes to reflect that there is no one in the whole great human family who cannot correspond thus with another, that the number of possible links rises therefore to infinity, and that there are, even so, for each one of these links, men, horses, vehicles, ships always at the ready, so that these messages of the heart, whatever the point of departure and whatever the place of destination, can traverse the distances by the most direct way and with the greatest of speed. One is simply amazed at this power which civilization has attained. — The Fisc, however, does not hesitate to step in. It has a calculus for the power of the affections; it has measured, precisely what human sympathies entail; and it has no shame about asking, for the service it provides, a price which may be up to ten times what the service costs.

Consequently the ability to correspond is restricted. We no longer write about minor matters. We no longer write to share our good fortune or our joy. We wait until mischance or sorrow creates in us that irresistible outpouring of our hearts which material calculation cannot block. Misfortune to the poor; misfortune to the old man whose shaky arms can barely keep him alive; he must resign himself, every month, across the years perhaps, to not knowing if his daughter's heart is still beating!

Philanthropy does not prevent our recognizing that the particular part of the price of letters, which is fair payment of the service the Post Office has provided, must remain as a charge on the addressee. We have to recognize, however, that the other part of the price, which constitutes tax, pure and simple, must be uniform and, above all, modest. I say uniform, because, I ask you, is it just that the more one is separated from those one loves, the less one has the chance to see them, to be with them, then the more one has to pay – and I speak not of costs but of taxes – when one receives letters from them? I say, modest, because this tax is the hardest of all the things which tend to cramp our moral joys and inflict on our souls privation and sorrows.

This is not, however, how the Fisc reasons. If it is not wicked, it is egoistical. It will willingly accept a financial reform, but only on the condition that it will not cost it a single obole (cent) in revenue. Let us therefore look at the issue in fiscal terms.

We believe M. Chégaray is wrong when he says in his report that the postal reform adopted four years ago in England has neither fully justified nor contradicted the calculations of its authors. If these calculations have proved wrong this is by way of their succeeding beyond hope. It is true that general interests counted for a lot in the motives of the cabinet which introduced this great measure, one explored by M. Chégaray only in financial terms. Even in this connection, however, it is not right to say that it has not justified predictions, given that it has completely surpassed them. – Income has dropped they say, but wasn't this outcome expected? In reducing the price from 90c., which was the average price, to 10c., a price which in our country would scarcely be profitable, the Whig cabinet did not have in mind an unchanged postal revenue. It had banked on a more lively exchange of letters, a growth in business and wealth, which could improve the other sources of public revenue. A secondary hope had been that postal reform, by reducing costs and thereby encouraging the sending of letters, would in the long run result in revenue from the new arrangement coming to equal that of the former system of graduated and higher prices.

Was the cabinet mistaken in these forecasts? It had reckoned on its needing five years for the number of letters to double, and it has tripled in four . While in 1839, the Post Office had delivered 65 million letters, in 1843 it delivered 209 million. 295 Without the reform, this mail traffic would have cost the public 185 million francs in losses, while it has lost only 20 million. The Post Office has achieved, however, on all the services under its control, a net return of 15 millions, while the French Post Office has achieved a margin of receipts over expenditures of only 18 millions. So what the Fisc has lost in England is trivial, while what the public has gained is incalculable, above all in respect of the huge number of matters dealt with, alongside the mass of affectionate exchanges, for which no formal accounting is possible. Indeed never did reform so totally fulfill its purposes.

The plan which all minds seem to be collectively pursuing in France, is a uniform rate of 20 centimes per letter. Since the average level of the present price of sending a letter is 42.5c., the savings in duty paid by the recipient would therefore be a half, while in England it has worked out at eight ninths . So we should not expect either such a serious deficit in revenue to the Fisc, or so rapid a growth in the circulation of letters. The advantages and disadvantages of the reform will be moderate, just as the reform itself is. While in England the number of letters carried by the mail had to increase nine-fold, that is to say from 65 million to 585 million, it will be enough in France if the number of letters is doubled, that is raised from 80 to 171 million. When this has been achieved, the Fisc, on both sides of the Channel, will have recaptured all their prey 296 and the people will have gained by 17 million francs in France, and 468 million in England, which all goes to show that if the British reform has been accused of being too radical, this is because we are unfortunately in the habit of judging measures of this kind only from the fiscal point of view, thereby failing to take account of the interests of the public.

The "Paris" Writings I: Bastiat and the Free Trade Movement (Oct. 1844 - Feb. 1848)↩

[See the Reader's Guide to the Writings of Bastiat]

1. T.23 "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine. On the occasion of his article entitled: The Right to a Job" (Feb. 1845, JDE)↩

Source

T.23 (1845.01.15) "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine. On the occasion of his article entitled: The Right to a Job " (Un économiste à M. de Lamartine. A l'occasion de son écrit intitulé: Du Droit au travail ), JDE , February 1845, T. 10, no. 39, pp. 209-223. [OC1.9, pp. 406-28] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

The Economists sometimes didn't know what to make of Alphonse Lamartine (1790-1869), 297 the Romantic poet from the lower ranks of the French aristocracy who had burst onto the literary scene in 1820 with his collection of poems Méditations poétiques , who later turned into a reformist, liberal politician during the July Monarchy with his call for the separation of church and state, his support for freedom of the press, the expansion of the voting franchise, and the abolition of the death penalty and of slavery, and his opposition to the building of new fortifications around Paris in the early 1840s. 298 However, they also opposed his advocacy of state regulation of the railways, government regulation of workers' wages and working conditions, and his sometimes lukewarm support for free trade. Bastiat's younger friend and colleague, Gustave de Molinari, was typical of many of the Parisian economists in his enthusiasm for Lamartine's work and their hopes for his support in future political battles for liberal reforms. Molinari wrote his very first book, a"political biography" of Lamartine, shortly after arriving in Paris. 299

Lamartine could have been crucial to advancing the the economists's cause when the February Revolution broke out and Lamartine thrust his way forward to take charge of the new Provisional Government if it weren't for his toleration and perhaps open support for state funded welfare programs such as "the right to work" (or right to a job) which were anathema to the economists. His sympathy for the idea made it possible for Louis Blanc to set up the National Workshops in the Luxembourg Palace in the first week of the revolution, and to extend the program to the point where it nearly bankrupted the French state, forcing the Assembly to cancel it in June, thus leading to the June Days rioting in protest and the killing and arrest of thousands of people. Bastiat became one of the National Workshops' harshest and most persistent critiques throughout the first half of 1848 from his position as Vice-President of the Assembly's Finance Committee. The origins of this opposition by Bastiat lay in this essay which he wrote in January 1845 to combat an article Lamartine had written the month before.

In spite of the harsh things Bastiat had to say to Lamartine in this essay, they later became good friends, sometimes sharing the stage at the large public meetings organised by the French Free Trade Association during the campaign of 1846-47. 300 They had become close enough for Lamartine to indicate to Bastiat that he might offer him a job in the Provisional Government which came to power on 24 February 1848:

There followed what has been called with reason the rush for positions. Several of my friends were very influential, including M. de Lamartine, who had written to me a few days before, "If ever the storm carries me to power, you will help me to achieve the triumph of our ideas." 301

Bastiat turned it down, apparently finding the jockeying for power distasteful and believing he could be more influential in the Finance Committee of the Chamber. As he related to his friend Félix Coudroy "As for me, I will set foot in the town hall only as an interested spectator; I will gaze on the greasy pole but not climb it. Poor people! How much disillusionment is in store for them!" 302 What frustrated Bastiat was the fact that Lamartine could support free trade on one hand but also find sympathy for the socialist criticism of wage labour on the other. Part of the purpose of this letter was to point this contradiction out to Lamartine.

Lamartine by 1844 had come under the influence of socialist ideas which were being actively promoted in France. Beginning in the late 1830s socialists like Proudhon, 303 Victor Considerant, 304 and Louis Blanc, 305 had increased their criticism of key aspects of the free market such as the right to own private property, the legitimacy of charging interest and rent, making profits on economic activity, and the organisation of work by means of wage labour. The most influential works were by the Fourier socialist Victor Prosper Considerant (1808-93) with the Théorie du droit de propriété et du droit au travail (A Theory of the Right to Property and the Right to Work) (1839) 306 and the journalist and historian Louis Blanc (1811-82) in L'Organisation du travail (The Organisation of Labour) (1839), 307 both of which were reprinted many times throughout the 1840s and during the Revolution. They argued that wage labour exploited the workers by not paying them the full value of their labour and by making them redundant in hard economic times. To counter this, they argued that workers should be guaranteed their jobs by the state, which should also employ unemployed workers in economic down turns, and by creating new forms of labour organisation in which workers were not paid by wages set by employers at market rates but by sharing amongst all workers the fruits of their labours. The slogans which the socialists popularised were "le droit au travail" (the right to work, or the right to a job) and the "organisation of work" in worker controlled "social" or "national workshops."

Lamartine was a liberal in that he didn't believe the state should interfere in the "la liberté des transactions entre le capital et le salaire" (freedom of transactions between capital and labour) or in free trade, but he was an interventionist when it came to the state looking after the welfare of workers. He thought that "le plus essentiel et le plus beau de ses titres, le titre de Providence du peuple" (the most essential and most beautiful of (the state's) functions was that of the Providential (supporter) of the people) and that from time to time "doit agir avec sa tutelle active et bienfaisante en ce qui touche le travail et le salaire des masses" (it must use its active and charitable tutelage in matters which concern the labour and wages of the masses). He denounced the policy of laissez-faire very strongly as the "axiome brutal du système anglais, toutes les fois du moins que le laissez faire et laissez passer veut dire laissez souffrir et laissez mourir " (the brutal principle of the English system, (where) at all times it means nothing less than "let people suffer" and "let people die."). 308

The Economists, on the other hand, defended the idea of "le droit du travail" which is a distinction which turns on French grammar. They distinguished between two different types of "rights" and "liberties" which is clearer in the original French. They distinguished between "le droit de faire quelque chose" (the right to do something) and "le droit à quelque chose" (the right to have something). In the case of "travail" (work or labour) the socialists advocated "le droit au travail" (the right of a worker to a job, especially one guaranteed by the government) whereas the Economists advocated "le droit du travail" or "la liberté du travail" (the right or the freedom of working, or of anybody to engage in work of some kind). The key difference in French is between the use of a noun (le travail) and a verb (travailler). 309

The economists began to counter the socialists' critique in the mid-1840s with a series of works such as Michel Chevalier's long critique of Blanc in the Journal des Debats in August 1844 310 and then the large three volume work by Charles Dunoyer De la liberté du travail (March 1845). 311 What took them by surprise was Lamartine joining the socialists with his article in favour of "the right to work" which he published in his magazine Le Bien Public (The Public Good) in December 1844 on "The Right to Work and the Organisation of Labour" 312 just before the appearance of Dunoyer's book (completed in January 1845 and published probably in March).

Bastiat dons the "economists' hat" to formally reply to Lamartine on behalf of the Journal des Économistes , which is rather odd as he had only recently emerged from the obscurity of Les Landes and had published his first article in JDE only the previous October. 313 He had not yet gone to Paris to be welcomed by the Political Economy Society - that was to come in May 1845. Yet the task fell to Bastiat to take on Lamartine, which suggests how rapidly his star was rising among the ranks of the economists at this time. He provided a similar service in October 1846 with another letter to Lamartine, this time opposing his call for greater regulation of the grain trade during the shortages and high prices caused by the poor harvests in 1846-47. 314 Both of Lamartine's articles dismayed the economists, as is clear from Bastiat's comments in this article. It would not be going to far to say that they felt betrayed by someone they thought was their colleague and political ally in the struggle against both the Monarchy and the socialists. In fact, Bastiat in his second letter to Lamartine in October 1846 calls him "our favorite poet" but demotes him to the past tense as a result of his current views. Bastiat points out how liberal Lamartine was on other matters and how his support for the socialists on this issue contradicts his other positions on things like free trade and reducing the size of government by strictly limiting its power. He also points out that there are two distinct schools of political economy: the one supported by the economists in the Guillaumin network, the liberal or laissez-faire school which is based upon individual liberty and the natural laws which govern all economic activity. The other is the school of arbitrary or despotic government which is based upon coercion by the state and is supported by the socialists and other interventionists who believe that the natural laws of the economy can be ignored by those who wish to create new and "artificial" organisations within society to achieve their social goals. 315 Bastiat not only criticises Lamartine's views because he thinks they are wrong, but also because he thinks he has used his great moral authority as a poet and political reformer to mislead the younger generation who hang on his every word, perhaps as he himself had done when he first read Lamartine's poetry in the 1820s:

Another criticism of the socialists which was taken up by Lamartine was their accusation that the economists were "heartless" Malthusians in their contempt for the suffering of the poor. Bastiat himself had began as a strict Malthusian, 317 like the other economists, and we see his first forays in exploring the economic impact of population growth on the well-being of ordinary people in a memorandum he wrote while serving on the General Council of Les Landes on the shifting burden of the land tax on different economic groups earlier that year, 318 and then again in 1846 with another memorandum "On the Bordeaux to Bayonne Railway Line" (May, 1846) 319 and two articles in the JDE on "Thoughts on Share Cropping" (Feb., 1846) and "On Population" (Oct. 1846). 320 The criticisms of the socialists made Bastiat think more deeply about this problem during 1844-46 as these writings show, so that by the time the chapter on population appeared in the posthumous edition of Economic Harmonies (1851) he had radically rethought the problem of population growth. 321 His conclusion was that Malthus and the Malthusians had made several mistakes: they badly underestimated the productive power of a deregulated market economy and international free trade to supply the food needed by ordinary people at prices they could afford, or what he called, borrowing a phrase from Lamartine in fact, "la vie à bon marché" (life at affordable or low prices); they also underestimated the ability of ordinary people, as rational actors, to plan the timing and the size of their families; 322 they did not understand that the higher density of population made possible by urban living lowered the costs of making profitable trades with others and deepened the division of labour which increased productivity; and finally, he had an early notion of human capital which meant that individuals should be be seen as valuable resources in their own right who were able to provide "services" to others and not as a net drain on the economy. Thus this article is an indicator of his changing thoughts on this important topic.

It is also worth noting that in the course of his critique of Lamartine Bastiat refers to several theoretical issues, many for the first time in his writing, which were to become very important to him later on. This suggest that he had been thinking about them for some time and this letter was his first opportunity to bring his scattered thoughts into a more coherent whole. Or perhaps, it might even have been a way to show off, as it were, in front of an audience of other economists his deep knowledge of and innovative thinking about economic theory. These key concepts include the following:

society as a mechanism "(un mécanique sociale) with its own internal "driving force" (moteur) which did not require an external "mechanic" to make it operate effectively and justly. Here is his first use of the expression which is discussed in more detail in "Natural and Artificial Organisatons" (Jan. 1848). 323
the distinction between "la charité volontaire" (voluntary charity) and "la charité légale ou forcée" (coerced or government charity).
a couple of very early uses of the idea of harmony, namely "l'harmonie du monde social" (the harmony of the social world) and the idea that a voluntary activity like charity is an "élément harmonique dans le jeu des lois sociales" (harmonious element in the interplay of social laws). According to Bastiat, a providentially guided "harmony" of interests existed in society in the absence of coercion which meant that there is no inherent reason why the diverse needs and interests of individuals, whether consumers or producers, should be in conflict with each if they have their property rights and liberty respected under the rule of law, and if they are free to trade voluntarily with one another (or not as the case may be). 324
his first pairing of the concepts of "l'harmonie" (harmony) and its opposite "dissonance" (disharmony).
related to this, is his first use of the idea of "les forces perturbatrices" (disturbing forces) which upset the harmony of the free market. He includes among them war, government regulations, privileges, subsidies, and tariffs. This idea would become very important in his treatise Economic Harmonies to which he planned to devote a chapter but which was never completed. 325
his first use of the idea of the self-correcting mechanisms of the free market, or what he called "les forces réparatrices" (repairing or restorative forces) whereby the market attempts to restore equilibrium after it has been upset by "les forces perturbatrices" (disturbing forces).
the first use of the term "organisation artificielle" (artificial organisation) which would become important in his later critique of socialism and would have, along with its opposite "Natural Organisation", a chapter devoted to it at the beginning of Economic Harmonies.
an early use of the idea of the indefinite "perfectibility of man."
the idea of labour and capital being "déplacé" (displaced or distorted) by government interventions in the economy thus causing harm until a new equilibrium can be established.

What is missing from this impressive list is his notion of exchange being the mutual exchange of "service pour service" (one service for another service). 326 He did however discuss it briefly in another piece written at the same time as this one, his unpublished review of Charles Dunoyer's book De la Liberté du travail (On the Freedom of Working) (March, 1845). 327 Thus we can conclude that most of Bastiat's key ideas were floating around in his head by early 1845 before he went to Paris to engage more fully with the main group of political economists.

Bastiat concludes with a very impassioned plea to Lamartine to model himself on Richard Cobden who in 1845 was in the final year of his campaign to repeal the protectionist Corn Laws in Britain (the first bill was passed by the House in January 1846 and came into effect in June that year). Bastiat thought the free trade movement in France would be unbeatable if it could harness Lamartine's great rhetorical skills to the wagon of free trade instead of giving his weight and moral authority to the champions of "a regulated society and big government." He explored these ideas about the strategies needed by a French free trade movement and the role to be played by charismatic speakers to mobilise public opinion at greater length in the introduction he wrote to his first published book, Cobden and the League , which appeared a few months after he wrote this essay on Lamartine. 328 It would turn out that the French free trade movement never could find "its Richard Cobden" although both Bastiat himself and Lamartine were regular speakers at the large public meetings organised by the Association during 1846 and 1847. 329

Text: Letter to Lamartine

Mugron, Les Landes.

January 1845.

SIR,

After having made you the target of criticism on all sides, the prodigious talent with which nature has endowed you, a talent that enhances a reputation without blemish, has now marked you out as the hope of all the various schools of thought. Your half-concealed opinions left each school hoping to enlist you to its cause. Catholicism, neo-Christianity, the supporters of Liberty, and even the modern oddities that go under the names of Saint-Simonism, 330 Fourierism 331 or Communism counted on you and placed their hopes in you. There is that system which can be summarized by the words coerced concentration /bringing together , the other one is expressed by the words, free competition; there is that theory which seeks to impose an artificial organization on production, on human capacities and on capital, and the other theory that sees no better organization of society's powers than the one to which they naturally gravitate : in a word, every school wishes to have you as an aid and would accept you as its leader.

For there is none of these for which you would not have been the most powerful spokesman. What does an idea that carries within itself the element of triumph that is truth, need? To be known, understood and popularized, and for this, it needs striking forms of speech and brilliant formulae whose novel clarity will revive in every heart the innate feeling for what is true and just that a magnanimous Providence has planted there. This is why those who toil, men of vigilance and learning, would entrust to your word the work of years and centuries, scientific investigations or the corrections born of experiment, in a word, the entire intellectual corpus of their schools so that you might broadcast it to the world. By that happy combination of strength of thought and vividness of image, of which you alone have the secret, by the unparalleled gift granted solely to you, the ability to infuse logic with poetry and poetry with logic, you would have made truth shine out in the scholar's study and the artist's studio and, in drawing rooms and boudoirs, in palaces and thatched cottages. You would have carved a pathway for truth to university chairs and the political rostrum alike.

How many times have I too, Sir, turned my gaze toward you because of my sincere intellectual conviction and the unshakeable faith in my heart! How many times have I not examined the words that fell from your lips or the articles that flowed from your pen to see whether they did not at last unveil the secret of your views or unlock your shadowy and mysterious symbolism! For since I understood or at least sincerely considered that I understood the workings of social life, I said to myself, "This light is of no use as long as it is under a bushel, and it will be revealed only by the powerful voice of a man who is capable of blending the dialectic of the metaphysician, the experience of the Statesman, the eloquence of the tribune, the ardent charity of the Christian, and the delightful accents of the poet."

You have at last given your views. But alas! The expectations of the schools of economics have been dashed. You acknowledge only two of them and you declare that you belong to neither. Such is the rock on which genius founders. It disdains the well-trodden paths and the treasure of knowledge gathered over centuries. It seeks its treasure within itself and wishes to carve out its own path. 332

As you say, there are two schools of political economy. Allow me to describe them so that an assessment may be made of the bitter criticism that, through an inexplicable contradiction, you direct at the one whose principles you ultimately accept and the fulsome praise you give, through a no less inexplicable contradiction, to the one whose vain and subversive theories you reject.

The first of these schools proceeds in a scientific manner. It notes, examines, groups, and classifies the facts and phenomena, it seeks to find their relationships of cause and effect and, from all its observations it deduces the general and providential laws according to which men prosper or perish. It considers that the action of science, qua science, on the human race is limited to setting out and making known these laws , so that each person may know the reward attached to his compliance in their regard and the punishments that follow their violation. 333 It refers back to the human heart for the rest, in the full knowledge that it persistently aspires to the reward and inevitably avoids the punishments, and since this twin motivation, a desire for good things and a horror of bad ones, is the most powerful force for bringing people under the sway of social laws, this school rejects as a curse the intervention of arbitrary forces that tend to alter the just and natural distribution of pleasure and pain. This gives rise to the famous principle " Laissez faire, laissez passer ", 334 against which you show such indignation, and which is just a wretched circumlocution for the word freedom which you have inscribed on your banner as constituting the very principle of your doctrine.

The other school, or rather the other method, which has given rise to and will continue to give rise to countless sects, proceeds through imagination . In its eyes, society is not a subject for observation but matter on which experiments may be carried out. It is not a living body whose organs have to be examined but inert matter that legislators subject to artificial arrangement. This school does not assume that the social body is governed by providential laws; it asserts that it can impose on society laws of its own invention. Plato's Republic , Thomas More's Utopia , 335 Harrington's Oceana , 336 Fénélon's Salente 337 , the protectionist régime, Saint-Simonism, Fourierism, Owenism 338 and a thousand other strange concoctions 339 that have on occasion been set up to the great misfortune of the human race and almost always in dreamlike fashion, served up as if to frightened children: these are just a few of the countless manifestations of this school.

The analytical method should ineluctably lead to unity of doctrine, for there is no reason for the same facts not to appear in the same light to all observers. This is why, except for a few slight differences that revised observations are constantly causing to disappear, it has rallied to an identical faith such men as Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, Jefferson, Bentham, Senior, Cobden, Thompson, Huskisson, Peel, Desttut de Tracy, Say, Comte, Dunoyer, Droz 340 and a host of other illustrious men whose lives were spent not in constructing in their heads an imaginary society populated with imaginary people of their own invention, 341 but in studying men and things and the way they interact in order to recognize and formulate the laws to which God was pleased to subject society.

The method of fanciful invention was bound to lead to intellectual anarchy, because you can bet an infinite number to one that an infinite number of dreamers would not have the same dream. Thus we see that, in order to be at ease in their imaginary world, one has banished property, another inheritance, this one here the family and that one there freedom. Here we find some who take no account of the laws governing population, and there others who set aside the principle of human solidarity, for it was necessary to conjure up chimerical beings in order to achieve a chimerical society.

Thus, the first observes the natural order of things and its conclusion is freedom . 342 The second creates an artificial form of society and its point of departure is coercion . For this reason and for reasons of brevity, I will call the first the economist or liberal school and the other the arbitrary or despotic government school .

Let us see now what judgment you bring to bear on these two doctrines: 343

In political economy there are two schools, an English and materialistic school (this is the liberal school that you are describing in these lines) that treats people as inert quantities, that speaks in figures for fear that an emotion or a thought might slip into its theorizing, that reduces industrial society to a type of stony-faced arithmetic, a heartless mechanism in which humanity is just a silent partner and in which workers are just cogs to be worn down and dispensed with at the lowest price possible, in which everything ends up as a profit or loss at the bottom of a column of figures, with no consideration of the fact that these quantities are men, that these cogs are minds, and these figures have lives, morality, sweat, bodies, and souls, and make up millions of beings like us who have been created by God with the same destiny. This is the school that reigns in France since the import of English economic science. This is the one that has been written and spouted and has governed up to now, with a few major exceptions. This is the one which has forbidden alms and criminalised begging without providing for beggars, criticized the hospitals, condemned the hospices, made fun of charities, made an outlaw of poverty, cursed over-population, forbidden marriages, advised childlessness, shut the centers for abandoned children and which, subjecting everything mercilessly and heartlessly to competition, that very providence of selfishness, has said to the proletariat: 'Get to work.' 'But we cannot find work.' 'Well, then, die! If you cannot earn anything, you have no right to live; society is a well-organized business. …

There is another school that has arisen in France in the last few years from the sufferings of the proletariat, the selfishness of manufacturers, the hard-heartedness of capitalists, the upheaval of the present times, the memories of the Convention 344 , the fellow-feeling of philanthropy, and the anticipated dreams of an age of perfect idealism. This is the one that, prophesying the coming of the industrial Christ to the masses (Fourier), calls them to the religion of association, that substitutes the principle of association through work for all the other principles, instincts and sentiments that God has kneaded into human nature, that believes that it has found the means of organizing labor without turning upside down the free relationships between producers and consumers, of assaulting capital without eliminating it, of regulating wages and distributing them at will with the infallibility and infinite justice of God. This school, which counts among its masters and followers so many men of enlightenment and faith, carries two major treasures within it: a governing principle, association, and a virtue, the charitableness of the masses. However, it seems to push its principles to excess and to fantasize its virtue. Fourierism has thus far been the sublime exaggeration of hope. We do not belong to either of these schools. We believe them both to be in error. One lacks soul and the other lacks only moderation in its passion for good. The difference we see between them is the difference between cruelty and illusion, and to solve the problem of wages we take from one the light of calculation and the other the warmth of charity.

I will not stop to point out the vague and erroneous expressions and the bold assertions that pepper this passage in which it appears that your pen mastered you more than you mastered your pen. Where have you witnessed economists treating people like inert objects , when in truth they see the harmony of the social world precisely in the freedom of their action? 345 Where have you witnessed the predominance of this school in France when it does not have a single voice, at least one that is acknowledged, in the government or Parliament? What is this disdain for figures, calculations, or arithmetic as if the figures are used for anything other than to record results and as if good and harm can be assessed in any other way than through the results which are observed? What scientific value is it possible to find in your indignation against the hard-heartedness of capitalists, the selfishness of manufacturers as such, as though industrial services and capital, any more than wages, could escape the laws of supply and demand that govern them in order to subject themselves to the laws of sentiment and philanthropy?

However, I feel the need to protest with all my strength against the odious insinuations you rain on the heads of all these illustrious scholars, whose venerable names I listed above. No, posterity will not ratify your judgment. It will not agree with you that the abyss that separates cruelty and simple illusion , also divides Smith and Fourier as well as Say and Enfantin. 346 It will not agree that Fourier's only mistake was to push " a great principle to excess and to fantasize virtue ." It will not see in the promiscuity of the sexes a sublime exaggeration of hope . It will not believe that social science owes Fourierism the following three great innovations in belief : "a belief in the infinite progress of the human race, in the principle of association, and in the charitableness of the masses", because the perfectibility of man, a consequence of the principles regulating his intelligence, was recognized a long time before Fourier, because association is as ancient as the family, and because the charitableness of the masses, however you want to consider it, whether from the theoretical or practical point of view, in the case either of individuals or society, has been formally promulgated by Christianity and implemented everywhere, at least to some extent. But posterity will be astonished that you assign such an elevated place and shower so much fulsome praise on a school that at the same time you sully with these eloquent words: it is a monastery in which "a mother is merely a pregnant woman, a father a beggetter of children, and the child a product of the two sexes." 347

But what are you blaming economists for? Could it be for the sometimes arid forms with which they have clad their ideas? This is literary criticism. In this case you would have to acknowledge the services they have rendered to economic science and limit yourself to accusing them of being cold writers. 348 In this regard as well it might be answered that while the severe and accurate language of science has the disadvantage of not hastening its propagation enough, the warm and image-laden language of poets, when transported into the didactic field, has the much greater disadvantage of often misleading the reader after having misled the writer. It is not the form that you are attacking, however, it is the thought and even the intention.

As for the thought, how can it be accused? It may well be erroneous; it cannot be criticized since it can be summed up thus: " There is more harmony in the divine laws than in any human arrangements . " You are free to say like Alphonse 349 that "These laws would be better if I had been called upon to take part in God's counsels." But no, you do not use such impious language. You leave such blasphemy to Utopians. For your part, you take hold of the very doctrine with which you endeavor to sully its exponents and in your entire article, except for a few exceptional views that I will discuss shortly, the great principle of freedom dominates, which implies that you recognize the harmony of divine laws, since it would be puerile to espouse freedom not because it is the true condition for social order and happiness but through a platonic love of freedom itself, setting aside the results which by its very nature it produces.

As for the intention, what perversity can we detect in the deliberate intention of those who choose simply to say:

"The equilibrium of social forces is established spontaneously; do not touch it!"

To reach your conclusion as to the actual intentions of economists, one would have to prove three things:

That the free play of social and providential forces is disastrous for the human race;

That it is possible to paralyze their action by substituting arbitrary forces for them;

That economists reject the latter, fully aware of their alleged superiority to the former.

In the absence of these three proofs, your attacks, if you intended them to include the intentions of the writers of whom I have been speaking, would neither be justified nor justifiable.

But I will never believe that you, whose honor and uprightness are beyond question, would wish to incriminate even the morality of illustrious scholars whose careers preceded yours, who have bequeathed you their doctrines, and whom the human race has absolved in advance through the veneration and respect with which it clothes their memory.

Besides, are there, in what you are pleased to call the English School, as though a science that limits itself to describing the facts and their sequence can be from one country rather than another, as though there could be Russian geometry, Dutch mechanics, Spanish anatomy, and French or English economics, are there, I ask, men in this school who, like the trade prohibitionists , have proclaimed their doctrines in order to mislead people's minds and take advantage of the common error so deliberately and knowingly disseminated? 350 No, you do not quote a single one. It is arguable that no philosophical sect has shown such dignity, moderation, and devotion to the public good and if you think about it you would understand that that is how it must be.

In the 18th century, when astronomy had not yet reached the stage it has now, a a kind of aberration in the movements of the planets was noted. It was noted that some moved closer to each other while others moved away from the center of movement, and the hasty conclusion was reached that the latter were steadily moving into the glacial depths of space while the former were going to be engulfed in the incandescent matter of the sun. Laplace 351 came along and subjected the alleged aberrations to calculation; he demonstrated that when the planets left their orbit, the force pulling them back increased because of this very distancing: "Through the total power of a mathematical formula," said Mr. Arago, 352 "the foundations of the physical world have been strengthened." 353 Do you think that the person who discovered and measured this beautiful harmony would willingly have agreed to misrepresent these admirable laws of gravity for personal interest?

Political economy also has its Laplaces. They have observed that, when social disturbances appear, there also exist providential forces that bring everything back into equilibrium. They have discovered that these restorative forces are proportional to the disturbing forces because the one gives rise to the other. In delighted admiration for this harmony in the moral world, they have conceived a passion for the divine work and they, more than other people, reject everything that might disrupt it. For this reason, as far as I know, there has never been an instance when the attraction of private interest has come to rival in their hearts this eternal object of their admiration and love. This surprised Bonaparte. He was little accustomed to resistance of this nature and honored them with the title Naive Fools because they refused to support his mission to rule in an arbitrary manner, considering it incompatible with the great social laws that they had discovered and proclaimed. 354 They bear this glorious title to this day and none of them can be seen to be active in government affairs because they would only do so if they were able to act according to their own principles.

I am sorry to have to say this frankly, Sir, but I believe that you have done a disastrous thing and one likely to misdirect the first steps of a young generation full of confidence in the authority of your words, when, dispensing criticism and praise indiscriminately, you violently attacked the most conscientious and in a practical sense Christian school, that has ever come onto the scene of the moral sciences, reserving your enthusiasm, sympathy and, pardon me for saying this, your "flirtatious" remarks for the other schools which are not, in your own words, anything other than a negation of freedom, order, property, family, love, domestic affections, and all the sentiments ingrained by God in human nature .

And what makes this unjust evaluation of men totally inexplicable is that, as I have said, you adopt the principles of the economists, free trade, and free competition, this godsend of selfishness .

There is no other way of organizing work, you say, "than freedom for it. There is no other way of distributing wages than through work itself being rewarded for what it does and achieving its own justice, something which your arbitrary systems will not allow. Free will with respect to work for the producer, for the consumer, for wages and workers, is as sacred as free will with respect to conscience in man. When you touch freedom of labor, you kill progress; when you touch freedom of conscience you kill morality. The best governments are those that do not touch them. 355

And elsewhere: "We know of no other possible organization of labour in a free country than the freedom that earns its own reward through competition , ability and morality." 356

It is not enough to say that these words are in line with the ideas of the economists; they embrace and summarize their entire doctrine. They imply that you have full knowledge and clarity of perspective on this great law of competition, 357 which carries within itself the general remedy for the inevitable harm that it may produce in particular cases.

And yet how can we believe that your view embraces all the facts and social forces that result from the principle of freedom when we see you rejecting the key notion of the responsibility of intelligent and free agents? 358

For when you speak of the two major schools, the one of freedom and the other of coercion , you say, "I am borrowing from one the enlightenment of its calculations and from the other the warmth of its charity." To speak accurately, you ought to say: "I am borrowing from one the principle of freedom and from the other that of irresponsibility ."

In fact, the result of the passages I have just quoted is that you have taken from the economists not just calculations but a guiding principle, namely, " Freedom is the best social organization ."

But this is on one condition alone, that the law of responsibility produces its full, total, and natural effect. If human law intervenes and distorts the consequences of actions so that they do not affect those for whom they were intended, not only is freedom no longer a good organization, but it also does not exist.

It is therefore a grave contradiction to say that you are borrowing freedom here and coercion there in order to fashion a monstrous or rather an impossible blend.

I will make myself better understood by going into some detail.

You criticise the liberal school for being cruel and right away you borrow from the arbitrary or despotic school "the warmth of its charity." That is the general approach, and here is its application.

You accuse the economists of forbidding marriage and counseling childlessness and opposing this, you want the State to adopt orphaned children or those who are too numerous .

You accuse the economists of forbidding and making fun of alms and opposing this, you want the State to intervene to help the masses in their poverty.

You accuse the economists of saying to the proletariat, " Work or die " and on the other hand you want society to proclaim the right to a job and the right to a living .

Let us examine these three antitheses, whose number I could have increased; this will be enough to determine whether it is possible to gather doctrines from opposing schools and achieve a sold alliance between them in this way.

I have no wish to burden the terrain of principles on which I am determined to stand with detailed discussion. However, I will make one preliminary remark. It was said a long time ago that the surest but certainly the least fair way of combating one's opponent is to attribute to him outrageous sentiments, false ideas, and words he has never said. I believe you are incapable of intentionally having recourse to such trick but, either because the words used have led to this effect or because of the demands of brevity, it is certain that you attribute to the economists words that were never theirs.

Never have they advised infertility 359 or forbidden marriage ; this criticism could have been more aptly made, and you in fact do make it, to Fourierism . While the economists have not condemned but rather merely deplored over -population, this very word " over " that you use justifies them.

What they have said on this serious subject is:

Man is a free being, who is responsible and intelligent. Since he is free, he uses his will to direct his actions; because he is responsible, he receives the reward or punishment for his actions, depending on whether they conform or not to the laws governing his being. Because he is intelligent his will, and consequently his actions, are constantly progressing, either in the light of his foresight or through the inevitable lessons of experience. It is a fact that people, like all living beings, are able to increase their numbers beyond their current means of subsistence. It is another fact that when the equilibrium is broken between the numbers of people and the resources that sustain life, there is malaise and suffering in society. Therefore, there is no alternative; plans have to be made to maintain the equilibrium or people have to suffer in order for it to be re-established. We conclude that it is desirable for the population as a whole not to grow too fast, and in order to do this that the individuals that make it up should not enter into marriage until they have the likelihood of being able to maintain a family. And as people are free, and as we do not recognize coercive or restrictive legislation in this regard, we call upon their reason, their feelings, and their common sense. The words we make them listen to are not in the slightest utopian or abstract. We tell them, with the wisdom of centuries and sense so common that is practically instinctive, that rashly or prematurely taking on a family that one does not yet have the means to bring up would be to bring unhappy people into the world and to make oneself unhappy. We add: If these individual rash actions become too widespread, society has more children than it can feed and it suffers , for the human race is not subject only to the law of responsibility , but also to that of solidarity , and this is the reason why economists are anxious to set out all the fateful consequences of a reckless increase in the human population, so that public opinion can bring its all-powerful action to bear on it, for they sincerely believe that in the face of this terrible phenomenon society faces nothing other than the alternative of foresight or suffering.

But you, Sir, you provide it with an expedient. You do not think that it has to plan ahead in order not to suffer and you do not want it to suffer for not having thought ahead. You say, " Let the State adopt children that are too numerous ."

This is certainly what will soon be decreed. But with what, if you please, will it bring them up? Doubtless with food, clothes, and products taken from the mass of the people in the form of taxes, for, as far as I know, the State has no resources of its own, none that is that do not stem from national production. 360 Thus the great rule of responsibility will be eluded. Those who, following their personal views perhaps, but in perfect accord with the public interest, in accordance with the rules of prudence, honesty, and reason, have refrained from, or postponed the moment of surrounding themselves with, a family, will be coerced into feeding the children of those who have given in to their brute instincts. But will the harm at least be cured? On the contrary, it will constantly get worse, for at the same time that no reliance can be placed on foresight, which will no longer have a rational dimension, the suffering itself, which continues to have an effect, will no longer act as a punishment, a brake, a lesson, or a stabilizing force. It will lose its attachment to morality, the latter now having nothing left that will explain or justify it. This is when people, without blaspheming, will be able to say to the author of all things: "What is the point of evil on earth, since it has no final purpose?"

The same remarks can be made about charity. First of all, economic science has never forbidden nor made fun of alms. Science does not make fun of or forbid anything; it observes, deduces, and demonstrates.

Next, political economy distinguishes between voluntary charity and state or compulsory charity. The first, for the very reason that it is voluntary , relates to the principles of freedom and is included as an element of harmony 361 in the interplay of social laws; the other, because it is compulsory , belongs to the schools of thought that have adopted the doctrine of coercion and inflict inevitable harm on the social body. Poverty is deserved or undeserved, and only free and spontaneous charity can make this essential distinction. If poverty receives help, even in the case of a degraded soul who has caused his own downfall, that help will be distributed parsimoniously in exactly the measure required, so that the punishment is not too severe, and yet the help does not encourage abject and contemptible sentiments that in the general interest ought not to be encouraged by inappropriate kindnesses. For unmerited and hidden misfortune, charity reserves liberal gifts and the discretion, the shelter, and the consideration to which misfortune is entitled in the name of human dignity.

However, state charity that is coerced, organized, and decreed as a debt on the part of the donor and a positive credit on the part of the receiver, does not nor can it make a distinction like this. Allow me to invoke the authority of a writer too little known and too little consulted on these matters:

Charles Comte states that:

There are several types of vice, whose principal effect is to produce poverty for the person who has adopted them. An institution whose object is to shelter people of every kind from poverty, without distinguishing the causes that have produced it, thereby encourages all the vices that lead to poverty. The courts cannot fine those people guilty of laziness, intemperance, improvidence or other vices of this sort, but nature, which has ordained rules of work, temperance, moderation and careful management for the human race, has taken it upon itself to inflict on the guilty the punishments they deserve . To reduce these punishments to nothing by giving the right to be given help to those who deserve such punishment is to leave in place all the attractions of vice. What is more, it is to allow the harm such vice produces to affect those to whom vice is alien, as well as weakening or destroying the only punishments able to repress it. 362

In this way, governmental charity, aside from the fact that it violates the principles of freedom and property, once again overturns the laws of responsibility, and by establishing a sort of community of entitlements 363 between the prosperous and poor classes it removes from prosperity the character of reward and from poverty the character of punishment stamped on them by the nature of things.

You want the State to intervene to help the masses in their poverty. But with what? With capital. And where will it obtain this? From taxes; it will have a budget for the poor . Therefore, by withdrawing this capital from general circulation, it would merely give back to the masses in the form of alms what they would have received in the form of wages!

Finally, you proclaim the right of the proletariat to a job, to a wage, and to food. And who has ever contested to anyone the right to work and consequently to a fair level of remuneration? Can this right ever be denied in a free society? However, by confronting us with what is a terrible hypothetical case, you are saying, "What if society has insufficient work for all its members, and what if its capital is not enough to give an occupation to all?" In truth, does not this extreme supposition imply that the population has exceeded its means of subsistence? In this case, I can clearly see the procedures that freedom tends to use to re-establish equilibrium; I see earnings and profits decrease, that is to say, I see each person's share of the community's wealth decrease; I see the inducements to marriage weaken, births diminish, and perhaps mortality increase until the proper level has been re-established. I see that these are harms and sufferings, and I both see and deplore them. 364 But what I do not see is that society can avoid these harms by proclaiming a right to work [i.e. to a job] , by decreeing that the State will take from an inadequate capital stock the means of providing employment for those who lack it, for I consider this filling one glass by emptying another. It is to act like that simple man who, wishing to fill a cask, drew from underneath what he put in from above or like a doctor who, to give strength to a sick man, injected into his right arm the blood he had taken from the left.

In my view, in the extreme theoretical case in which we are obliged to reason, such expedients are not only ineffective, but essentially harmful. Not only does the State move capital from one place to another, it withholds part of the capital it gathers and undermines the activities of the capital it does not commandeer. What is more, the new distribution of wages is less fair than the one presided over by freedom, and unlike the latter it is not proportional to the just rights of ability and morality. Finally, far from decreasing social suffering, on the contrary it increases it. These expedients do nothing to re-establish the equilibrium that has been upset between the number of people and their means of existing. Very far from doing so, they increasingly tend to upset this equilibrium.

But if we think that society can be put into a situation in which all it has is a choice of harms, if we think that in this case freedom brings it the most effective and least painful remedies, be warned that we also believe that it acts above all as a means of prevention. Before restoring the equilibrium between people and the food supply, it acts to prevent this equilibrium from being disrupted, because it allows all the reasons for men to be moral, active, temperate and far-sighted to retain their influence. We do not deny that what follows the forgetting of the virtues is suffering, but wishing that this were not so is to want an ignorant and debased people to benefit to the same extent from well-being and happiness as a moral and enlightened one.

It is so true that freedom prevents the harm for which you seek a remedy in the right to a job that you yourself acknowledge that this right does not need to be applied to those industries that enjoy total freedom: "Let us set aside", you say, "shoemakers, tailors, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, coopers, locksmiths, masons, carpenters, joiners, etc. The fate of these people is not in the balance." 365 However the fate of factory workers would not be in the balance either if manufacturing had a natural life, always had its feet on firm ground, expanded only according to need, and did not rely on the artificial and variable prices resulting from protection , one of the fruits of the theory of arbitrary government.

You proclaim the right to a job , you raise it to a principle , but at the same time you show little faith in this principle. See within what narrow limits you in fact circumscribe its action. This right to work can be invoked only in rare instances, in extreme cases, only where life is at stake (propter vitam) 366 and on condition that its application will never create deadly competition from the State against the work of free industries and voluntarily agreed rates of pay.

Reduced to these terms, the measures you announce are within the domaine of state regulation 367 rather than social economy. 368 I consider that I can confirm, on behalf of the economists, that they have no serious objections to the intervention of the State in rare or extreme cases in which, without undermining free industries or changing the rates of voluntarily agreed wages it is possible to come to the aid, propter vitam , to save the lives of workers who are temporarily and abruptly displaced as a result of unexpected crises in production. 369 But, I ask you, to achieve these exceptional measures, was it necessary to rake over all the theories of the schools most in opposition to each other? Was it necessary to raise banner against banner, principle against principle, and trumpet into the ears of the masses those deceiving words: the right to a job or the right to a living ? I say to you in your own words: "These ideas are as resonant as this because all they contain is wind and tempest." 370

Sir, I do not think that Heaven has ever given men more precious gifts than those lavished on you. There is enough warmth in your soul and enough power in your genius for the century to be subject to your influence and, at the sound of your voice, take one more step along the path of civilization. But to do this, you ought not to take bits here and there from the schools that most oppose each other and from principles that cancel each other out. Your prodigious talent is a powerful lever but this lever is powerless if it does not have a principle as its fulcrum. In the past you stood up before the opposition with a sincere heart and eloquent voice. What result did you achieve? None, because you did not make any appeal to a principle . Oh! If only you were a strong supporter of freedom! If only you portrayed it bringing progress to the social world through the action of its two mutually sustaining laws, responsibility and solidarity! If only you rallied people's minds to this truth: "In political economy there is a great deal to be learnt and little to be done!" 371 People would then understand that freedom carries within itself the solution to all the major social problems that trouble our time and "that it provides justice for people that arbitrary governments do not provide." 372 How is it that you have found such fertile truths only to abandon them immediately afterwards? Do you not see that the rational and practical consequence of this doctrine is the reduction in the size of government ? 373 Take courage, then, and follow this shining path! Take no heed of the worthless popularity you are promised elsewhere. You cannot serve two masters. You cannot work to reduce the scope of power and demand that it leaves "both labour and conscience" alone, while on the other hand requiring it to "engage on a lavish scale in education, establish colonies, adopt children that are too numerous and intervene on behalf of the masses and their poverty." If you entrust these varied and sensitive tasks to it, you will make it grow inordinately. You will entrust it with a mission that is not its own. You will substitute its scheming for the economy of social laws. You will transform it into a "Providential agency that not only sees but foresees." You will enable it to impose and redistribute huge taxes. You will make it the object of all forms of ambition, hope, disappointment, and intrigue. You will elevate its executives inordinately and transform the nation into state employees; in a word you are on the path of an bastard, incomplete and illogical form of Fourierism.

These are not the doctrines that you ought to be promulgating in France. Reject their misleading attractions. Adhere to the severe but true principle, the only one that is true, Freedom. Allow your wide-ranging intellect to embrace its laws, its actions, its associated phenomena, the factors that disrupt it, and the restorative forces which it has within itself. 374 Inscribe the words " free society, small government " on your banner, 375 ideas that are deeply interrelated. This banner will perhaps be rejected by the parties, but the nation will embrace it rapturously. But eradicate from it the slightest trace of the motto, " coerced society, big government ". Exceptional measures, applicable in rare circumstances and extreme cases and whose use is in the end highly debatable cannot outweigh the value and authority of a principle for long in your mind. Such a principle is for all time, for everywhere, for all climates and every circumstance. Proclaim freedom, therefore: freedom to work, freedom to trade, and freedom to do business, 376 for this country and all others, for this and every age. If you do this, I dare to promise you if not popularity today at least popularity and the blessings of the centuries to come. A great man has taken on this role in England. 377 There is not a single day in the year nor hour in the day during which the great laws of the social mechanism 378 are not set out before the gaze of the masses. He has gathered around him a travelling university and a group of preachers for the 19 th century, 379 whose life-giving words penetrate every strata of society and are bringing to the surface a powerful, enlightened, peace-loving but indomitable public opinion which will preside shortly over the destiny of Great Britain. For do you know what is happening? More than fifty thousand English people 380 will be given electoral rights by the end of the month to balance the influence of the advocates of arbitrary government power and counteract the efforts of the prohibitionists, false philanthropists, and the aristocracy. Freedom! That is the principle that is going to reign on our doorstep and one man, Mr. Cobden, will have been the instrument of this great and peaceful revolution. Oh! If only you could have a destiny like this, one for which you are so worthy!

2. T.317 "Introduction and Post Script to Economic Sophisms" (March 1845)↩

Source

T.317 (1845.03) "Introduction and Postscript to Economic Sophisms," JDE , April 1845, T. 11, no. 41, pp. 1, 16. Dated Mugron March, 1845. Written only for JDE article. A new expanded Introduction and Conclusion were written for the book ES1 in November, 1845. Not in OC. Not in CW3.

Editor's Introduction

Bastiat wrote this brief Introduction to the first three "economic sophisms" which were published in the Journal des Économistes in April 1845. They were the first of eleven published during 1845 which were later collected, along with eleven other pieces, into his second book Economic Sophisms (First Series) which was published in January 1846. 381 It was very tentative and even apologetic in nature and this requires some explanation given his later high reputation among the Parisian economists. 382

Bastiat came to the attention of the Paris-based political economists when he sent them an unsolicited article on French and English tariff policy at the end of July which he had been working on over the summer of 1844. 383 After a delay of several months (Molinari later revealed that the editor Hippolyte Dussard had ignored it and left it in the in-tray because Bastiat was an unknown person from the provinces with no letter of introduction) 384 it was eventually published in the October issue of the Journal des Économistes . He had also been translating material published by the Anti-Corn Law League and transcripts of their public speeches which the Guillaumin firm would publish in June 1845. 385 This book, Cobden and the League , contained a very long introduction written by Bastiat which was a combination of a history of the free trade movement in Britain and a work of strategy showing how their ideas and methods might be adapted to France. 386 In it he also presented a radical critique of the landed "oligarchy" (his term) which ruled Britain and which had obvious implications for the domination of French politics by the alliance of large landowners and manufacturers which emerged during the 1820s and who were able to maintain a high tariff wall around the French economy for the next several decades.

Bastiat's work caused quite a stir among the political economists who invited him to Paris to meet them and attend a dinner in his honour hosted by the Political Economy Society on 10 May, 1845. 387 In fact, he ended up staying in Paris for three months (May through July) before moving there permanently in March 1846 to work full-time for the national branch of the French Free Trade Association which he helped establish. In March 1845, before he arrived in Paris, he had begun work on a new project to popularise free market economic ideas and debunk protectionist ones, which would become his most famous book Economic Sophisms . The Journal des Économistes agreed to publish these clever and witty pieces under the title of "Economic Sophisms" beginning with three in the April issue, another two in the July issue, and another six in the October issue. 388 This short "Introduction" appeared at the beginning of the first collection in April and has never been reprinted since. Bastiat also tells us in a letter written at this time that he was not happy with the title "Economic Sophisms" and was looking for an alternative. 389 Clearly he did not find a better title and this is how they have come down to us today.

The Introduction is an interesting piece because it shows his hesitation and uncertainty about entering the fray as a "full member" of the economics fraternity which had gathered around the Guillaumin publishing firm since its founding in 1837. He almost apologizes for publishing in their august journal a series of lighter pieces aimed at a less well-informed readership, people who did not read the heavy theoretical tomes or the collections of economic data normally published by Guillaumin. He defends himself by saying that he wanted to reach a younger audience who had not yet been corrupted by protectionist prejudices, something he would mention in a letter to Richard Cobden on 5 July 1847 390 and again in his introduction "To the Youth of France" which preceded the first volume of his treatise on Economic Harmonies (January 1850). 391

Bastiat need not have worried about how he would be received by the Parisian economists as they began to shower him with accolades and job offers as soon as he arrived in May. His correspondence from Paris to his close friend Félix Coudroy back in Mugron during these three months reveal some interesting things. Firstly, that the economists had read all his articles and were willing to discuss economic matters with him as an equal. He expressed relief to Félix that in spite of their geographical and intellectual isolation in Mugron he had held his own in conversations with them. 392

Secondly, that his articles on "Economic Sophisms" and other economic topics were so highly regarded by the editors of the Journal des Économistes that they were given top billing in the issues in which they appeared, pushing the work by other more established economists down the table of contents. 393 This happened in April, June, July, and December 1845, and again in February, April, October, and December 1846. His articles on "Economic Sophisms" also proved popular with readers and there was a spike in subscriptions for the journal after they appeared in print. 394

Thirdly, that the economists were having negotiations with the government about setting up chairs in political economy in the government funded University and Colleges and that they had asked him, given his obvious writing skills, to write a proposal supporting this which they could submit to the government. A faction within the economists, the businessman Horace Say, the editor of the Journal des Économistes (1843-45) Hippolyte Dussard (who had originally ignored his essay on tariffs), the editor of the vast Collection des Principaux Économistes project Eugène Daire, 395 and the president of the Political Economy Society Charles Dunoyer were actively backing Bastiat for one of these Chairs should they become available. 396 In the meantime, there was also talk of getting Bastiat some money to give a course of lectures in one of the private colleges, something which did not happen until the fall of 1847 in the School of Law. 397 Not surprisingly the textbook he used for his lectures was the first edition of the Economic Sophisms .

Fourthly, that he was offered the position of editor of the main journal of the Paris economists, the Journal des Économistes , which had 500-600 subscribers at that time. This was a remarkable thing to offer someone who had just come to their attention ten months before and shows the very high regard they had for him as an economist and a writer. In a long letter to Félix 398 he lists all the positive aspects of such a position: it would enable him to have an impact on the Chamber of Deputies and other organs of the press when it came to economic matters; he would be able to put his own more radical and consistent free market stamp on the editorial policy of the journal which he thought was run by a group of "well-meaning men;" 399 since the journal's readership also included businessmen, financiers, and reform-minded bureaucrats in the customs service, he hoped he would eventually be seen as their "spokesperson" on free trade issues; and since the position would not take up all of his time he would still have time to research and publish his own material which would improve his chances of getting one of the new Chairs of political economy. 400 In spite of these positives things, he ultimately declined the offer for two reasons. Firstly, the salary of 100 louis (fr, 2,000) per annum was a "wretchedly low salary" 401 and secondly, he had his heart set on creating a French Free Trade Association modeled on Cobden's Anti-Corn Law League. This had been the purpose behind his book on Cobden and the League which was about to appear in print (June 1845), especially the Introduction in which he laid out a coherent strategy for doing just this. It was too soon in his view to give up that dream.

Fifthly, the sons of two of the biggest names in the French classical liberal movement of the early nineteenth century, Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) and Charles Comte (1782-1837), approached Bastiat with offers to make use of or even look after their fathers' personal papers. 402 Both J.B. Say and Comte had profoundly influenced Bastiat's thinking and he mentions them many times in his writings. 403 Perhaps this is why Horace Say and Hippolyte Comte both felt they could trust such a sympathetic person like Bastiat, whose way of thinking about economics as part of a much broader liberal social theory, was very much like their fathers' and much less like the more orthodox political economists who made up the Political Economy Society.

And finally, to top off a remarkable first year in Paris, Bastiat was elected a "corresponding" (or junior) member of the 4th section (Économie politique et Statistique) of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences on 24 January, 1846. 404 He was elected with 20 votes (out of a possible 21) by the other full members of the Academy after Dunoyer had promoted Bastiat's candidature by presenting copies of his two books which had appeared since his arrival in Paris: his book on Cobden and the League (June 1845) and the first series of the Economic Harmonies (January 1846). Bastiat was very proud of this position and included it as part of his credentials on the cover of the books and pamphlets he published subsequently.

So it is the light of this unexpected, rapid, and rather fulsome reception of Bastiat into the circle of the Parisian economists that we should read his touchingly tentative "Introduction" to what would become his most popular and well-known work of economics. Perhaps the reservations he expressed in March 1845 were unwarranted.

Text

If there are still some readers who are willing to pay serious and close attention to works of pure theory concerning the most important economic questions, I have to think that they are to be found particularly among the subscribers to this journal. It is they who have given me the courage, after much hesitation, to publish here a refutation of the main sophisms upon which the prohibitionist or protectionist régime is based. I don't have the foolish presumption to destroy in a few pages the entrenched prejudices which so many good works have scarcely been able weaken, but I hope to instill at least some doubt, especially among those young minds which have not yet become clogged with preconceived ideas. I offer them no ready made solutions but merely some key ideas which they will be able to take up in the future. Even if one cannot force the reader to reach a given end, it is still quite something to put them on the right path. …

P.S. The discussion which has just taken place in the Chamber of Deputies on the subject of the customs legislation 405 provides ample food for thought for this survey of economic sophisms . I ask your permission to continue it in a future article. 406

3. T.20 "On the Book by M. Dunoyer. On The Liberty of Working" (May, 1845)↩

Source

T.20 (1845.??) "On the Book by M. Dunoyer. On The Liberty of Working " (Sur l'ouvrage de M. Dunoyer, De la Liberté du travail ). Unpublished draft, possibly written in May after Bastiat met Dunoyer for the first time at his welcome dinner and Dunoyer asked him to write an article on it for the Journal des débats . Bastiat never finished it. [OC1.10, pp. 428-33.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

Charles Dunoyer (1786-1862) and his colleague Charles Comte (1782–1837) 407 had a profound and lasting impact on Bastiat's thinking as he reveals in several letters. 408 Dunoyer's latest book De la liberté du travail (On the Liberty of Working) (1845) had been published in February 1845 and we know from a letter Bastiat wrote to Dunoyer on March 7, 1845 that he had received a copy of it in Mugron. 409 This undated draft may well have been written at this time. In his letter, Bastiat thanks Dunoyer for his kind words 410 about his own work as he had written two pieces for the Journal des Économistes in late 1844 and early 1845, and had a book on Cobden and the League about to be published by Guillaumin in June. 411 His essay criticising Lamartine's work on the same topic as Dunoyer's book would have caught Dunoyer's attention. The two men met for the first time at Bastiat's welcome dinner in Paris in May 1845 412 and in his letter to Félix Coudroy relating what happened at the dinner, Bastiat with some excitement tells him that Dunoyer had asked him to write an article on his book for the prestigious Journal des débats because he thought that Bastiat was "éminemment propre à faire apprécier son travail" (eminently qualified to evaluate his work). It is probably with this task in mind that Bastiat wrote this draft. However, Bastiat was still somewhat in awe of the Parisian political economists and was uncertain about his own talents as an economist and never finished the article. Dunoyer's book was however reviewed in the Journal des débats by the economist Michel Chevalier. 413

Charles Dunoyer and Charles Comte were two of the leading liberal social theorists of the Restoration and July Monarchy. Bastiat acknowledged their importance to his own intellectual development in this unpublished book review of Dunoyer's book and in his essay on Mignet's eulogy of Comte given to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his death in 1847. 414 After successfully collaborating on one of the key liberal journals of the Restoration period, Le Censeur (1814-15) and its sequel Le Censeur européen (1817-19), both men turned to writing detailed examinations of the social, legal, and economic institutions and ideas which made liberty possible. Comte focused on law and property in the Traité de législation (Treatise on Legislation) (1826) and the Traité de la propriété (Treatise on Property) (1834); 415 while Dunoyer focussed on the historical and economic evolution which society had gone through to get to its current state of emergent industrialism, in a series of books beginning in 1825 and culminating in De la liberté du travail (1845) which is the object of Bastiat's attention in this short review. 416

In the Preface written in January 1845 Dunoyer noted the long gestation period of his ideas, which went back even further than the 20 years quoted by Bastiat in his opening lines. Dunoyer says he began thinking about the deeper social and intellectual reasons behind the existence of authoritarian government even as he was fighting against its current manifestation in the restored Bourbon monarchy in 1815. He came to the conclusion that his and Comte's efforts to change the face of authoritarian government would not be successful unless the underlying reasons why people demanded or tolerated authoritarian governments had been addressed. This began a long and difficult research program lasting nearly 30 years in which he wanted to expand the domain of political economy away from an exclusive focus on the creation and distribution of wealth, which was its inheritance from Adam Smith and J.B. Say, into a new dimension of "social economy." 417

Dunoyer also wanted to shift attention away from an exclusive concern about the form of government, whether monarchical or republican, authoritarian or democratic, to a deeper sociological and intellectual understanding of why societies and economies took the forms they did. He believed that violence on a political or societal level could only be explained (and thus ultimately eliminated) only when it was understood why individuals engaged in violence on an inter-personal level. As he asks at one point: 418

Les excès reprochés au pouvoir, disais-je, sont le fait de la population, de la population considérée dans sa vie publique, dans son activité collective. Mais n'y a-t-il d'oppressions dans un pays que celles que la population y exerce politiquement? Les violences que se font les individus dans leurs rapports mutuels ne sont-elles pas des oppressions aussi, et des oppressions absolument de la même nature et tenant a la même cause, c'est-a-dire a l'imperfection de leurs facultés , au mauvais emploi qu'ils en font les uns à l'égard des autres et à l'état peu avancé de leur morale de relation? Il ne leur suffirait donc pas, pour être libres, de se bien conduire collectivement, politiquement? Il faudrait donc encore que, dans leurs rapports privés, ils sussent mieux régler l'emploi de leurs forces? [vol. 1, p. 3]

I would say that the much criticised excesses of power are done by the people, by the people viewed in their public life, in their collective activity. But are the acts of oppression in a country only those which the people exercise politically? Aren't the violent acts done by the people in their relations with each other also acts of oppression, acts which are of the exact same nature and which stem from the exact same cause, that is to say from the imperfect exercise of their abilities (faculties), the bad use that they make of one ability with respect to the others, and to the poorly developed state of their moral beliefs concerning their mutual relations? Therefore, it would not be sufficient for them, in order to become free, to conduct themselves well collectively and politically. Wouldn't it also be necessary that, in their private relationships with each other, they would have to know how to better control the use of their power (strength)?

Dunoyer had a quite different theory of liberty than many of his fellow liberals like Bastiat in that he did not define liberty as the absence of coercion but the ability of individuals to use their powers to achieve the goals they have set themselves. The following statement must have unsettled Bastiat a little, as his view of liberty was very firmly grounded in the theory of natural rights: 419

Ce que j'appelle liberté, dans ce livre, c'est ce pouvoir que l'homme acquiert d'user de ses forces plus facilement à mesure qu'il s'affranchit des obstacles qui en gênaient originairement l'exercice. Je dis qu'il est d'autant plus libre qu'il est plus délivré des causes qui l'empêchaient de s'en servir, qu'il a plus éloigné de lui ces causes, qu'il a plus agrandi et désobstrué la sphère de son action.

What I call liberty in this book is the ability that man has acquired to use his powers more easily as he frees himself from the obstacles which ordinarily hinder him. I say that he is free to the extent that he has removed the causes of what was preventing him from making use of them (forces), to the extent that he has been able to keep these causes at bay, to the extent that he has increased his sphere of action and cleared away any obstacles within it.

Perhaps as a result of his frustrations resulting from the failure of the liberals to develop a coherent and effective theory of limited government in the restoration period, Dunoyer had given up the attempt to derive liberty from first principles. He dismisses this as the work of "dogmatic philosophers who only speak about rights and duties." 420 He, on the other hand, wanted to focus instead on "how it happens that men are free, under what conditions can they be free, what combination of knowledge and sound moral habits make it possible for men to carry out private industry, how do they raise themselves up to the point where they can engage in political activity?"

This shift from a moral defence of liberty to a sociological and historical study of how free societies in fact emerged, or were on the cusp of emerging, was later regretted by Bastiat and Molinari when they came to debating socialists during the 1848 Revolution. Both noted that political economy needed to be defended on moral, scientific, and political grounds and by not doing so, writers like Dunoyer had opened up the liberals to damaging criticism from the left and the right. However, the extraordinary historical and sociological detail drawn upon by Dunoyer and the way he blended this with economic analysis, may have inspired Bastiat to plan the writing of his own History of Plunder which would follow the completion of his treatise on economics, the Economic Harmonies .

In a footnote Dunoyer recalls how the first part of his project was published as L'Industrie et la morale considérées dans leurs rapports avec la liberté in 1825 and an enlarged sequel as Nouveau traité d'économie sociale in 1830. Unfortunately, the latter volume did not receive the attention it deserved because the outbreak of revolution in July of that year distracted potential readers and a fire in the bookshop destroyed nearly all the copies except for a handful of review copies. The full and complete version did not see the light of day until early 1845. It quickly became one of the most important books in the arsenal of the political economy movement just as Bastiat was taking up residence in Paris.

It should be noted that in this essay Bastiat uses for the first time the term "harmonique" (harmony) which would become so central to his thinking later. He uses it while criticising socialists for not seeing that " a marvelous, harmonious, and progressive order (can) result from the to and fro of social groups and the free action and reaction of human interests." There is also his first use of another key concept, namely that exchange is the exchange of one service for another ("service pour service") in his statement that "from the economic point of view, society is an exchange of services that are paid for." Thus, in this essay and his "Letter to Lamartine" (January 1845) many of his original economic insights appear for the first time in print. 421

On the Book by M. Dunoyer, On The Liberty of Working

"I had the idea for this book twenty years ago", says Mr. Dunoyer. 422 Certainly, during this twenty year period, there was not one year in which this major work might have been published for the people with more relevance; and I venture to believe that it is destined to bring science back to its proper path. A disastrous theoretical system seems to have taken a dangerous hold over people's minds. A figment of the imagination, welcomed by lazy minds and disseminated by fashion, encouraging praiseworthy but ill thought-out sentiments of philanthropy in some and attracting others by its misleading promise of prompt and easily-obtained enjoyment, this theory has taken hold like some epidemic. It is breathed in with the air and caught by contact with the world; even science no longer has the fortitude to resist it. Science bows before it, salutes it, smiles at it, flatters it and yet it knows that this system could not stand up for one minute to the severe and impartial examination of reason. This system is known as Socialism . It consists in rejecting any providential designs in the governance of the moral world; in supposing that a marvelous, harmonious, 423 and progressive order cannot result from the to and fro of social groups and the free action and reaction of human interests; and in dreaming up artificial forms of organization that need only the consent of the human race to come into force. Will we all become Moravian Brethren ? 424 Will we lock ourselves away in a phalanstery? 425 Will we abolish only heredity, or will we also rid ourselves of property and the family? We have not made up our minds on this and, for the moment, there is only one thing whose exclusion has been unanimously decided upon, and that is freedom.

Away with freedom!

Down with freedom! 426

Everyone agrees on this point. All that is left for the billion people that live on our planet is to make the choice, from the thousand plans that have seen the light of day, of the one to which they would prefer to be subjected unless, however, there is a better one among those that hatch each morning. It is true that this choice presents a few difficulties, for the Socialists are far from all having the same social projects , even though they have taken the same name. Here is Mr. Jobard 427 who thinks that the notion of property does not extend far enough. He wants to extend it to the most fleeting literary or artistic thoughts. Then we have Saint-Simon 428 , who does not accept even material property. Between them we have Mr. Blanc 429 , who duly recognizes property of the goods produced by work (except for the sharing of his invention), while castigating as impious and sacrilegious anyone who draws the slightest profit from a book, painting or musical score - happily submitting himself to current practice until his theory triumphs.

Amidst the countless births of these Social Plans , begot from the over-heated imaginations of our modern would-be Teachers of Nations , reason finds indescribable solace at feeling itself being brought back by Mr. Dunoyer's book to an examination of, yes, another Social Plan , but one created by Providence itself; at seeing the development of the fine harmonies it has inscribed in the heart of man, in his organization and in the laws of his intellectual and moral nature. People can say forever that there is no poetry in experimental science; this is not true, for it would be the same as saying that there is no poetry in the work of God.

Do people think that Cuvier's geological discoveries 430 do not lead us to admire the glimpse they permit us of the Creator's designs and most ingenious inventions, just because they were due to laborious and patient observation, or because they agreed with factual realities?

The obligatory point of departure of modern reformers 431 (whether they acknowledge this or not) is that society is deteriorating under the influence of natural laws and that these laws tend increasingly to introduce poverty and inequality in men; for this reason, with what mournful pictures do they not darken the initial pages of their books! To accept the principle of perfectibility would be to create in advance a blunt rebuttal of their claim to remake the world. If they acknowledged that in the laws of Responsibility and Solidarity there is a force that overwhelmingly tends to make men improve and become equal, why would they rise up against these laws, they who profess to aspire precisely to this result? Their task would be limited to studying them, discovering their harmony, making them known and pointing out and combating the obstacles they still encounter in the errors in men's minds, the vices in their hearts, popular prejudices, and the abuses of power and authority.

The best thing with which to confront the Socialists is therefore a simple description of these laws. This is what Mr. Dunoyer does. But after all, since people often differ over things only because they do not agree on the meaning of words, Mr. Dunoyer begins by defining what he understands by freedom . 432

Freedom is the power to act . Therefore each obstacle that is overcome, each restriction that is overthrown, each morsel of experience gained, each piece of learning that lights up the intellect, each virtue that increases confidence, friendship and strengthen the social bonds is one more freedom conquered in the world, for there is nothing in all these things that is not a power to act , a peaceful power and one that is beneficial and civilizing.

Mr. Dunoyer's first volume is devoted to solving the following question of fact: Has the world made progress under the sway of the law of freedom, or has it not? He then studies in turn the various social states through which it has been man's destiny to pass, the state of the nations that hunt, keep flocks, farm, or carry out industry and to which correspond the states of cannibalism, slavery, servitude, and monopoly. He shows the human race rising up toward well-being and morality as it becomes more free ; he proves that at each phase of its existence the harms that it has endured have been caused by the obstacles that it encountered in its ignorance, errors and vices. He identifies the principle that has enabled it to overcome them and, finally turning toward the future the torch that has shown him the past, he sees society making unceasing progress without having to be subjected to forms of organization that have recently been invented, on the sole condition that it wages unceasing combat against both the fetters that still encumber human production and the ignorance that obstructs men's minds and what remains of lack of foresight, injustice, and evil passions in their habits.

In this way, the author gives short shrift to the old sophism, unworthy of science and recently brought back from the most barbarous of ages, which consists in shoring up error by drawing on isolated and unfortunately only too numerous facts which serve to induce a regression of the human race. Faithful to his method, he works out the progress made, attributes it to its genuine sources and shows that, by developing these and destroying, rather than resurrecting obstacles, extending, and not restricting the principles of responsibility, strengthening, not weakening the resilience of solidarity, and by educating, improving, and liberating ourselves, we will move on toward fresh progress.

Once he has studied the human race through its various stages, Mr. Dunoyer considers it in the light of its various functions.

At this point, he needed to set out systematically the names of these functions. We have no hesitation in saying that those used by the author are more rational, more methodical, and above all more comprehensive than those traditionally used by economic science. 433

If you divide production either into agriculture, manufacturing and commerce or, like Mr. de Tracy, 434 you reduce it to two sectors, production that transforms and production that transports , it is clear that you are leaving outside the scope of economic science, a host of social functions, in particular all those that are carried out between people. From the economic point of view, society is an exchange of services 435 that are paid for and in this respect, lawyers, doctors, soldiers, magistrates, teachers, priests, and civil servants are just as much a part of economic science as traders and farmers. 436

We all work for one another, we all exchange services with each other, and economics is incomplete if it does not include all forms of service and all forms of work.

We therefore believe that political economy owes Mr. Dunoyer a debt for establishing a classification that, without exceeding its natural limits, has the merit of opening new horizons and new fields for research, especially those of an intellectual and moral order, and wresting it from the materialistic confinement in which greater minds do not care to languish for any length of time.

Therefore, when Mr. Dunoyer, after having sought to identify the social states that have been most favorable to the human race, examines the conditions under which each function develops with most power and freedom, one senses that a moral principle has come to assume its proper place in economic science. He shows that intellectual forces and individual virtue or virtuous relationships with others are no less essential to the success of our projects than the forces of industry. The choice of time and place, knowledge of the market, order, foresight, a mind that follows through, probity, and saving, all contribute as genuinely to the swift accumulation, fair distribution, and judicious consumption of wealth as capital, skill and human activity.

We would not be so bold as to say that in the huge tapestry traced by the author there have not crept in a few comments on detail that might be contested or still less that he has exhausted his boundless subject. However, his method is a good one, the limits to the science well established, and the dominant principles clearly defined. In this huge field there is room for many workers, and if we were to express our thoughts in full, we think this area of study is one where both those meticulous minds who have an unshakeable attachment to the imperatives of logic which are required in that part of political economy which is accessible to rigorous demonstrations, and those ardent spirits whose idolatry of beauty and goodness draws them instead to the realms of utopia and fantasy, will be able to come up against each other.

4. T.47 "Thoughts on Sharecropping" (15 Feb. 1846, JDE)↩

Source

T.47 (1846.02.15) "Thoughts on Sharecropping" (Considérations sur le métayage), JDE , T.13, no. 51, Feb. 1846, pp. 225-239. This article was not included in Paillottet's OC. [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

After Bastiat's first article "On the Influence of French and English Tariffs" appeared in the JDE in October 1844 he wrote many more for that journal before the Revolution of February 1848 broke out, and in the process changing the direction of his life. They consisted of several kinds of material, shorter, more popular pieces which would appear in the collection Economic Sophisms , short reports on various aspects of his free trade activity including summaries of his speeches, a few book reviews, as well as 7 more substantial articles on economic matters written primarily during 1845 and 1846 before he devoted himself almost entirely to his work with the French Free Trade Association and its magazine Le Libre-Échange . Two of them, "On Competition" and "On Population," would be substantially revised and rewritten and would appear in his treatise Economic Harmonies (1850, 1851). 437 These articles were the following:

"The Economic Situation of Great Britain: Financial Reforms and Agitation for Commercial Freedom", JDE , (June 1845) (a shortened version of his Introduction to his book Cobden and the League , which will appear in CW6 (forthcoming)
"On the Future of the Wine Trade between France and England", JDE , (Aug. 1845) (CW6 forthcoming)
"On the Questions submitted to the General Councils of Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce", JDE , (Dec. 1845) (CW6 forthcoming)
"Thoughts on Share Cropping", JDE , (Feb. 1846)
"On Competition", JDE , (May 1846) (below, pp. 000)
"On Population", JDE , (Oct. 1846) (below, pp. 000)
"On the Impact of the Protectionist Regime on Agriculture", JDE , (Dec. 1846) (CW6 forthcoming)
"Organisation and Liberty", JDE , (Jan. 1847) (CW6 forthcoming)

The essay on share-cropping came in the middle of this period. In it, Bastiat reflects on his activities as a landowner and farmer, his thoughts on the future of agriculture, how he unsuccessfully tried to reform the work practices of his métayeurs (sharecroppers), his preference for share-cropping over tenant farming, and an early version of his thoughts on issues which he would take up later in a different form, namely Malthusian population theory, the inherent conflict (or harmony) between labour and capital, and the nature of productive and unproductive labour, in particular landowners who rent their land to others. These latter reflections show how much his thinking would change over the coming 2 or 3 years.

There are several passages in this article which are autobiographical in nature. It is not clear exactly how much of his land he worked himself and how much was worked by sharecroppers but it seems he might have had 120-150 sharecroppers and their families working his land which totaled about 250 hectares in size altogether. In his paper "On the Bordeaux to Bayonne Railway Line" (19 May 1846) 438 he notes that "in former times" sharecropper farms were about 2-3 hectares in size and the vines they grew were enough to feed a family as well as other workers in the area. He says this comfortable existence was destroyed by protectionism during the Napoleonic period and the Restoration when wine exports to other parts of Europe were curtailed, as well as increases in indirect taxation on wine sold within France. He states that small farms were no longer economically viable and there were mergers to create farms 5-6 hectares in size which were viable, thus displacing some families. He also describes some of the hardships they faced:

In the village in which I live, thirty sharecropper houses have been demolished, according to the land register, and more than one hundred and fifty in the district whose legal interests have been entrusted to me, 439 and, mark this well, this means as many families that have been plunged into complete destruction. Their fate is to suffer, decline, and disappear. 440

Towards the end of the essay Bastiat's shows himself to have been rather paternalistic towards his sharecroppers. It says he took great care in choosing whom he would allow to work on his land (they had to both be good farmers as well as fit into the voluntary community of sharecroppers that he was fostering), that he would advise them about when was the right time to marry and to have children (which reveals his Malthusian concern about overpopulation of workers in the countryside), and he would take care to invite them all to communal meals on festivities like New Year's Day when his table might be "surrounded by one hundred and twenty heads of farming enterprises."

Concerning land use and ownership, in the first half of the 19th century over half the population of France worked on the land in some capacity. Small-scale famers who owned their own land were known as "laboureurs" or "cultivateurs" and were the most prosperous; larger landowners, especially in the north rented their land out to farmers who were called "fermiers" and the system it gave rise to as "fermage" (land rents); the poorest farmers were concentrated in the south where sharecropping predominated. "Métayers" (sharecroppers) did not own or rent their land but were entitled to a one half share in the final product. The land owner provided the capital, such as land, seed, cattle, and ploughs. The poorest of those who worked the land were the day labourers ("journaliers") who hired out their labour on a daily or seasonal basis. Mounier estimated in 1846 that 43 million hectares of land was under cultivation in France at that time which was divided as follows: 8.47 million hectares by renters (20% of the total area), 14.5m by sharecroppers (34%), and 20m by owners (46% area). 441

A significant problem for French farmers in the 19th century was the retention of farm size which would have enabled them to remain economically viable. The change in inheritance laws during the Revolution was designed to end the old regime practice of primogeniture (passing the entire estate to the eldest son) but it over-reacted by requiring an equal division among all the children, even if the farmer wanted to leave his land to one of his children in order to continue the family business. This gradually led to the problem of "morcellement" or the division of the land into smaller and smaller plots which hampered the growth of more productive agriculture. Bastiat's solution to this problem was to encourage the spread of sharecropping using a new system of agriculture which he called "alternating cultivation" (more details below). His younger friend and colleague Gustave de Molinari thought the solution to this problem was to encourage the formation of large-scale agricultural businesses ("la manufacture agricole" - an agricultural factory) which would be more efficient than small family owned farms, just like large industrial factories were more efficient than the small workshops of artisans (le petit atelier). 442 Molinari argues that industry of all kinds became more productive by replacing the small artisan workshop with large-scale factory production, and that the same thing would happen to agriculture.

Concerning agricultural practices, during the Middle Ages the three-field system of rotation was commonly used in Europe with a winter planting of rye or wheat, followed by a spring planting of oats or barley, and a third period in which the land was left fallow. This was replaced with a more productive four-field system in the 16th century where a soil replenishing crop like legumes was substituted for the fallow period, thus boosting total output. By carefully choosing the types of crops planted the farmer could support both agriculture and livestock on the land with a cash crop, a fodder crop, a grazing crop, and then a crop to replenish the soil. Bastiat's scheme of "alternating cultivation" was a more complex and flexible variation of the four field system of rotation which he thought was better because it would use a greater selection of crops which would allow for more regional and climatic variation, the choice of crops could be made with more regard to current market prices, and by using modern double entry book-keeping the farmer would become more entrepreneurial and scientific in their management of the farm business. The previous year Bastiat would have read Charles Dunoyer's thoughts on the advantages of alternating cultivation over the older triennial rotation system in Liberté du travail (1845), in which he discusses the benefits of this kind of farming for the more profit conscious "l'entrepreneur de culture" (the entrepreneur in the farming business). 443

It was in order to encourage the acquisition of these scientific and accounting skills that two years earlier Bastiat had written a proposal to a local religious Foundation asking for their support in founding a school for the sons of sharecroppers. 444 He had come to realise over the previous 20 years that changing the behaviour of the adult sharecroppers was impossible and that he had to train the younger generation in the possibilities of new agricultural techniques. This document shows that he had been thinking about a "revolution in farming" for some time and believed that his estate was "one of the most suited to major crop rotation in the country." 445 His idea was to use his estate as an experiment to show how the transition from small-scale to large-scale farming, based upon a more scientific system of multi-crop rotation, using modern bookkeeping techniques to manage the shifting economic demand for crops and their different costs of production and rates of return. He was appealing to a religious foundation for assistance in starting a school for potential future share-croppers to work on these new farms he was planning to establish. His hope was the younger generation of farmers, if he could entice them away from traditional farming practices, might make "this major farming and social revolution in our region" possible in the span of 50 years. This proposal led to nothing as far as we can tell.

There were also moral and political reasons why Bastiat preferred the system of share-cropping over other practices like tenant farming and agricultural wage labour. Somewhat out of character with his later thinking about the "harmonious" relationships which existed between economic groups in a free market, here Bastiat thinks that there tenant farmer creates "excessive" competition which is harmful to both the individual farmers concerned and the communities in which they live, by driving rates of return to the bare minimum. In the case of agricultural wage labour he thought this would inevitably result in the creation of an agricultural "proletariat" who would be inclined to violent revolution. This leads him to the conclusion that tenant farming and wage labour should be "excluded" from farm areas (how this would be achieved he does not say), even though he admits that tenant farming produces greater output as the statistics from Flanders clearly show.

Sharecropping was to be preferred in his view because it was a more cooperative economic endeavour, a voluntary association between "capital" (the private landowner) and "labour" (the sharecropping farmer and his family) which produced a "fairer" distribution of output, even though it might be less than that of the tenant farmers. 446 This kind of free market "association" was a direct reply to the socialists' demand, voiced by Victor Considerant and Louis Blanc, that new forms of socialist association, such as social or national workshops backed by state coercion and compulsion, should be introduced. This was a view shared by one of the leading agronomists of the period, Adrien de Gasparin (1783-1862), who wrote the following year after Bastiat penned this essay about the political benefits of the métayage system:

In the principle of the sharing of output between the worker and the capitalist there is the hidden virtue which can be marvellously adapted to the weaknesses of human nature, which puts an end to jealousy and greed, and which seems to be particularly suited to the current situation. In a farming district with sharecroppers (métaires) one doesn't see this blind hatred towards property which animates the spirits of those who are engaged in renting their farms (fermage). By facing the same risks together, sharing the same fear of floods, enjoying the same benefits, weeping at the same losses, they build up a co-fraternity which prevents negative passions from taking hold. In my Memoir I consider sharecropping to be the natural transition from slavery or serfdom to a system of free agricultural production ... 447

Bastiat's "Thought on Sharecropping" also enables Bastiat to explore some ideas which he would take up later in greater detail, namely Malthusian population theory, the inherent conflict (or harmony) between labour and capital, and the nature of productive and unproductive labour, especially in the form of land rent. In this early effort, we see Bastiat taking positions which he would revise or even reject in his treatise Economic Harmonies . For example, he present arguments about the "idle landowner" which seems to contradict other statements Bastiat would make about the productiveness of all voluntary economic activity where there are mutually beneficial exchanges of "service for service." The landowner, to the extent that he makes available land, capital, seeds, etc., would also be productive in this sense. In his debate with Proudhon 448 and other socialists in 1849 Bastiat was to argue vigorously that rent paid for land and interest paid for loans were both justified and productive. Either he changed his mind between February 1846 (when this was written) and then, or he has some other understanding about what "idle landowners" were. 449 There is a hint of the latter in his remark that "landowners ... often have never seen the land that finances their opulent life at court" (below). This suggests Bastiat was referring to aristocratic landowners (propriétaires) and not farmers as such, but it is not very clear. He also believes that "there is an incurable antagonism between the three classes that tend the soil" (landowners, tenant farmers, and illiterate day laborers) which seems to contradict Bastiat's later notion that there is a "harmony of interests" between all consumers and producers when there is an absence of violence and political privilege. And finally, he seems to be a more orthodox Malthusian here than he would later become. He defends Malthus from the criticism of Proudhon, for example, but agrees that the pessimistic conclusions one could draw from his theory of the inevitable squeeze on living standards brought about by overpopulation are essentially correct - "The fact is that over-population has always and will always be the greatest scourge of the human race, because it involves all the others." In his later writings on population ("On Population", Journal des Économistes , (Oct. 1846) and Chap. 16 "On Population" Economic Harmonies (2nd ed. 1851) he would challenge this pessimism on the grounds that human beings were not like unthinking "plants" and could rationally plan their lives so as not to be determined by "the means of subsistence" (the bare minimum needed to survive), and that when left free to function as they wanted to, free markets would be able to indefinitely increase "the means of existence" (the standard of living) and thus break free from the Malthusian population trap for good.

It would seem that when he wrote this essay Bastiat was a supporter of free trade but not yet the advocate of radical, across the board laissez-faire policies he was to become later. It is likely that Bastiat became more radical as he worked full-time for the free trade movement, as he increasingly became active in opposing socialism during the Revolution, and as he rethought his ideas as he worked on his treatise on economic theory.

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In putting before the general public a plan for an agricultural establishment which could conceivably become a model for good sharecroppers, I have to admit that, like all designers of projects, I feel toward mine a sort of paternal tenderness. I think that few institutions of this kind would go together as well with the circumstances of our Département (of Les Landes) and hold promise of so many fertile seeds of well-being, education, and moral principles at so little cost.

I have previously criticized sharecropping , 450 but I am now convinced that, while my comments were fair, they were inadequate. I had seen the good that it prevented but not the good that it does or might do. Since my aim is to improve it and to eliminate its disadvantages, allow me to make a few general remarks about this method of (voluntary) association which brings together labor and capital , considerations which will oblige me to tackle some of the most important problems in social economy. 451

That set of activities through which the human race provides for its subsistence, has undergone major revolutions. First of all, people confined themselves to hunting wild animals. Later, by domesticating certain species, they were able to make use of and profit from the grasses that grew spontaneously. Much later, they subjected the land to the plough and, from the earliest times to the present day, appeared to settle on the form of farming known as the three field system of crop rotation . Finally, farming has now entered its fourth phase, that of alternating cultivation .

We can easily imagine the immense progress that each of these stages has enabled the human race to make. Huge stretches of territory were needed to provide hunting tribes with a meager existence. Pastoral tribes were able to increase in number and wealth, comparatively speaking. Similar progress must have followed the conversion of pasture into cultivated fields. 452 Finally, there is no doubt that alternating cultivation is preparing the human race for further progress which will raise it as far above its present state as the system of three year crop rotation raised it above pastoral life, or as herding raised it above its primitive existence.

When we consider how far each of these systems carries within itself the germ of the succeeding system, we are surprised at the time required for the human race to move from one to the other. Between hunting game for food consumed as it was caught and raising the tamest species of animals in one's own vicinity in order to obtain as needed their milk, meat, wool, or leather, seems to be just a step, and this step still seems to be insuperable to the American tribes. People may think that the transition between raising animals around a tent using certain naturally occurring grasses and encouraging these to grow by cultivating them, is easy, and yet it has, never been tried by the nomadic tribes of Tartary or Arabia. The key thing is that the three year system probably coincided with the first experiments in farming. In the event, people had first of all to sow wheat for themselves and oats for their stock on land that had been cleared, and when it did not take long for them to realize that successive harvests encouraged the proliferation of parasitic plants, leaving land fallow must not have taken long to be introduced and thereby complete the system of crop rotation. One might think that in terms of difficulty anyway, from this to the achievement of the same goal through the successive planting of different varieties of crops, there was just a small step to be taken and yet this progression appears to be beyond the powers of the most enlightened of nations, those whose civilization was the most advanced, in spite of the efforts of scholars and the encouragement given by those in power. 453

Be this as it may, this latest revolution is taking place, although slowly, before our eyes. In order to ascertain the part that sharecropping can play in this, it is important that we compare three year crop rotation with alternating cultivation .

In three year crop rotation , each domain is divided into two halves, one devoted to permanent pasture and meadow for stock and the other subject to the plough. Sully's epigram "pasturing and plowing and are the two nourishing breasts of the State" 454 refers to this fundamental division, an epigram in which a vague premonition of alternating cultivation has so awkwardly been seen.

Cultivated land is itself divided into three parts or three fields alternately devoted to the production of two types of cereal with one year fallow, or more accurately, one year of land clearance and preparation.

It is currently fashionable to denigrate this ancient system as being the sorry product of ignorance. Clever minds have judged it very differently;

"I do not think I will be suspected", said Mr. de Dombasle, 455 "of being too zealous an advocate of this system of farming. However, I find it impossible to deny that it appears to be perfectly suited to the circumstances of the time in which it was conceived, a time in which farming operated only on the basis of a few plants taken from the family of cereals. If you consider the extreme simplicity of this system, the harmony that existed between all the parties involved, the equal share it offered at all times of the year, the work it necessitated, and the facility with which it applied to all types of soil situated in a wide variety of climates, you will probably consider that it would have been impossible at that time to conceive a more comprehensive solution to the following problem: to find the most convenient system of farming to produce the items that were the most essential to consumption for a poor nation with little civilization and a population that, although small, was already too large to ensure its food supply with a pastoral system, a system that required the least labor and would be the easiest to implement by people lacking in education and developed finance.

Such in all probability were the givens of the problem in the circumstances that prevailed in the nations of Europe in the Middle Ages and also for a long time afterwards. Considered in this light, the three year rotation system with a fallow period and common grazing land was genuinely an admirable concept, in spite of its serious but inevitable faults." 456

The most striking characteristic of the three year system is its lack of flexibility . It is the same today as it has always been, and because of this it is eminently suited to sharecropping , because it is based upon a wealth of observations and experience which go back to the dawn of time, and which generations have passed down in the name of routine . (Routine, from rota , a wheel, which once it is turned continues to turn by itself.)

But however venerable this ancient form of farming that our fathers have passed down to us, we should not hide the fact that it has served its purpose and come to the end of its useful life. With its narrow limits and its homogeneity, it is powerless to supply modern industry with the abundance and variety of raw materials that are increasingly needed. It is even incapable of ensuring the food supply of a large population, because it excludes a great number of animal and vegetable products, and the variety of products is the best solution we have to the problem of the inconsistency of the seasons.

For this reason, I repeat, a farming revolution is now in the throes of preparation, that is to say, it is being formed in the social body, like all revolutions, at the time when it has become necessary. This revolution is the advent of alternating cultivation . 457

In the same way as lack of flexibility and homogeneity are characteristics of the three year system, flexibility and variety are the distinctive traits of alternating cultivation.

In this system, pasture, the commons, and even permanent meadows. The entire area of traditional land, each divided into a wide variety of fields, is subject to the plough. The infinite diversity of social needs revealed by the market price for food products determines the production of each of the fields that are included in the rotation system, and the head farmer has the function of maintaining within this apparent confusion the order laid down by the rules of crop rotation, the uninterrupted succession of plants that fertilize the soil and those that exhaust it, plants appropriate for animal feed and those for human consumption, with the appropriate insertion of plants that clean and prepare the soil without our resorting to fallow land, in short, never losing sight of the fact that all these crops have to be combined, so that at the end of each rotation cycle the soil is kept at least in the same condition, or preferably maintained with improved value and fertility.

This is the system of alternation. I have no need to point out here how much it encourages mankind's development and well-being through the abundance and variety of its products.

One thing that strikes me is the state of inferiority that threatens the regions that are the last to adopt the system of alternation. It is in the nature of this system not only to deliver to consumers a wide variety of food products, meat, vegetables, root vegetables, or milk products but even to provide cereals themselves at an overall price lower than the one that three year crop rotation can produce. This appears paradoxical, since the ancient system devotes two-thirds of the cultivatable land to this type of production while the new system devotes half at the most.

However, it should be noted that, in alternating cultivation, the estate which is ploughed is increased by the land that three year crop rotation gives over to permanent meadowland and pasture for stock, so that in the end, cereals do not lose any planting area.

On the other hand, in the three year system, the rent relating to the third of the estate that is uncultivated and the considerable costs of land lying fallow increase the debits in the accounts for the two following harvests, which means that it is possible for it to withstand competition from the alternating system only because this latter system is still limited to a tiny number of cantons in France.

In a word, it is doubtful whether the former system will maintain the level of fertility of the soil that the latter increases constantly.

Farming statistics published recently at the order of the administrative authorities 458 shed light on these facts with the irresistible eloquence of figures. Let us compare three departments here, one in French Flanders, the cradle of alternating cultivation, the second in Touraine, 459 where the three year system has reached the pinnacle of perfection, and finally in our own region.

	Department of the Nord	Department of the Indre-et-Loire	Department of Les Landes
Population per ten thousand square meters	18,074	4,971	3,114
Production per hectare
Wheat	20.74 hect.	12.27	8.62
Rye	18.41	15.19	8.23
Oats	39.93	10.08	0.30
Potatoes	169.20	101	27.79
Dry vegetables	22.64	10.01	11.99
Flax	579.1 kilog.	423	140
Natural meadowland/grass land	35.57 quint./met	27	17
Artificial meadowland	43.95	24	18
Number of animals
Cattle	226,338	92,529	62,228
Sheep	210,834	237,793	463,628
Horses	79,177	27,852	23,035

What is more significant than figures like these?

Let us present them in another form to make the results more telling. We will establish the real state of affairs using the Department of Les Landes as the unit of comparison.

	Landes	Indre-et-Loire	Nord
Population	1	1.59	5.80
Value of stock	1	1.30	6.44
W heat per hectare	1	1.41	2.50
Oats	1	1.22	4.85
Artificial meadowland	1	1.30	3.30
Flax	1	2.40	5.16
Potatoes	1	3.29	6.81

Thus, in the Department of the Nord, production is triple what it is in Les Landes for the two plants that are combined both in alternating and in three year cultivation, like wheat and oats. It is five-fold , in the case of plants such as clover, flax, and potatoes, plants which are unable to find a proper place in the three year system. The result of the two systems is shown in a population in the Nord that is more than five times larger than that of Les Landes and which consumes more than six times the value of butchered meat.

It is true that the class of farmers are not alone in benefiting from the surplus of production that is due to their intelligent production. As production costs decrease in relation to output, we see the rate of farm rent and consequently the price of land increasing, so that in the end it is the landowner who reaps the benefit of the superiority of Flemish farmers. This is what restores the balance between the two forms of cultivation. Without this type of moderation, it would be impossible for three-year cultivation to compete with its rival. However the power that exists in this gradual increase in the value of land in attracting to the Nord capital waiting to be invested can be readily understood.

Alternating cultivation is no less powerful in attracting capital that is not seeking capital gains but investment for revenue purposes. Through the abundance and variety of the raw materials it supplies to industry, as well as the increased consumption made possible by densely populated and wealthy regions, it offers manufacturers infinitely greater opportunities than those to be found in regions which are thinly populated, economically deprived, and limited to the production of cereals.

Thus, alternating cultivation attracts everything, population, consumption, capital, education, and industry.

But is not sharecropping an insurmountable obstacle for those countries in which this method of operation has been adopted who now wish to enter the realm of modern agriculture?

As we have already said, sharecropping goes together perfectly with the three year crop rotation system because both of them are inherently inflexible . Action that is always identical does not require a progressive agency. Doubtless a three year farming system implies a great deal of knowledge, but since its procedures are uniform, this knowledge has been readily set and condensed, so to speak, into a series of proverbial rules transmitted, especially by example, from time immemorial to the present day. A sharecropper with no education or general ideas always knows enough to do as his forebears have done, and the mass of observation that grows from century to century even allows for some advance in execution when a system that is on the whole inflexible is followed.

By contrast, the essential characteristic of alternating agriculture is flexibility, or at least diversity. Here the division into fields may vary from period to period in line with consumer needs and has to vary from canton to canton in line with the requirements of the soil. It is then his own experience and not that of his ancestors that a farmer has to consult for the rules governing his decisions.

When you assume that the alternating system based on a simple division of fields was also able, like grazing, or three year crop rotation, to become a new form of routine handed down from father to son to future generations through the sole channel of experience and custom, it is still a fact that the initial example of this cannot be provided by sharecroppers. It was not the slaves who shepherded the herds of the nomadic Tartar tribes to pasture who would have introduced them to three year crop rotation, and no more would sharecroppers, steeped in ancient experience, be the ones to take farming forward into a new phase.

Sharecroppers lack three characteristics to enable them to become the instruments of a revolution like this: knowledge, power, and will .

Alternating cultivation requires more knowledge than three year crop rotation. It involves a greater number of plant varieties, for each of which knowledge of how to prepare the soil, how to sow, grow, harvest, and store them is required. The same holds for the production of fertilizer. Animal husbandry also plays a greater part and has to involve more advanced breeds. Finally, the art of making use of animal products develops on a larger scale. Where do you think sharecroppers can gain such knowledge? In books? They cannot read and do not even speak the language the books are written in. From example? They have no other example to follow than three year crop rotation. Through their relationship with their landowners? They instinctively know that while landowners are superior to them from the point of view of scientific knowledge, they nevertheless know less than sharecroppers do from the practical point of view. Without knowing how to make this distinction, they understand and sense that scientific knowledge is not enough in practical terms.

Even if sharecroppers knew how to change their method of farming, they could not . The exploitation of an estate in line with new procedures requires a considerable increase in capital: the acquisition of more advanced agricultural machinery, a greater stock of seed, an increase in the number of draught animals, and the enlargement and improved distribution of barns and stables. Who will supply this additional capital? Whether it is the landowner or the sharecropper, this change in the ratio of their contributions to the common task is bound to bring about a corresponding change in their agreement in order to ensure a new and equitable relationship. Such accounting is all the more essential in that, without it, the cost prices of a host of products, in particular, animal products, such as meat, milk butter, cheese, wool, etc., which are nevertheless an essential and important sector of income in alternating cultivation, are impossible to estimate. In any event, bookkeeping is beyond the capabilities of all sharecroppers and the majority of landowners.

Finally, that the sharecropper does not have an ever-growing will to innovate is something in no need of proving. We often hear agronomists, and especially the more enthusiastic ones (the so-called agronomaniacs ) 460 bewailing the disinclination and the force of inertia that they encounter in their sharecroppers with regard to their projects for improvement. What is not noted enough is the usefulness, I might even say the necessity, for such resistance. The attachment to old customs that nature has so deeply built into the hearts of this class is the sole guarantee we have against reckless innovation. Without it, changes that are accepted as soon as they are conceived would inevitably undermine the very source of food supplies. And is it not fortunate that will is lacking where, as we have shown, knowledge and power are also lacking?

These are the reasons that have led me to oppose sharecropping in the past, and what I have said above shows that I still consider it incompatible, at least in the way it is organized currently, with the introduction of advanced farming in the country.

Should it then be concluded that it is a matter of urgency that tenant farming replace it? This, it must be said, would be a hasty deduction. First of all, a country does not change its system of organization and its customs as easily as we replace a worn-out garment with a new one. In the majority of Départements, nothing has been set up to accommodate tenant farming, as regards its most advantageous aspects. The class of enterprising and enlightened men who would have, as tenant-farmers, to run the farms, does not exist in our country and the division of the land into very small holdings is not likely to attract them. The day laborers, the people who make up the basic category of agricultural labor, are not increasing in number and it is doubtful, to say the least, that their arrival in the countryside is to be desired. Finally, the practice of landowners receiving their rent in kind has created attitudes that cannot be changed without upsetting all the relationships that, properly speaking, make up the social life of a country.

So, while it might be proved that, from the farming point of view, tenant farming is better than sharecropping, it would be truly utopian to put it forward to the country as being an essential step in achieving alternating cultivation .

But if sharecropping, which is more inflexible by nature than tenant farming, is inferior to it from the technical point of view, if this inferiority becomes even more marked in these critical times in which profound change, we might even say a major revolution in farming methods, calls for the intervention of knowledge and capital, the question has also to be asked whether this inferiority also exists in other aspects, in particular in the social aspect, which is by far the more important. Sharecropping and tenant farming interact in quite different ways with the laws of population and those governing the distribution of wealth. If we concede that tenant farming creates more products, it remains to be seen whether it distributes them as fairly between all those who have contributed to them and whether it puts as powerful a brake on a disruptive increase in population, which all economists and statesmen consider to be the greatest scourge that can afflict the human race since, just in itself, it implies all the others.

It is with distaste that I raise these serious questions. Nevertheless, interest in them is so pressing, in particular for our South of France, that I am obliged to ask for a moment of your attention. Besides, how could I advocate the establishment of a school for sharecroppers after showing this form of organization in its most unfavorable light if I did not also discuss its good, useful, and beneficial aspects with regard to the populations in whose heart it has been so powerful a presence.

The income from production is shared between three sectors of people in farming regions: landowners, tenant farmers and farm laborers.

The proportions of this sharing out are clearly far from being perpetual . In proportion as an intelligently run operation succeeds in improving the soil and increasing production, landowners take advantage of the competition between farmers by raising the rent for the land each time a lease is renewed, so that the farmers benefit from the increase in wealth only temporarily, between one renewal of the lease to the next. In the end, the results of progress come to be realized only in the pockets of the idle landowner, the person who has contributed nothing to it. The situation of the tenant farmer is at a standstill, if it does not actually deteriorate, under excessive competition. 461 Doubtless it will be said that there is also competition between the holdings to be let to tenant farmers, but it is obvious that the number of these is limited, whereas the number of men capable of heading up a farm is bound to increase constantly with the growth of education and capital formation.

This inequality in the distribution of all the products resulting from successive improvements to the soil and advances in farming methods is more disadvantageous still to manual laborers.

Competition by a natural process reduces wages to the level required to support a worker. This is as true for farming as it is for manufacturing. If a well-run spinning mill succeeds in producing better results, it does not follow at all that the wages of the laborers will increase. If the improvement takes place in isolation, it benefits the entrepreneur. If it is common to all spinning mills, it benefits the consumer. As for wages, they do not change. The entrepreneur in fact does not set them in accordance with his profits but in line with the rate at which competition provides him with hands, and if the country offers them to him at one franc a day, then no matter how much his profits increase, this will not persuade him to give two francs out of the goodness of his heart.

Things happen in exactly the same way in farming regions. There is even an additional reason for the situation of manual laborers not improving along with improved farming methods. This reason is that, since all of the surplus wealth produced goes to the landowner, the tenant farmer is not in a better situation even though the farm is more productive. Saving on the costs of production is an essential imperative for him that never slackens, and the first and most important economy, as well as the most obvious, is to reduce the labor force as far as possible and to pay the cost of the labor that cannot be saved upon only at the lowest rate the competition between day laborers allows him to reach.

For wages to increase, therefore, one of two things is needed. 462 The first is that the manpower demanded should increase progressively with output or that the population of laborers should be limited so as to limit the supply of labor, thus raising its price.

But from either point of view we see that this class is put into the most unfavorable situation. In the case of the demand for labor, this tends to decrease rather than increase with the progress in farming methods, for this progress consists precisely in having work done by machines. And, as for supply , there can be no doubt that it tends constantly to increase, for it is in the nature of wage-labor that it gives rise to lack of foresight and encourages a destabilizing increase in population. This is what modern social science has both understood perfectly and shown. In all eras this fact has been vaguely felt, hence the forceful expression, the proletariat , which was applied to the class which lives off wages, long before the laws of population were subjected to the scrutiny of science.

Thus, while accepting that tenant farming was a system of farming more favorable than sharecropping to advancing agriculture and increasing wealth, one cannot deny that with regard to the distribution of products, it contains the greatest of all disadvantages. Far from calling on all classes of labourers to share products equitably, far from enabling them all to share in the benefits of farming progress so that the increase in wealth is nothing other that an increase in well-being that is fairly distributed, on the contrary, it ends up merely by enriching the wealthy and impoverishing the poor, constantly increasing the gap between these two extremes in the social scale, and thus creating that incommensurable distance that separates extreme opulence and extreme poverty.

It is not just well-being that is distributed so unequally under the law of tenant farming, but also education and influence, even though these are not the result of wealth.

A idle landowner who is totally ignorant of farming methods distances himself from the land that provides him with a living, and often has not even visited it. He lives in large towns at the center of civilization and political affairs. 463

The tenant farmer, in truth, has to cultivate his mind and keep abreast of progress in farming. All the expertise is concentrated in him. However, you should note that the positive results of his education, confiscated periodically by the landowner, leave the tenant farmer in the same situation at each renewal of his lease. He is thus enclosed in a circle he cannot break out of, and both his ideas and influence cannot extend beyond his trade .

As for the day laborer, forever reduced to a wage that allows him to live, he is little concerned with the farming methods of which he is a mindless cog. It is even to be doubted whether the sort of subtle education that comes to him externally can be held to be beneficial, since this does not arise from his position, is not likely to improve him, and perhaps will serve only to make him appreciate the horror of it all.

Actually, the whole sector is bound to be affected by the constant absence of landowners and their families in the farming areas. Freed from any personal participation in farming work, they have weakened the links attaching them to the soil as far as they can and they disappear without a backward glance to consume their incomes far away. A quarter, or perhaps a third of the products are thus lost to the region that has produced them, and the vacuum caused by this constant absenteeism is all the more irreparable because it cannot be filled in the long run by the work carried out by tenant farmers and day laborers, since, as we have seen, this work serves only to increase the part played by absenteeism .

For this reason, travelers who go through the rich or rather the fertile regions subject to tenant farming have trouble reconciling the beauty of the crops in the fields and the wealth of products with the poverty of the region: deserted chateaux, farms whose progress is seemingly barred by some inexorable law, and a jumble of hovels in which the race of day laborers swarm. There is an incurable antagonism between the three classes that tend the soil; 464 landowners who often have never seen the land that finances their opulent life at court, tenant farmers who deplore the sight of their rich harvests, a certain sign of the increase in charges that hangs over their heads, and illiterate day laborers without interest in the success of their work, without foresight, and without hope in a future which, for them, holds no seed of improvement. Such is the real situation to which these regions have been reduced by tenant farming, a system very much over extolled because it is too often considered solely from the point of view of production and the interest of the landowner.

At first sight, it appears that there is a slight difference and nothing more between tenant farming and sharecropping . To rent the land the former pays a fixed rental, while the latter hands over a charge in proportion to the products in kind. It is nevertheless certain that from these slight differences two totally separate social orders arise.

Farm leases are essentially temporal. They are renewed every twenty-one, eighteen, or sometimes nine years, and even, as in Ireland, every year. 465 If the tenant farmer becomes rich and succeeds in his business , the farm lease periodically drags him back to his initial situation.

Sharecropping leases 466 are essentially perpetual in nature, or at least their duration depends totally on the activity, the spirit of order, and probity of the sharecropper in question. Provided that he works the land well and faithfully carries out the conditions of his contract, there is no reason he should be thrown out and under no circumstances are his charges increased. There is thus a place for hope in the sharecropper's heart. He will benefit from all of his efforts and each drop of sweat that falls from his brow will be rewarded. He will be able to show off his fields with pride and confidence to his landowner and has no fear that the success of his crops will arouse the latter's greed .

Sharecropping has divided cultivatable land into portions that one family is capable of farming. In sharecropping regions, there are thus no day laborers or proletarians. Whoever puts his hand to the plough has a stake in the result. Moral qualities and intellectual advancement are not useless or perhaps disastrous baggage for anyone. Doing work with greater wisdom and perseverance does not just improve the lot of this kind of farmer in the short run and increase his landowner's fortune in the long run, but it also permanently improves the farmer's own situation and that of his family.

In sharecropping, the distribution of wealth obviously takes place more equitably. The family that supplies the capital and the one that supplies the labor share the result in proportions that, once they have been set, are immutable. Depending on the difficulties of the labor, its share is half, two-thirds, three-fifths, and often three-quarters. This is the real association 467 of capital and labor that has so long been sought by the utopians of our century. Once the share due to labor has been agreed, the farmer just has to act, increase his output, and improve his situation, and his reward will be assured indefinitely.

From the point of view of the population, the sharecropping regions appear to be in a very favorable situation.

There has been a great outcry against the doctrines of Malthus recently. 468 It might be supposed that this famous economist had imposed on the human race the laws that he has merely recorded. You might as well criticize Newton for having set out the laws of gravity, since it is by virtue of these laws that we are hurt by falling bodies or by our own falls.

The fact is that over-population has always and will always be the greatest scourge of the human race, because it involves all the others.

Another equally well-known fact is that a tendency to increase in a disorganized fashion is mainly seen in the class of people that live on wages. The foresight required to postpone marriage has little influence on these people because the damage caused by excessive competition is perceived by them only dimly, and at a future time ostensibly not much to be feared.

It is thus most favorable for a region to be organized so as to exclude wage labor . 469 In sharecropping regions, marriages are arranged principally in accordance with farming needs; they are more frequent when, for some reason, there are vacancies that hamper work and become rarer when these vacancies are filled. Here, the relationship between the extent of the estate and the number of hands, a state of affairs that is easy to observe, operates very much like foresight and does so in a more certain manner. For this reason let us see whether, if nothing occurs to create job opportunities for an excess in population, it remains stationary. Our southern Départements are proof of this.

Is this the same in tenant-farming countries? England and Ireland are there to provide us with an answer. We do not know what is growing faster on the other side of the Channel: production, population, or pauperism . Well, at first glance it seems contradictory for this triple development to occur simultaneously. A growing population can obviously be explained by a gradual increase in production and vice versa, but this increase in poverty is a phenomenon that appears to contradict the two others, for on one hand how can a surplus in products not lead to the well-being of producers, and on the other how does poverty not restrict the population? These apparent anomalies are explained by wage-labor , which factories and farming vie with one another to develop in the British Isles. Wage labour dictates that products are distributed unequally, thus explaining the simultaneous increase in wealth and poverty. It neutralizes consideration of the future with regard to marriage, thus explaining the simultaneous development of the population and pauperism.

Is this result consistent with philanthropy? Is a badly organised expansion of that part of the population which lives precariously on wage-labor, a human resource constantly changing and thrown off balance for a plethora of reasons; such as increasingly vigorous competition in the supply of labor, a steady drop in the value of wages to the point where workers, as in Ireland, are reduced to living on a few potatoes stolen from pigs' troughs, 470 the end point of the human race?

Fortunate then are the regions within which the largest and most general of all industries, the one that occupies the vast majority of workers, is based on an organization that excludes wage labor . Let us refrain from meddling with sharecropping, this association of labour and capital, which closes the door against two of the most terrible scourges of the human race: over-population and pauperism.

From a moral point of view, sharecropping offers certain further incontestable advantages. The common interest it establishes between landowners and sharecroppers, the force that impels them toward an identical goal along parallel pathways, prevents and forestalls feelings of mistrust and envy, the dull but bitter resentment that gnaws away at wage earning working class , exploding from time to time into riots, "Rebecca-ism," 471 or incendiary action, divers symptoms of the same suffering. In regions in which sharecropping predominates, doubtless there are a variety of degrees of wealth, but there is also common opportunities and prospects. Sharecroppers win or lose for the same reasons that enrich or impoverish their master. Each side has an interest in getting on well, joining forces to overcome bad days by helping each other, and devoting the surplus in good years to making improvements. Everyday relationships are established that are almost those of a family connection between the families of landowners and those of sharecroppers. Masters like to find out about the situation of their farmers; they intervene with advice in marriage projects, and accelerate or slow them down depending on the requirements of work or, what amounts to the same thing, social interest. 472 They take account of good reputation when a new worker, who wants to head up a new farm, is introduced into their estate, thus giving a better opportunity of growth and enlargement to those families with the best reputation. When sharecroppers come to offer their landowners the harvest chicken or Easter eggs, their meeting is cordial and affectionate. They have no reason to suspect each other of sinister ulterior motives and sharecroppers are able to indulge in praising the fine harvest and the fertility of the soil without having to fear either enflaming their master's greed or giving him the dreadful idea of changing the clauses of their contract. I have seen a landowner invite his sharecroppers on New Year's Day, in accordance with an ancient custom, and see his table surrounded by one hundred and twenty heads of farming enterprises. 473

I have not traveled, 474 I have not been able to compare tenant farming countries with sharecropping ones, but I think that reason is enough to show that they must offer very different prospects. In the first category, there are a few dilapidated chateaux that absenteeism has left silent and empty with farms situated at a great distance and in which education and prosperity cannot break the iron barrier imposed by the tenant farming system; villages inhabited solely by laborers, in which doubtless misery, filth, a lack of care for the future and the lack of a culture of work are the sad lot of the proletariat. This is not the cold physiognomy that sharecropping imprints on our landscapes. The division of the territory into small estates increases the number of houses, gardens, stands of trees, pastures, fields, vineyards, and woods, and makes the entire landscape attractive through its variety.

The conclusion drawn from all this is that tenant farming favors production more while sharecropping favors the distribution of wealth. One appears superior from the purely agricultural point of view while the other appears to have incontestable advantages from the social one. So if it were possible to extend a proper, sound form of education among the sharecropping class, if sharecropping could be equipped to overcome the barrier separating the three year crop rotation and alternating cultivation, I have no doubt that we would soon see regions in which this form of organization has prevailed come to equal tenant farming ones in the technical sense without exhibiting comparable signs of the triple scourge of absenteeism by landowners, of an inevitable stationary state as regards tenant farmers, and of country labourers being destined to becoming members of the proletariat .

5. T.51 "The Theory of Profit" (26 Feb. 1846, Mem. bord. )↩

Source

T.51 (1846.02.26) "The Theory of Profit" (Théorie du bénéfice), Mémorial bordelais , 26 February 1846. [OC7.11, p. 50-53.] [CW4] 475

Editor's Introduction

After the success of the English Anti-Corn Law League 476 in getting the protectionist Corn Laws repealed in 1846 (the first reading of the Bill passed in January and the final reading passed in June) the French free traders formed their own Free Trade Association in the port city of Bordeaux in 23 February 1846 and then in Paris with the founding of a national organisation on 1 July 1846. 477 Bastiat was made the secretary of the Advisory Board and then editor of their weekly journal Le Libre-Échange which began in November 1846 and lasted until it was closed on 16 April 1848 after 72 issues . 478 Bastiat gave his first public speech on behalf of free trade in Bordeaux on 23 February 1846 three days before this article appeared in a local paper and he quotes from that speech here. 479

The protectionists countered this move by forming their own national organisation the "Association pour la défense du travail national" (Association for the Defense of National Employment) in October 1846 to defend the interests of the protected industrialists and manufacturers. 480 It was led by Antoine Odier (1766-1853) 481 and Pierre Mimerel de Roubaix (1786-1872) 482 who merged several regional protectionist associations together in order to better organise themselves against the newly formed national French Free Trade Association. The protectionist association's journal was Le Moniteur industrial to which Bastiat refers several times during this article. 483 The Association lobbied successfully between March and July 1847 to defeat a major reform of French tariff policy which was being considered by the Chamber of Deputies.

The format of this article follows that of many of Bastiat's "economic sophisms" where he uses a dialogue between two characters with opposing points of view - here the sceptical Mayor of Bordeaux and an iron industry lobbyist who argues for taxes on iron goods imported into the city so his iron making business can enjoy guaranteed profits. The argument is that firms will not invest in starting businesses which employ French or Bordelais citizens unless they are protected from "foreign" competition and are guaranteed a return on their investment by the government. The Industrialist tries to persuade the sceptical Mayor to use the city tolls (the "octroi"), 484 which are normally used to collect taxes levied on food and other goods brought into a town to pay for public works such as streets and lighting, as a form of local "tariff" protection. This is a line of argument which Bastiat was to use again 485 in "The Mayor of Énios" (6 Feb. 1848) but with the roles reversed: the Mayor of a small town, Énios, is the one who goes to the region's Intendant to get permission to use the octroi taxes in this way. He believes that if tariffs are good for France as a whole, since they are supposed to promote national industry, why wouldn't they also be good for his town as well, in order to promote his town's local industry? The Intendant denies the Mayor permission but is forced into the amusing position of defending free trade within France but not externally - which of course was Bastiat's point in writing the story.

We also see here an early example of Bastiat's decision to avoid euphemisms and use what he called "harsh" or "brutal" language to describe the policy of protectionism. In an article he published in the Journal des Économiste s the month before, "Theft by Subsidy", 486 he responded to criticism of his First Series of Economic Sophisms which had just appeared in print that they were "too theoretical, scientific, and metaphysical." His response was to make sure that his future writings could not be accused of this again, which he did by peppering their pages with an "explosion of plain speaking." By this he meant that he would use very blunt, direct, even "brutal" language, such as "theft", "pillage," "plunder," and "parasitism," when describing the activities undertaken by the State which were accepted by most people as perfectly normal and "legal." So, in many of the essays written in 1846 and 1847 which were to end up in Second Series of the Economic Sophisms Bastiat wanted to make it perfectly clear what he thought the state was doing by regulating and taxing French citizens and to call these activities by their "real name," namely theft and plunder. Is this essay on "The Theory of Profit" he uses the word "pillage" repeatedly as part of this revised rhetorical tactic. It is also an indicator of what he was thinking concerning his planned "History of Plunder" in which he regarded the State as engaging in widespread "organised and legal plunder and pillage" of its citizens and taxpayers.

Text

As I was leaving the meeting hall on Monday, 487 a man came up to me and said: I listened to you carefully and you said the following, "At the end of the day, you have to know on what side truth lies. If we are wrong, let protection be taken to its limit. If we are right, let us demand freedom, etc. etc." - Well, Sir, that presumes that freedom and trade restrictions are incompatible.

"I think that this follows from the meaning of the words."

"So you have not read Le Moniteur Industriel ? It shows clearly that freedom, protection, and prohibition can be accommodated very well together according to the theory of profit ."

"What is this theory, then?"

"It is this, in short. Man wants to consume. In order to consume, he has to produce. In order to produce, he has to work, and in order to work he has to have the likelihood of making a profit , or better still, a guaranteed one."

"Very good, and what is the conclusion?"

"The conclusion is very simple; listen to Le Moniteur ! 'What measures should a nation adopt in order to produce a particular good at the highest level of production and by the shortest route possible, in order to have the maximum amount of consumption and well-being? Obviously it has to guarantee the profits for anyone who undertakes such an industry as this. It has to guarantee the profits of the producers.' "

"And how is this to be done?"

"Listen to Le Moniteur again: 'To develop production as far as possible sometimes calls for trade prohibitions, sometimes for tariff protection, and sometimes for free trade.' So you see that Le Moniteur Industriel is no more in favor of prohibition than it is for protection or for freedom."

"In other words, all industries have to gain one way or another. One that naturally yields a profit has to have liberty and competition, and one that naturally produces a loss, has the right to convert this loss into a profit through organized pillage. 488 We could say quite a lot about that. But you remind me of an event that I witnessed recently. Allow me to tell you about it."

"Go on."

"I was with the Mayor when an industry lobbyist came along and this is the conversation I overheard:

The Industrialist: "Mr. Mayor, I have discovered a reddish earth in my garden which appeared to contain iron, and I intend to set up a blast furnace in my home in the center of the town."

The Mayor : "You will ruin yourself."

The Industrialist : "Not at all, I am sure of making money out of it."

The Mayor : "How?"

The Industrialist : "Simply by making a profit."

The Mayor : "Where will the profit lie if you are forced to sell iron at the market rate of say, 12 or 15 francs, that perhaps will cost you 100 or even perhaps 1,000 francs to produce."

The Industrialist : "This is the reason I have come to see you. Give me the power to hold your town's people to ransom, not only until my losses are covered but well beyond that, and you will guarantee a profit for my industry."

The Mayor : "My authority does not extend that far."

The Industrialist : "I beg your pardon, Mr. Mayor, but do you not have a city toll?"

The Mayor : "Yes, and incidentally, I would like to base the town's income on another means of raising revenue."

The Industrialist : " Well then! Put the city toll to work for me; don't allow a single batch of iron to cross the toll booth. The people of Bordeaux will certainly be forced to buy my iron and at my price. "

The Mayor : "All the other producers will object."

The Industrialist : "Give them all the same legal favours.

The Mayor : "Very well. The outcome will be that, just as you will sell very little iron, we will also have very little bread, clothing, or anything else. It will be a regime of the least quantity ."

The Industrialist "What does it matter, if we all make a profit by pillaging each other legally and in an orderly manner?"

The Mayor : "Sir, your plan is a fine one, but the people of Bordeaux will not submit to it.

The Industrialist : "Why not? The French will submit willingly to it. I am asking from the city toll only what others are asking from the Customs Service."

The Mayor : "Well then! If the Customs Service is so obliging, go and talk to it and stop bothering me. The city toll is responsible for raising a tax and not for providing profits for manufacturers."

The Industrialist : "Mr. Mayor, just one more word. Suppose that my request had been successful twenty years ago; you would now have a blast furnace in the town center which would provide a living for at least thirty workers."

The Mayor : "Yes, and Bordeaux would perhaps be reduced to two thousand inhabitants." 489

The Industrialist : "You do understand that, if my proposal had come about, and you repealed the city toll, my thirty workers would now be without a job."

The Mayor : "And Bordeaux would be moving towards becoming once more what it is, a splendid city of one hundred thousand inhabitants."

The Industrialist, going away: ""What it is to deal with a theorist! 490 Not to understand the theory of profit ! But I will go and find the Head of the Customs Service, and my cause may not yet be lost."

6. T.58 & T.49 "Two Articles on Postal Reform II" (April 1846, Mem. bord .)↩

Source

T. 58 (1846.04.23) "Postal Reform" (Réforme postale), Mémorial bordelais , 23 Apr. 1846. [OC7.17, pp. 78-83.] [CW4]

T.49 (1846.04.30) "Postal Reform. 2nd article" (Réforme postale. 2e article), Mémorial bordelais , 30 Apr. 1846. [OC7.18, pp. 83-91.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

For information about Bastiat's interest in postal reform, see the Editor's Introduction to "Two Articles on Postal Reform I", 3 & 6 Aug. 1844, Sentinelle des Pyrénées (above).

First Article (23 April 1846, Mem. bord .) (T2, FN)

What has become of France's energy, her audacity and initiative, which so struck the rest of the world with admiration? Have we all shrunk to the size of Lilliputians? Has the intrepid giant turned into a timid and wavering dwarf? Is our national pride content for people to say of us: "they were once the premier swordsmen in the world?" Have we decided to turn our backs on the great glory of bravely marching down the path of reforms based solidly upon truth and justice?

We might be tempted to believe this on reading the inadequate program published by the Commission of the Chamber, emphatically entitled: Postal Reform . 491

The State has seized control of the transport and delivery of letters. I do not intend to dispute its taking over this sensitive service, on the grounds of the individual's right to engage in various activities, since the State carries it out with everyone's consent.

However doesn't it follow from the fact that since, for reasons of order and security, the State has decided to deprive its citizens of the ability to send each other messages as they please, it should not ask them to pay anything over and above the service provided?

Let us take the roads. They are used in the circulation of people and goods and such a high value has been attached to them that, after devoting huge sums to constructing them, the State hands them over at no cost for citizens to use.

Can it really be maintained that the circulation of ideas, the exchange of feelings, the transmission of news and relations between father and son, brother and sister, mother and daughter, are less valuable in our eyes?

Yet not only does the State get paid for the service of delivering letters, but it also subjects this delivery to an unequal and exorbitant tax.

I accept that the Treasury needs revenue. However, it will also be agreed that relationships between parents and their children, the outpourings of friendships, or the anxieties in families ought to be the last things to be the subject of taxation .

How very odd! As a result of a double inconsistency, a fiscal character is given to the Post Office but not to the Customs Service, 492 with the result that both are diverted from their rational objective.

A citizen certainly has the right to say to the State: "You cannot, without infringing my dearest-held rights, rob me of the ability to send in any way I choose a letter on which perhaps my fortune, my life, my honor, or my peace of mind depends. All that you can in justice do is to persuade me to turn to you voluntarily , by offering me the means of correspondence that are fastest, safest, and most economical."

If the principle were laid down (I ask for your indulgence for this very unparliamentary expression) that the State should not profit from the delivery of letters, the solution to all the problems raised by postal reform would be found with the greatest ease, for I have heard only one objection to a lower and uniform rate: the Treasury would lose so many millions of francs (to lose, in administrative language, is to fail to earn).

Genuine recovery of the costs incurred and a uniform charge for delivery, 493 these are the two subjects to which I will try to call the reader's attention.

But above all, I consider that I have to pay my full respects to the postal authorities. It is said that in England, it is in the Post Office that resistance to reform is organized. In France, on the contrary, reform seems to have arisen within the postal bureaucracy itself, if it is true that the first publication in which this subject has been discussed has to be attributed to a senior civil servant in the Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 494 Never have I read a work that is freer of fiscal and bureaucratic attitudes, more imbued with ideas that are elevated, generous, or philanthropic and in which from each page emanates a love of progress and the public good.

Genuine recovery of the costs incurred. — If I am to be faithful to the principle that I laid down above, I have to ascertain first of all what the charge or rather the cost of each letter ought to be.

In 1844, 108 million letters were in circulation and, with a reduced charge, it would be impossible for this not to exceed 200 million.

Expences increased to fr. 30,000,000

From which should be deducted:

Packet ships to the Levant 495 fr. 5,200,000

Revenue from seats on mail coaches fr. 2,300,000

Transfers of money fr. 1,100,000

Payments from continental offices fr. 400,000

Revenue from journals fr. 2,000,000

Total: fr. 11,000,000

Remainder attributable to letters fr. 19,000,000

Furthermore, the administrative costs have to be charged rigorously in the ratio of one third of the additional services.

It remains true that 200 million letters at 10 centimes, produce 20 million, more than cover their cost.

We should note that at this price, letters would still pay a tax of 5 centimes, or 100 percent, since they would defray the cost of transporting government letters that equal their weight for free.

In view of this latter consideration, I say openly that if we did not live in an age in which we appear to fear the good when it appears to us in a slightly absolute form and to be quite relaxed about the dose of pain which would make it acceptable to us, I would say that a simple letter should cost only 5 centimes, 496 and certainly the advantages of the reform would then be so total that we should perhaps not have any hesitation. But let us make it 10 centimes, half to pay for the cost and half to pay for the tax.

The first advantage of this reasonable pricing, I hardly need to say, would be the quite proper satisfaction given to the most refined and worthy of people's needs concerning the moral order.

The second, to increase the number of transactions and business dealings far in excess of what would be necessary to make up, through other channels, for the loss of the current net revenue from the Post Office to the Treasury.

The third, to bring the sending of letters within the reach of all. The Chamber's Commission sets the cost of letters to soldiers at 10 centimes. 497 It is forgetting one thing, which is that, out of 34 million inhabitants, there are 8 million who are also soldiers, the soldiers of industry, 498 who once they have met the basic necessities of life, have not a sou left in their pockets.

Finally, a fourth and invaluable advantage would be to return to each French citizen the right to deliver letters and not to to create arbitrarily an entire category of artificial crimes.

I am surprised that people are not struck by the serious harm that there always is in legally defining actions that are innocent in themselves and often praiseworthy as misdemeanors and crimes. And in this case, see what a series of absurd and immoral actions you are forced to engage in when you base the Post Office on the principle of raising revenue.

The duty paid on letters is fiscal and is therefore bound to exceed by far the cost of the service provide d; therefore individuals will be encouraged to compete with the State; therefore the State will deprive them of an innocent and sometimes invaluable freedom; and therefore the State will have to impose a criminal penalty.

And what a penalty! Is it possible to read Article 7 of the Commission's draft legislation without feeling overwhelming disgust? 499 An act of simple kindness punished as though it were a heinous crime! Carrying a letter liable to a fine that may reach 6,000 francs! How many crimes are there against property or even against persons which carry penalties like this?

With a charge of 10 centimes, or better, one of 5 centimes, you have no need to create crimes. The list of these is long enough already. You are able to give everyone his freedom back. People will not take the trouble of looking for unreliable opportunities to send mail when the ones they have available to them are the most economic, convenient, direct, certain, and rapid.

Since I have mentioned punishments, I want to emphasise something in the Commission's draft which I am certain will outrage public feelings.

A person is engaged in delivering a letter. In itself, this act is not a criminal act. It is not the nature of things but the law, and the law alone, which has made it so. This person can be punished by a 6,000 franc fine and what is more, by another piece of legal fiction, the punishment may fall upon a third party who is not even aware of the fact (under article 8). 500

A civil servant uses his counter-signature improperly. This is also fraud, and what is worse, fraud of the worst possible kind, as it is premeditated, calculated, and intentional. What is more, there is falsification committed by a public official in public records. There is abuse of confidence and violation of an oath of office. The fine for this is 25 francs! What should I say about article 10: 501 the authorities may come to an agreement or compromise concerning any offense against these regulations both before and following a verdict, etc. ? Statements like this carry their own commentary.

So, transactions made difficult, feelings upset, family ties loosened, business dealings hampered, freedom restricted, grossly unequal charges, fictional crimes, and arbitrary punishment: these are the inevitable consequences of the principle of revenue raising introduced into the law on postal services.

For this reason recourse has to be made to this other principle, that the Post Office ought to provide the service for which it is intended and at the lowest price possible, that is to say, one that covers its costs.

It remains for me to discuss the uniform charge for delivery, together with the means of covering the Treasury's deficit. This will be the subject of another article.

Second Article (30 April 1846, Mem. bord.)

The uniform charge of delivery for letters has so many incontestable and obvious advantages that you have to close your eyes deliberately in order not to see them.

The following objection is raised: "A uniform charge is contrary to the very principle you have stated, that of simply paying for the service received, because it is fair to pay more in proportion to the extra cost involved.

Apparent equality would be none other than actual inequality."

However, do not we all, in everyday life, write letters to destinations that are sometimes distant and sometimes quite close? Equality is based on this notion, and nothing stops an average being taken of all the distances a letter may be considered to have covered. 502

Wherever, in similar cases, a uniform charge is established for the delivery of journals or money, the correct formula must have been found, since nobody objects to it.

What is more, there comes a point at which, in practice everything has to come to a halt, even the strictest justice, and this is when such microscopic differences, such infinitely tiny and minute divisions are reached, that putting them into practice is a burden for everyone. Does the Commission's system claim to achieve mathematical equality? Are letters delivered at eight o'clock charged at a higher price than those delivered at nine? Is it governed by the ratio existing between one recipient who lives at a distance of 39 kilometers and another at 40?

Therefore when we speak of equality, what must be understood is an equality that is possible and practicable and which, for example, does not require change to be given for a centime.

And this is precisely what would happen with a system of graduated charges if account were taken of the minutely scaled, unreal conception of fairness it hides behind.

For it has been proved that the cost of transport, the cost that affects letters in different ways, alters the cost from one zone to another by a mere ½ centime. 503

But since it is in the name of equality and equity that the Commission has decided in favor of a graduated charge, let us examine its system from this point of view.

First of all, it is based on the principle that the Post Office ought to be a fiscal instrument and that, while the State exhausts its revenues in facilitating the circulation of goods, it ought to create a source of revenue for itself from the circulation of sentiment, affection, and ideas.

It follows from this that there are three elements in the delivery of a letter:

1. A tax.

2. The recovery of costs common to all letters.

3. The covering of costs that vary with distance.

It is clear that, with regard to the first two elements, the charge for all letters should be uniform and that a graduated payment can arise equitably, only in the case of the third.

It is therefore necessary to determine its size.

The general costs common to all letters, administration, inspection, monitoring, etc. come to 12 million, which we can reduce to 10 since part of these costs is absorbed by services outside the subject with which we are dealing, such as the transport of fifty thousand travelers, the transport of money, packet ships, etc. 504

Transport costs come to 17,800,000 francs, which can also be reduced to 10 million, as we have seen in the previous article, if those not related to mail are deducted, as they should be.

These costs have to be spread over:

875,000 kilograms of letters amounting to 116 million ordinary letters

1,000,000 kilograms of newspapers and printed matter, 133 million letters

1,000,000 kilograms of business documents, 133 million letters

Total 382 million letters

Or in round numbers 400 million ordinary letters.

So we have 10 million francs of fixed costs spread over 400 million letters, which gives for each 2½ centimes

10 million francs of graduated costs add to the cost price an average of 2½ centimes

Total 5 centimes

Finally, as the average cost of a letter today is 42½ centimes, it follows that the proportion of each of the three elements in this cost is as follows:

Fixed costs 2½ centimes

Graduated costs 2½

Tax 37½

Total 42 ½ centimes

If, as the partisans of the radical reform demand, the purely fiscal element is eliminated, delivery would be set at 5 centimes, the cost price. In this case, the State would have to subsidize the delivery of official correspondence.

Or, if 10 centimes were adopted, letters from individuals would still pay a tax sufficient to cover the cost of the public service.

In either case, a uniform charge is obligatory since the transport costs, the only ones that could possibly justify a graduated charge, average only ½ centime. The result is that the shortest distance costs 1¼ centimes and the longest 5 centimes.

The rate based on this principle should therefore be as follows:

Fixed costs

Graduated costs

Total or rate charged

Zone 1

Zone 2

Zone 3

Zone 4

Zone 5

2 ½

1 ¼

1 6/8

2 ½

3 ¾

4 3/8

6 ¼

7 ½

This rate is obviously unrealizable. It would be no less so if a fiscal charge were added, since it would have to be immutable, for example, 20 centimes. And in this case, we would have the monstrous rate of:

Zone 1: 23 ½ centimes;

Zone 2: 24 3/8 centimes;

Zone 3: 25 centimes, etc.

Well, what has the Commission done, in the name of equality? It has made the tax unequal, and its rate when broken down gives the following results:

General costs

Graduated costs

Tax

Total charge proposed

Zone 1

Zone 2

Zone 3

Zone 4

Zone 5

2 ½

1 ¼

1 3/8

2 ½

5 ¼

6 ¼

15 5/8

33 ¾

42 ½

Was I not right to say that the Commission's system established a tax that was as unequal as it was exorbitant, since for some people it was twice and for others ten times the cost of the service provided?

Thus serious equality exists only in uniformity. However, a uniform charge implies a nominal charge and, so to speak, one that is reduced to a practical minimum.

Twenty centimes has been bandied about. But at this rate a category of letters at 10 centimes would be needed (those that circulate within the radius of a post office), hence the requirement of sorting, assessing duty, and consequently the impossibility of ever achieving a system based upon compulsory stamping.

I have just uttered the word compulsory stamping. 505 It is possible only with a charge of 10 centimes, or better still 5 centimes, and the advantages of this are so obvious that it ought to be a matter of surprise if the objection of the loss to the Treasury prevailed, as though the Treasury were not the general public.

Let us calculate what the current work of the Post Office is and what it would be after the reform as proposed to us by the Commission. One hundred letters are posted. Each of them, in terms of distance, may come into eleven zones and, with regard to weight, nine classes, which raises the number of combinations to ninety-nine for each letter. Here we have the Post Master, consulting his table and his scales in turn for each letter, required to check 9,900 possible alternatives in a few minutes. After this, he notes the weight on one corner and the charge in the center of the address. 506

Is postage needed? He will take the money and give change, note the address in I do not know how many registers, wrap the letter in a form that states, for the third or fourth time, the name of the recipient, the place of departure, the place of arrival, the weight, the charge, and the number.

Then comes delivery. There are other interminable accounting procedures between the Post Master and the postman, the postman and the recipient, and a continuous series of inspections and more paperwork upon paperwork.

What should I say with regard to the work resulting from rejections, overcharging and undercharging, and general accounting; this masterpiece of complication, intended to ensure the compliance of postal workers at all levels,? Is this really necessary?

Is it not odd that millions are spent to save one hour by speeding up mail delivered by coaches and yet more millions are spent to have the distributors of mail waste this hour?

With compulsory stamping, all this slowness, complication, and paperwork, all these rejections, the overpayments and underpayments found, the sorting, the charges, the accounting that takes a prodigious amount of material and finance will all suddenly disappear in a trice. The Post Office and registration will sell envelopes and stamps at 5 or 10 centimes and that will be the end of it.

The objection will be made that it would be arbitrary to deprive senders of the ability to send a letter that is not stamped.

They will not be prevented from doing this. Let us remember that, under these arrangements, they are entitled to send their letters in any way they like, and therefore they cannot complain if the Post Office is determined to remain in control of the means in order to make the service as rapid and economical as possible.

Let us be frank. From a moral point of view, and the point of view of civilization, business, and personal sentiment as regards convenience, simplicity, and the speed of the service, in a word, in the interest of justice and true equality, there can be no possible objection to a uniform and moderate charge.

The loss of revenue! That is the sole and unique obstacle.

The loss of revenue! That is why a huge and unequal tax strikes at the communication of ideas, the transmission of news, anxieties of the heart, and the torment of absence! That is why our Law Codes are swollen with fictional crimes and real punishments. That is why the time gained with the speed of the mail coaches is lost in the delivery of letters. That is why the service is overloaded with intractable complications! That is why it is subject to a system of accounts based on 40 million divided into amounts of 40 centimes, each of which gives rise to at least a dozen book keeping entries! 507

But in the end, what is the amount of this loss?

Let us take it to be 20 million francs.

People will doubtless agree that this sum, left in the hands of taxpayers, would be used to buy sugar, tobacco, and salt and that this would reduce the loss to the Treasury.

They will also agree that the frequency and ease of communications, by increasing business, will have a favorable effect on all the sources of public revenue.

Moreover, the number of letters cannot fail to increase from year to year.

Finally, once the service is simplified to a such a degree, it will certainly enable considerable savings to be made.

Once all these savings have been taken into account, let us suppose there is still a loss of 10 million francs.

The question is to know whether you can use 10 million more usefully, and I am bold enough to challenge you to show me in the budget, as huge as it is, 508 an item of expenditure that is better understood.

Seriously then, at a time when you are spending 1 billion to facilitate the circulation of people and goods, are you really hesitant to sacrifice 10 million to facilitate the circulation of ideas!

Will you not ask yourself whether it is wise to overlook revenue of 10 million when it is a question of giving the general public so many inestimable advantages?

For if the number of letters merely doubles, who would be able to put a figure on the value of the business carried out, the human longings satisfied, or the anxiety dispelled by this increase in correspondence?

And is it a negligible matter to remove from your law codes illusionary crimes, arbitrary punishments, and the immoral manoeuverings between administrative caprice and the decrees of the courts?

Is it a negligible matter to hand over to a poor laborer the letter from his son for which he has waited so long, without snatching from him the profit from fifteen hours of heavy work, almost all of it for tax?

Is it a negligible matter to refrain from reducing a destitute widow to leaving the letter that will tell her whether her daughter is still alive at the post office for two weeks, so as to scrape together the 24 sous demanded (of which 22 are pure tax)?

This very day, I read in Le Moniteur that the figure for public revenue was increasing each quarter.

Why is it then that the time is never right for the most urgent reforms not to be postponed or spoiled by this eternal consideration: the loss of revenue?

Above all, do you absolutely need 10 million francs? You have one easy way of raising this sum. Return to the true nature of things by doing these two things. At the same time as you remove the fiscal nature of the postal tax, restore it to the Customs Service. Merely reduce duties on iron, coal, cattle and flax by one quarter.

The Treasury and the general public will benefit from this. Each of these reforms will facilitate the other; you will have paid homage to two principles of eternal justice and your future electoral manifestos will at least be based on something more substantial than "order with freedom" and "peace with honor", those commonplace sentiments which, if they make no commitment to anything, will not mislead anyone either.

7. T.64 "On Competition" (JDE, May 1846)↩

Source

T.281 (1846.??) "Competition" (Concurrence), Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle: répertoire universel des sciences, des lettres et des arts avec la biographie de tous les hommes célèbres , ed. Ange de Saint-Priest (Paris: Au bureau de l'Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle, Impr. Beaulé, Lacour, Renoud et Maulde, 1846). Tome huitième, pp. 389-400. Probably early 1846. Republished as "On Competition" in JDE, May, 1846. See T. 64. Not in OC. Revised for EH, 1st ed. chap. 10.

T.64 (1846.05.15) "On Competition" (De la concurrence), JDE , May 1846, T. XIV, no. 54, pp. 106-22; also EH chap. 10. 2nd half very similar, 1st half quite different. A note states that this article was written for l'Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle (no date given). [DMH] [CW4]??

Editor's Introduction

We know that Bastiat had ambitious plans to write a treatise on economic and social theory before he came to Paris. 509 These plans firmed up at the beginning of 1846 when he began to get some recognition from his colleagues and peers with the successful publication of his second book, Economic Sophisms , in January 1846, and his appointment to the Academy of of Moral and Political Sciences on 24 January. Although he became increasingly busy setting up a Free Trade Association, first with a regional one in Bordeaux in February and then a national one in Paris in May, he also found time to begin publishing articles which would eventually be turned into chapters in the treatise Economic Harmonies (Jan. 1850). In 1846 he published two articles, one "On Competition" in the first half of the year (which would become the final chapter 10 in the first edition), and a second "On Population" in the second half of the year (which he would substantially rewrite and which would become chapter 16 in the expanded second edition which was published by his friends in July 1851 after his death).

Both articles were written for an Encyclopedia edited by Ange de Saint-Priest 510 before they were revised slightly and republished in the JDE also in 1846 (May and October). They were then revised again, this time more substantially, probably over the summer of 1849, as Bastiat was working hard getting the manuscript of volume 1 of the Economic Harmonies ready for printing in December 1849. It should be noted that this is another example of Bastiat attempting to popularize economic ideas for a broader audience. Both articles were written while he was also writing what were to become his "economic sophisms."

Bastiat would not return to working on his book until late 1847, no doubt because for much of 1846 and 1847 he was working full-time for the FFTA especially after the launch of its journal Le Libre-Échange in November 1846 which he edited and largely wrote. He would complete three more chapters during 1848 which he published in the JDE, two of which were explicitly called "Economic Harmonies: "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (Jan., 1848) which would become chapter 1; "Economic Harmonies: I, II, and III. The Needs of Man" (Sept., 1848) and "Economic Harmonies IV" (Dec. 1848) which would become chapter 2 "Needs, Effort, and Satisfaction" and chapter 3 "The Needs of Man". 511

After getting distracted again by his political and journalistic duties in early 1849 he was persuaded by his friends and supporters Hortense and Casimir Cheuvreux to use an exclusive lodge in some woods outside Paris (possibly with their financial assistance) over the summer so he could work undisturbed on the project. An early biographer of Bastiat, Ronce, believes that he was able to complete the rest of volume 1 (6 chapters on Exchange, Value, Wealth, Capital, Property and Community, Landed Property) because it was already largely written "in his head" many years before. 512 After writing an impassioned plea "to the youth of France" as an introduction and a rather apologetic conclusion, the book was finally published in late December. 513 He must have secretly known at this time that he would not live to see the work completed as his health was rapidly failing.

We are including this essay here because it was substantially revised for the book and the changes he made are interesting to show how his thinking was evolving during this period. It should also be noted that this is the first part of the book he ever wrote and it appeared as the final chapter in volume 1.

Things to note in this essay include the following.

It was written to counter the growing socialist criticism of competition that it is very destructive and harmful to the interests of workers and that it should be replaced by not-for-profit, worker-run "organisations" and "associations." Bastiat countered by arguing that competition creates a "genuine community" among people and not an "artificial" and "forced" one which the socialists wanted to impose on society. He called competition a "beneficent force" since producers are forced to compete with each other to supply more useful things to consumers at lower cost, thus saving them labour, effort, and discomfort. Furthermore, the accumulation of capital, especially in form of tools, reduces the amount of hard physical labour workers have to do and replaces it with more "intelligent", educated, and productive labour which eventually results in higher wages for workers.

Bastiat provides here for the the first time the story about what things an ordinary worker has in his home or workshop which come from around the world as a result of international trade and open markets. Here he visits a member of the "industrial class" and describes what he sees. Elsewhere, he talks about a "village carpenter" and all the things others, both domestic and foreign, have provided him with to make his life easier and more comfortable. 514

He points out that every person is both a producer and a consumer at the same time, and that the forces of competition are at work in both areas. As a consumer, the worker benefits from the competition between producers to create more things and sell them at the lowest possible prices. As a producer or seller of labour, the worker is also competing with other workers to sell their labour. Any calculation of a person's total welfare has to include the positives and negatives on both sides of the competitive process. Bastiat thought the balance was definitely in the workers' favour.

One of the important additions he would make for the EH1 version of this article was a new section on what he called "les causes perturbatrices" (disturbing factors) 515 which prevent the natural harmony of the market and competition from creating as much wealth as it might in their absence. In this article here, Bastiat points out that " in modern societies, competition is far from fulfilling its natural role; our laws hinder it at least as much as they favor it" and mentions in particular "conquest, monopolies, trade restrictions, privileged positions, high government posts and influence, the trafficking in administrative deals, and loans from public funds" as examples of things which prevent the beneficent effects of competition being felt. He does not yet use the term "disturbing factors," although he had referred to it a few times since his first use in his "Letter to Lamartine" (JDE, Feb. 1845), 516 probably as he had not yet fully incorporated it into his thinking.

In the new introduction he wrote for the EH1 version he argues that the socialists falsely accuse competition of causing the harms which he believes results from these disturbing factors:

While the Socialists see Competition as the cause of all harm, it is in the violations it (competition) receives that one has to look for the disturbing factor which (harms) all the good.

In the four new pages of material he inserted he observes that:

I will now set out general laws that I believe to be harmonious, and I am confident that the reader also will begin to guess at the existence of these laws, that they act in favor of the community and consequently of equality. However, I have not denied that the action of these laws has been profoundly disrupted by disturbing factors. Therefore, if we now find some shocking example of inequality, how can we judge it without being conversant with both the regular laws of social order and the disturbing factors which distort these laws?

Bastiat's use of the term "ceteris paribus" (or "all other things being equal") 517 was not common among political economists of his period. John Stuart Mill used it as early as 1836 in "On the Definition and Method of Political Economy" and in A System of Logic (1843) but there is no evidence that Bastiat was aware of his work. 518 He first used it in a paper he wrote in 1834 on "Reflections on the Petitions from Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Lyons Relating to the Customs Service" (April 1834), 519 and began using it in earnest in 1846 and thereafter. Thus, it appears that Bastiat was an independent early adopter of the phrase and it reveals the depth and growing sophistication of his thinking about economic problems and their solution.

There is also here an early reference to a concept which Bastiat will develop much further in the article "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (January 1848) and an unfinished chapter in EH2 Chapter 22 "Le moteur social", namely "le mécanisme social" (the social mechanism) By this Bastiat meant that society was a "mechanism" (le mécanisme social) or what we might today call a "process," which had moving parts, like a watch or a clock, which consisted of "les rouages" (cogs and wheels), "les ressorts" (springs), and "les mobiles" (the movement, or driving or motive force). Bastiat described the social mechanism as "a prodigiously ingenious mechanism (which) is the subject of study of political economy." Here he mentions it but does not go into much detail except to assert that competition was the driving force of this social mechanism. 520

One of Bastiat's innovations in economic theory was to stress the importance of consumptions as "the end" or purpose of economic activity and that production was "the means" to attain that end, thus turning classical economic theory on its head. We can see several references to this new way of thinking in this essay, particularly in the passage where he states unequivocally that "the real focus of economic science" were "the laws of consumption, and what promotes it, equalizes it, and makes int moral" 521 and chastises the classical economist Pellegrino Rossi for ignoring it.

Related to this stress on consumption was Bastiat's view about the importance of leisure which increasing prosperity made possible. He will return to this question later in 1849 in two important publications, his pamphlet on Capital and Rent (Feb. 1849) and in "Letter No. 4: F. Bastiat to P. J. Proudhon" (26 November 1849) in his debate with Proudhon on Free Credit . 522 In Capital and Rent where he says:

And here we can glimpse one of the finest harmonies in the social world. I am referring to Leisure, not that leisure that the warlike and dominating castes organized for themselves through the plundering of the workers, but the leisure that is the legitimate and innocent fruit of past activity and saving. 523

And in a virtual hymn to the befits of leisure made possible by the accumulated wealth and general prosperity made possible by the free market, he states:

Whatever sincere admiration I have for the admirable laws of social economy, whatever period of my life I have devoted to studying this science, whatever confidence is inspired in me by its solutions, I am not one of those who believe that it embraces the entire destiny of man. Production, distribution, circulation, and the consumption of wealth are not the sum of all things for man. There is nothing in nature that does not have a final aim, and man also has to have a goal other than that of providing for his material existence. Everything tells us this. Where do the sensitivity of his feelings and the ardor of his aspirations, his ability to admire and experience enchantment come from? Whence comes his ability to find in the slightest flower a subject of contemplation, or the excitement with which his senses receive and transmit to his spirit, like bees to the hive, all the treasures of beauty and harmony that nature and art have spread around him? How shall we explain the tears that moisten his eyes when he hears about the slightest act of devotion? What is the origin of that ebb and flow of feeling which his heart fashions, much as it directs his life-blood? Where does his love of humanity and his reaching out for the infinite come from? These are the marks of a noble destiny, which is not limited by the narrow bounds of industrial production. There is a purpose to man's existence. What is it? This is not the place to raise this question. But, whatever it is, what we can say is that he cannot achieve it if, bowed under the yoke of inexorable and constant work, he has no leisure to develop his senses, his affections, his mind, his sense of the beautiful, and what is purest and most elevated in his nature; the germ of which is in all men but in a latent and inert form because of a lack of leisure in all too many of them. 524

There are several significant differences between the two versions of the essay which should be noted. The revised chapter in EH1 is 50% longer (12,000 vs. 8,000 words) than the JDE article. The original Introduction of 21 paragraphs (2,100 words) was replaced in the EH version with a new introduction of 4,000 words in which Bastiat more directly replied to the socialists' criticism, which had been amplified by the February Revolution, that competition was "anarchic" and harmed the interests of the workers. A short new section of 648 words was added with a more detailed discussion of how many people laboured to produce simple everyday objects in order to show that all labour is "cooperative labour." And finally, he added a new section of 1,895 words on the justice of the monetary return to capital, the mutually dependent relationship between the two classes of capitalists and workers, the effect of competition on wages, and the idea that there was a "centrifugal" as well as a "centripetal" force at work in competition. Socialists focussed on the centrifugal force which acted to pull things apart and ignored the centripetal force which drew things together. Bastiat believed both forces needed to be taken into account in order to understand the true impact which competition had on society.

Text

I am going to discuss 525 the effects of one of the laws to which Providence has entrusted the progress of human society, a law which has as its purpose to equalise well-being and material circumstances among the members of the great family of mankind; to bring to the realm of the community the enjoyment of goods which nature seems to have reserved for certain countries, and the conquests of which (nature) have led to the hard work of each century to increase the wealth of the generations which follow; a law rich with social harmonies, 526 huge in its general impact, but often harsh in its operation; a law misunderstood in our time, and which, more than any other, attests to the unmeasurable superiority of the designs of God over the vain and powerless associations of men.

What is this fatal power against which we have struggled in vain ever since the carefree days of our youth began to pass us by? which leaves us no time to learn what is indispensable to know? which flings us onto the tumultuous byways of the world, and which, as it frustrates our desires for the things we hope for, never stops shouting at us: "March! March! He who does not run over other people will get run over"?

My goodness! The response which rises up is immense and unanimous from all corners of the globe, from the palace and the humble cottage, from the largest farms and the sharecroppers, from the construction site and the workshop, from the department store and the corner shop, from the office and the study, from the bank and the office, from the great hall of the stock exchange and the antechambers of government : It is Competition ! Competition !

But what is this beneficent force which achieves this surprising miracle of which my eyes are the witness? I am admitted into the home of one of these men from the industrial class 527 who is annoyed by competition, and what do I see? I see that he consumes in one day what he couldn't manage to produce during the entire span of his life, even if 10,000 lives came to be added to his end-to-end. And when I try to calculate how much time, effort, capital, tools, and vehicles are needed so that his office gets the simple furnishings that I find there; so that these carpets, armchairs, curtains, porcelain china, bronze statues, and crystal ware came to be gathered in this narrow space; 528 when I consider that what is there is only one one thousandth part of what my host has obtained from the general market place of the world; 529 that nevertheless he has stolen nothing from anybody, nor robbed anything from anyone; that he has really produced the value of of these innumerable things without busying his hands with anything else but using a pen, a needle, a shuttle, or a plane; when I come to think of this apparently huge disproportion I have just mentioned between the production and consumption of an individual, that this surprising miracle is becoming a reality, to some degree or another, for the benefit of all mankind scattered across the surface of the globe, how extraordinary, how contradictory even, that this could come to be; then I am struck with astonishment at the beauty, majesty, and the power of this social mechanism which has competition as its driving force, 530 and leaving for others the ambition of inventing a more ingenious organisation , 531 I will limit mine to studying, understanding, and admiring it, and I hope, if I can, to describe what has come ready made out of the hands of eternal wisdom.

Therefore, because man has two very distinct relationships with labor, because he is in turn a producer of useful things which he does not consume, and a consumer of useful things which he does not produce, relative to him competition must be seen from two different perspectives.

From the first point of view, from the individualistic point of view, the private, inveterate, and eternal thought of all workers is the solution of this problem: " To make sure that the useful things which I bring to society are as sought after and as rare as possible. " And this is why the producer, as producer, reacts against his competitors, disapproves of them, attempts to destroy them as much as he able to, and calls to his aid the use of force, fraud, the law, sophisms, 532 tariffs, monopoly, trade protection, and restrictions.

But the social problem is this: " To make sure that, for any given work which an individual brings to the general market, they get from it a sum of useful things which tends constantly to INCREASE and be MADE MORE EQUAL ." We will see that this is the task of competition .

To begin we have to establish the fact that the utility which every object contains has been put there by the cooperation of two forces, nature and labour .

Wheat owes its utility in part to the bounty of nature, air, light, warmth, and to the nutrients which nature has made available to us. On the other hand, it needed to be worked on, sown, harrowed, and harvested. When it comes to turning this wheat into flour, nature supplies the force of gravitation which is put to work with the falling water, the hardness of the mill stone, and man contributes to the final result by supervising and regulating the action of these forces, by directing them to a given end. — This is how it is for all industry.

Of these two forces which cooperate in the production of useful things, one of them, that of nature, is free ; the other, that of labour, is alone the subject of exchange, payment, and value .

However valuable a service provided by nature might be, if the hand or genius of man is not part of it, it is free, it is devoid of value in the economic sense of the word. Human industry has never produced and never will produce anything as useful, necessary, and indispensable to us as water, air, warmth, light, and yet we enjoy them for free when our bodies receive them immediately from nature, without the intervention of any effort. But, in order to have water it is necessary to go looking for it at a great distance, it is an effort which one has to undertake oneself or pay for. 533 If we wish to separate the air we breathe into its component parts, for example hydrogen gas to fill a balloon, there is work to carry out; and here is the reason why hydrogen gas, which is only part of the air has a value , while breathable air, which is the whole, does not.

Were we to review all the objects we buy and sell we would always find that they have a composite utility: one part has been supplied by nature and that is free , the other part has been supplied by labour and that is the object of exchange, for the very simple reason that in order to enjoy a useful thing which has cost some effort to obtain, one has to undertake the effort oneself or pay back in one form or another the person who undertook the effort for you.

The desire which all men feel to improve their condition leads him to increase as much as he can the cooperation of nature in the production of utility. It is here that the field is wide open to human genius. 534 Water, wind, heat, light, gravitation, electricity, all the laws of the physical world are increasingly used to make their contribution. From this it follows that from one generation to the next a given quantity of human labour can, so to speak, serve as a vehicle for a much greater sum of the services of nature and this shows us that there is nothing about the social problem which is insoluble or contradictory, which I stated earlier in these terms: "To make sure that human consumption increases more rapidly than his labour."

Not only is progress, thus defined, possible, but it is necessary, it is inevitable, and it is a providential consequence of the perfectibility of our faculties; and we will see well-being spread rapidly among the human species, if, by another law which we will not concern ourselves with here, 535 it does not increase in number at the same rate as it capacity for production.

I needed to briefly discuss these general ideas here in order to show the social action of competition in all its power and in all its harmonies.

What is exchanged, what forms the basis of our transactions, I have said, is labour, is discomfort, is effort, such that one could, in more common language, define political economy as the theory of the services which men provide each other, like "I owe you one!" or in tit-for-tat fashion. 536

But labour is not a homogeneous quality, an absolute quantity which can be weighed or numbered, which can be measured by a chronometer or a dynamometer. 537 There is only labour which is more or less preferred in the social context in which it is carried out; more or less clever, difficult, dangerous, risky, or even enjoyable. Besides, one must not lose sight of the fact that it is only given up 538 voluntarily, that each person remains the judge of the pain which he demands in return for the pain which one gives up, as well as the circumstances which can determine whether it is demanding or easy. Thus there is no reason to be surprised that there might be a great inequality in payment for labour and, ultimately in the well-being of human beings.

Lets us now examine the principle circumstances which influence this inequality and how it tends to disappear under the action of competition.

One of the most obvious is the possibility of seizing control of one of the natural resources which I mentioned earlier. These resources are not distributed equally across the globe. In one place the soil is more fertile; in another place the heat of the sun is more intense; in such and such a place there are large deposits of coal; yet in another there are rivers full of fish.

Without competition , those who are within reach of these natural advantages would only allow other people to share in them by making them pay an excessive and permanent amount; with the result that we would pay the producer not only for his effort but for the gifts of nature. A man who lives in the tropics could say to a European, "Thanks to my hot sun, I can get a bail of cotton with an effort equal to ten, while you could do it only with an effort equal to 100 . Now, for you to sell this cotton, it is not my effort which is the measure of my demands, but yours. God did not give a climate with high temperature to you but to me. So, here is my cotton, give me in exchange for it something on which you have expended an effort equal to a hundred or there about. If not, grow the cotton yourself." But competition does not permit these intolerable kinds of markets to exist. It doesn't allow a man to be paid for an effort which he did not make, for labour which he has not done, and it tends to make common and free for all men these natural goods which appear to be the exclusive privilege of a few.

Men in the tropics have not been able to impose their claim to measure the value of their wages by the amount of my effort and not by that of their own. If their efforts are too highly paid it will not fail to encourage rivals to enter the market. Competition has entered the picture; cotton has been offered at a discount to the point where the European pays, with an effort equal to ten, what the Indian produces with an effort equal to 10. Now, when things have reached this point, when I am prepared to give for a bail of cotton only an effort equal to one tenth of that which I would have taken to produce it in France, then will I demand it, and isn't there then an exchange of labour for labour, and, as far as I am concerned as a European consumer, don't I get into the bargain , the cooperation of the tropical climate? Thus, thanks to competition , I have become, and all men have become, just like the Indians and the Americans, that is to say, participants in the generosity of nature as far as the production of cotton is concerned, and are able to get it for free . It is the same for all products imaginable. 539

There is a country, England, which has numerous coal mines. Obviously this is a considerable local advantage, especially if we assume, as I will, to keep the argument simple, that there is no coal on the continent. As long as it is not traded, the advantage to the English is to have a greater abundance of fuel than other nations, which they can get without much effort and without taking too much of their valuable time. As soon as trade appears, on the assumption that there is no competition, the exclusive possession of the mines makes it possible for them to ask for high prices and to set a high price on their efforts. As we can neither make these efforts ourselves nor go elsewhere, we will have to put up with this. English labor as applied to this type of activity will be very well paid; in other words coal will be expensive, and nature's bounty may be thought of as having been conferred on one nation rather than on the human race.

This state of affairs, however, cannot last. There is a great natural and social law which opposes it, namely competition. For the very reason that this type of work is very well paid in England, it will be much sought-after, for people are always looking for high earnings. The number of miners will increase both through addition and through the birth of children. They will offer themselves at a discount and will be content with constantly declining pay until it reaches the normal rate, the level paid generally in the country for all similar work. This means that the price of English coal will decrease in France and that a given quantity of French labor will obtain an increasingly large quantity of English coal, or rather of the English labor that is bound up in the coal. In the end, it means, and this is what I ask you to note, that the gift that nature appears to have given to England has in reality been given to the entire human race. Coal from Newcastle is generously given free of charge to all men. This does not constitute either a paradox or an exaggeration: it is generously given to them freely, like the water from a stream, on the sole condition that people take the trouble to go in search of it or that those who take this trouble on our behalf are compensated for this. When we buy coal, it is not the coal that we are paying for but the labor required to extract it and transport it. We limit ourselves to returning an equal quantity of labor that we have attached to our wine or silk. It is so true that the generosity of nature has been extended to France that the work we return is no greater than the work we would have needed to do if the deposit of coal had been in France. Competition has brought about equality between the two nations with regard to coal, except for the inevitable and slight difference that arises from distance and transport. 540

I have cited two examples. My aim was to elucidate my thoughts. But lets us not lose sight of the fact that since the law of competition applies to all the gifts that nature has unequally distributed across the globe, it is necessary to consider it as the principle of a just and natural process of equalisation; it is necessary to admire it, praise it, as the most obvious expression of the impartial concern God has for all his creatures.

I regret that space does not permit me to draw out the consequence of this theory which I have just introduced. I will limit myself to drawing your attention to one. If it is true, as it appears to me to be unquestionable, that the diverse peoples around the globe are led by competition to exchange among themselves only the labour and effort which is becoming more and more equalized or evened out; and to mutually give each other, into the bargain , the services of nature that each one of them has closest within reach; then how blind and absurd they must be when they reject by means of legislation products which embody an enormous quantity of free utility ?

Another circumstance that puts certain individuals in an exceptionally favorable situation with regard to their payment is the exclusive knowledge of the processes by which it is possible to seize control of natural resources . What we call an invention is an advance made by human genius. We have to see how these fine and peaceful conquests, which at the outset are a source of wealth for those who make them, soon become, under the influence of competition, the common and free heritage of all mankind.

The forces of nature really do belong to everybody. Gravity, for example, is a common property; it surrounds us, penetrates us, and dominates us. However, if there is just one way of making it contribute to a useful and planned result, and one man knows this way, this man is able to set a high price on his efforts or refuse to make them except for a very considerable payment. His claims in this regard will have no other limit than the point at which he demands from consumers a sacrifice that is greater than that imposed on them by the old process. For example, he may have succeeded in eliminating nine-tenths of the labor required to produce a product X . But X currently has a price that is determined by the effort required for its production using the standard method. The inventor sells X at the market price; in other words, he is paid ten times as much for his effort as his rivals are paid for theirs. This is the initial phase of invention.

Let us note first of all that this does not violate justice. It is just that the person who reveals a useful process to the world should be rewarded for this: To each according to his ability . 541

Let us also note that up to now the human race, apart from the inventor, has made only a potential gain, one in prospect so to speak, since, in order to acquire product X it is obliged to make the same sacrifices as it made in the past.

Nevertheless, the invention enters its second phase, that of imitation . It is in the nature of excessive rewards to arouse envy. The new process becomes widespread, the price of X keeps decreasing and payment for it decreases also, especially as the imitation becomes distant from the time of the invention, that is to say, as it becomes easier, less risky, and because of this, less attractive. Indeed, there is nothing in this that cannot be allowed by the most ingenious and impartial legislation. 542

Finally the invention reaches its third phase, its definitive period, that of its universal diffusion , common availability, and freedom from cost . It comes full circle when competition has brought payment to producers of X back to the general and normal rate for all similar production. At this point the nine-tenths of the efforts saved by the invention in these circumstances are a victory for the benefit of the entire human race. The utility of X is the same but the nine-tenths have been added to it by gravity, which in the past was common to all in principle and which has become common to all in this particular application. This is so true that all the consumers on the planet are allowed to purchase X for the sacrifice of one-tenth of the effort it cost in the past. The surplus has been totally eliminated by the new process.

If you are willing to consider that there is not one human invention that has not gone through this cycle, that X in this instance is an algebraic sign representing wheat, clothing, books, or ships whose production has caused an incalculable mass of effort to be eliminated by the plough, the loom, the printing press, and sails, and that this observation applies to the humblest of tools just as it does to the most complicated mechanism, to nails, wedges and levers, just as to steam engines and the electric telegraph, 543 I hope that you will understand how the following major problem is solved in the context of the human race: A huge quantity of useful things or things which can be enjoyed, that is forever growing and ever more equally distributed, comes along to reward each given quantity of human labor .

I have shown that competition serves to move both the forces of nature and the processes by which these are harnessed into the domain of common availability, and freedom from cost . All that I still have to do is to make clear that it fulfills the same function with regard to the tools we use to set these forces in motion.

It is not enough for there to be forces in nature such as heat, light, gravity, and electricity. It is not enough for the mind to conceive the means of making use of these; you also need tools to transform mere intellectual conceptions into a physical reality and supplies to keep alive the people while they are undertaking the work.

There is a third factor that favors an individual or a class of people with regard to remuneration, and that is to possess capital . He who holds the tool that is essential to the workers, the materials on which the labor is to be done, and the means of existence 544 that are to be consumed during the production, can determine his rate of remuneration. This principle is certainly fair, for capital is merely effort made previously, which has not yet been rewarded. The capitalist is doubtless in a good position to impose his will, but we should note that, even without competition, there is a limit that his demands can never exceed. This limit is the point at which his remuneration would absorb all the advantages of the service he is providing. In this case, it is not right to talk, as often happens, about the tyranny of capital , since even in the most extreme cases its presence can never be more damaging than its absence to the situation of the worker. All that capitalists can do, like the people in the tropics who have an intensity of heat that nature has denied to others or the inventor who holds the secret to an industrial process that is unknown to his fellow-men, is to say to them: "If you wish to make use of my efforts, this is my price; if you find it too high, do as you have done in the past and do without it."

However, competition intervenes among the capitalists. Tools, materials, and provisions succeed in creating useful things only if they are used. Therefore there is a fight 545 among the capitalists to find a use for their capital. The extent to which this fight forces them to reduce their extreme demands, whose limits I have just set out, thus resulting in a reduction of the price, is therefore a net profit, a gratuitous gain for consumers and therefore for the human race!

In this instance, it is clear that something which is free of cost can never be absolute; since all capital represents past efforts made, it always contains with it the principle that a payment will be made. 546

We have seen that there is an upper limit beyond which one would no longer borrow. This limit is where there is " zero service " for the borrower. Furthermore, there is a limit, well short of which one would not make loans, and this limit is where there is " zero payment" for the lender. Competition between borrowers pushes the remuneration of capital to the upper limit; competition between lenders pulls it back towards the lower limit. It fluctuates between these two points, rising when it is just and necessary when capital is scarce, dropping when it is abundant.

This subject is immense and I cannot deal with it here. 547 I will limit my remarks by stating a fact which nullifies many of the assertions which are fashionable at the moment, that civilisation tends to lower the return on capital - one pays 20% in Brazil, 10% in Algeria, 8% in Spain, 6% in Italy, 5% in Germany, 4% in France, 3% in England, and even lower in Holland. Now, everything that the passage of time does to wipe out the price of capital is a loss for the capitalists, but it is not a loss for the human race. It is a force which, like the forces of nature , like more efficient industrial processes , results in greater abundance , in equalisation , and thus raises the general level of the human race. 548

It remains for me to study the competition which occurs between labor itself, a subject which is much larger than than what I have just sketched out. It would require a whole book to follow the future of capital in all its metamorphoses, and it would require ten books perhaps to correct all the errors which the "sentimentalist" schools of thought 549 have spread during the past few years concerning the fate of the workers. The requirements of the present work in which I am publishing this sketch force me to limit myself to a few simple outlines. 550

A host of circumstances contributes to making the remuneration for labor unequal (here I am referring only to labor that is free and subject to competition). If you examine it closely, you see that this alleged inequality is almost always just and necessary, and is in fact nothing other than genuine equality.

All other things being equal, 551 moreover, there is more profit in dangerous projects than in ones that are not, in trades that require long apprenticeships, and outlays that are unproductive for long periods of time, which assumes the long-term exercise within the family of certain virtues, than in trades where physical strength is all that is needed, or in occupations that require development of the mind and give rise to refined tastes than in those that just require manual labor. Is all this not just? Well, competition of necessity establishes these distinctions; society does not need a Fourier 552 or a father-figure like Enfantin 553 to decide this.

Among these circumstances, the one that has the most general effect is inequality of education. Here, as elsewhere, we see competition exercising its twin effect of leveling classes and raising the level of society.

If you think of society as being composed of two superimposed strata, 554 in one of which the principle of the mind is foremost and in the other brute force; and if you examine the natural relationship between these two social strata, you can clearly see a force of attraction in the first and a force of aspiration in the second which contribute to their merging. The very inequality of profit generates an inextinguishable desire in the lower stratum to reach the region of well-being and leisure, and this desire is supported by the influence of the enlightenment that illuminates the upper classes. The methods of teaching are improved, the price of books is decreasing, education is acquired in less time and at less cost, science, monopolized by one class and even one caste 555 and obfuscated by a language that is dead or embedded in hieroglyphic script, 556 is now written and printed in the common tongue and penetrates, so to speak, the atmosphere and is breathed in like air.

But that is not all. At the same time as a more universal and egalitarian form of education is drawing the two social strata together, weighty economic phenomena linked to the great law of competition are accelerating their fusion. Progress in engineering is constantly reducing the part played by manual labor. The division of labor that simplifies and isolates each productive operation, makes trades originally manageable only by a few, open to all. There is more: a group of tasks that originally assumed a wide range of knowledge has, through the mere passage of centuries, become routine in the area of activity of the least educated classes; this is what has happened to farming. Agricultural processes, which in antiquity gained those who revealed them to the world the highest of honors, are now the heritage and almost completely dominated by the commonest of men, to such an extent that this very important area of human activity is, so to speak, entirely removed from the well-educated classes.

From what has gone before, one may draw a false conclusion and say: "We can clearly see that competition decreases pay in all countries, in all kinds of careers, in all ranks, and levels them downwards , but in this case it is the wages for manual labor that will become the type and standard for all wages."

I will not have been understood if people do not see that c ompetition , which works to reduce all excessive pay to an average that is increasingly uniform, is bound to raise this average. I agree that this upsets people in their capacity as producers, but this is in order to improve the general situation of the human race in the only form reasonably able to improve it, that of well-being, prosperity, leisure, and intellectual and moral advancement, in a word, from the point of view of consumption .

Will it be said that in the event the human race has not made the progress that this theory appears to imply?

My first response is that, in modern societies, competition is far from fulfilling its natural role; our laws hinder it at least as much as they favor it, 557 and when the question is put as to whether the inequality of the situation of individuals is due to its presence or absence, we have only to see which men are at the top of the pile and can dazzle us with the glamour of their scandalous wealth, to be convinced that inequality, in so far as it is artificial and unjust, is based upon conquest, monopolies, trade restrictions, privileged positions, high government posts and influence, the trafficking in administrative deals, and loans from public funds; all things that have no connection with competition.

Subsequently, I believe that people fail to realize the genuine progress that the human race has made since the very recent period when the partial emancipation of labour began to take place. It has been said, and rightly so, that a great deal of philosophizing was needed to identify the facts that are constantly being witnessed. What a respectable and hard-working family of the working class consumes does not surprise us, because habit has accustomed us to this strange phenomenon. If, however, we were to compare the well-being this family has achieved with the situation that would be its lot under a social order in which competition was excluded, if statisticians, armed with accurate instruments, were able to measure as though with a dynamometer the relationship between the work of this family and the composition of its consumption at two different periods, we would recognize that freedom, as restricted as it still is, has achieved something extraordinary for this family, something whose very duration makes it pass unnoticed. The amount of human effort needed to produce a given result has been drastically cut and is truly incalculable. 558 For a native inhabitant of Canada who needed an object which weighed a quintal (100 kg) located 300 leagues away he would have to go looking for it, perhaps at a cost to him of 6 months of hard work. Today an artisan from the Bayonne region 559 who sends to Paris an object of equal weight pays 4 francs, or the equivalent of a day's wages. Thus 179/180 of the effort needed by the Canadian native has been wiped out. This portion of the effort is no longer undertaken by anybody, and nobody has to be paid for it; it is the amount taken care of by the forces of nature, the strength of animals, industrial processes, and tools, the use of which have become common and free of charge . As a result of competition, a single day of work is enough to cover the cost of the transportation, for the present effort which is required as well as for the previous efforts embodied in the mechanical tools or animals (which we term capital ) which contribute to the end result. There is not a single one of our consumption goods to which the same remarks do not apply.

Finally, that ever-increasing flow of useful things which work generates and which is in turn distributed by competition through all the veins of the social body, is not wholly defined by well-being. Most of it is absorbed in the flood of ever more numerous generations. It results in an increase in population in accordance with laws that are closely connected with the subject under discussion and which will be set out in another article. 560

Let us stop awhile and cast a rapid glance over the ground we have just covered.

Man has needs that have no limit. He develops desires that are insatiable. To meet them he has materials and forces which are supplied to him by nature, capabilities, and tools, and all the things that labor produces. Labor is the resource that has been the most equally shared out among all; each person instinctively and inevitably seeks to join to it as much of the forces of nature, as much innate or acquired capability, and as much capital as possible, so that the result of all this co-operation is as many useful things produced as possible, or what amounts to the same, as much satisfaction achieved as possible. Thus the ever-increasing contribution made by the forces of nature, the indefinite development of knowledge, and the gradual increase in capital produce this phenomenon, strange at first sight, that a given quantity of labor supplies an ever-increasing sum of useful things and that each person may, without depriving anyone else, achieve a mass of consumption out of all proportion to what his own efforts could produce.

But this phenomenon, the result of the divine harmony that Providence has spread throughout the mechanism of society, would have turned against society itself by planting in it the seed of endless inequality, if it were not combined with another kind of harmony no less admirable, namely competition, which is one of the branches of the great law of human solidarity .

Indeed, if it were possible for an individual, a family, a classe, or a nation that found themselves within reach of certain natural advantages, which had made an important industrial discovery, or acquired the tools of production through saving, to be cut off permanently from the law of of competition, if such a thing were possible, I repeat, it is clear that this individual, this family, or nation would be in permanent possession of a monopoly of extraordinary remuneration at the expense of the human race. Where would we be if the inhabitants of the equatorial regions, freed from any competition with each other, were able, in exchange for their sugar, coffee, cotton, or spices, to demand from us, not repayment in the form of an effort equal to theirs, but an effort equal to that which we would have had to take ourselves to produce these things in our harsh climate? What incalculable distance would separate the diverse situations of people if the race of Cadmus 561 were the only one that knew how to read, if nobody was allowed to use a plow unless he could prove that he descended directly from Triptolemus, 562 if the descendents of Gutenberg 563 were the only ones allowed to print, the sons of Arkwright 564 to use a spinning jenny, or the nephews of Watt 565 to get the chimney of a locomotive smoking!

However, Providence did not will this to be so. It placed within the social machine a spring, such that nothing is more astonishing than its power, except perhaps its simplicity. Through the operation of this spring, any productive force, any superiority of industrial process in short any advantage not due to his own labor , slips through the fingers 566 of the producer, stops there in the form of exceptional reward just long enough to arouse his enthusiasm and after a while goes on to enlarge the communal and free heritage of the human race before finally issuing an ever-growing quantity of individual satisfaction constantly being shared more equally. This spring is c ompetition . We have seen its economic effects; all that remains for us to do is to cast a rapid glance over a few of its political and moral consequences. I will limit myself to indicating the most important of these.

Some superficial minds have accused competition of introducing antagonism among men. This is true and inevitable as long as men are considered only in their capacity as producers; if you take the point of view of consumption, you will see that competition itself draws individuals, families, classes, nations, and races together through the bonds of universal brotherhood.

Since goods that at first sight appear to be the privilege of the few become, through an admirable decree of divine beneficence, a heritage common to all; since the natural advantages of location, fertility, temperature, mineral wealth, and even industrial aptitude, seem just to slip through the hands of the producers, given the competition which they enter into with each other, and turn exclusively to the advantage of consumers, it follows that there is no country that does not have a stake in the progress of all the others. Every progress achieved in the East is wealth in prospect for the West. If fuel is discovered in the South, the people of the North are warmed. Great Britain can make all the progress she likes with her spinning mills; her capitalists will not reap the benefit, for the interest on their money does not increase. The benefit does not go to her workers since their earnings remain the same, but in the long run it is Russia, France, Spain - in a word the human race - which gets the same satisfactions with less effort or, which amounts to the same thing, greater satisfaction for the same effort.

I have spoken only of benefits, but I could have said as much about the harms, that afflict certain nations or regions. The very nature of competition is to make general that which was once particular. It acts precisely on the principle of insurance . If a plague ravages farmland, it is those who eat bread who suffer. If an unjust tax is levied on French vines, it results in expensive wine for drinkers the world over; thus benefits and harms of the long-lasting kind just slip through the hands of individuals, classes, and nations. Their providential destiny is to affect the entire human race in the long run and improve or worsen its situation. This being so, to envy a particular nation for the fertility of its soil, the beauty of its ports or rivers, or the warmth of its sun is to fail to recognize the advantages in which we are all destined to have our share. It is to reject the abundance 567 offered to us and to miss the toil we have been spared. This being so, national jealousies are not just perverse sentiments, they are sentiments that are absurd into the bargain. To harm others is to harm yourself. To place obstacles in the path of others, 568 whether these are customs tariffs, foreign alliances, or wars, is to obstruct your own path. Consequently, harmful passions are punished, just as generous ones are rewarded. The inevitable sanction of accurate, distributive justice appeals to one's self-interest, enlightens public opinion, and in the end proclaims and secures the upholding by people of the eternally true maxim: The useful is only one aspect of the just, liberty is the most beautiful of the social harmonies, 569 and justice is the best policy.

Christianity introduced the great principle of human brotherhood to the world. It spoke to the heart, the emotions, and the instincts that were noble. Political economy seeks to have the same principle prevail in cold reasoning and, by showing the link between cause and effect, reconciles the calculations of the most attentive self-interest with the inspiration of the most sublime morality in one reassuring agreement.

A second consequence of this doctrine is that society is a genuine community . Messrs. Owen 570 and Pierre Leroux 571 may save themselves the trouble of looking for a solution to the great problem of c ommunism ; it has already been found. It results not from their despotic schemes but from the organization that God has given to man and society. Natural forces, more efficient industrial processes, and tools of production, all these are common to man or are tending to become so. This is true for everything, except for the trouble people incur , and the labor and individual effort put in. Between men there is only one and there can be only one inequality , one that the most dyed in the wool communists acknowledge, and that is the inequality that results from the inequality of effort. These are the efforts exchanged between people for a freely negotiated price. All the utility that nature, the genius of past centuries, and human foresight have imparted to the products being exchanged is therefore available into the bargain. Reciprocal payment relates only to their respective efforts, either present effort in the form of labor or preparatory effort in the shape of capital. (This) is therefore a community in the strictest sense of the word, unless you wish to claim that each person's share in the satisfaction has to be equal, while the share of effort exerted is not. This would indeed be the most unjust and monstrous of inequalities and, I would add, the most disastrous, for it would not kill competition but merely cause its action to be inverted. People would still fight, but they would fight 572 to excel in laziness, lack of intelligence, and lack of foresight.

Finally, the doctrine that we have developed, so simple and, we are convinced, so true, forces the emergence of the great principle of human perfectibility out of the domain of oratory and into that of rigorous proof. From this internal motive, which never rests in a person's breast and which leads that person to improve his or her situation, is born the advance of technology, an advance that is nothing other than the gradual cooperation of forces, which by their very nature are unconcerned with any remuneration. Competition gives rise to the granting to the community those benefits which were originally acquired by individuals. The intensity of the effort required for any given result is constantly reduced for the benefit of the human race, which sees its range of satisfactions and leisure increase from one generation to another and the level of its physical, intellectual, and moral progress advance, and through this arrangement, so worthy of our study and eternal admiration, we clearly see the human race rising up out of its degradation.

I hope my words will not be misunderstood. I am not saying that all brotherhood, all community, and all human perfectibility are contained in competition itself. What I am saying is that it is linked and allied to these three great social social concepts, that it is part of them, that it makes them manifest, and that it is one of the most powerful agents of their sublime realization.

I have concentrated on describing the general and consequently beneficial effects of competition, for it would be sacrilege to suppose that any great law of nature could produce effects that were both harmful and permanent, but I am far from denying that its action can be accompanied by a great deal of hardship and suffering. I even consider that the theory that has just been set out, explains both these sufferings and the inevitable complaints they generate. Since the work of competition is to level out , of necessity it is bound to upset anyone who raises his proud head above this level. We can understand that each producer strives to retain the exclusive use of a resource , an industrial process, or a tool of production for as long as possible in order to keep the highest price for his work. Well, since the purpose as well as the result of competition is precisely to remove this exclusive use from individuals in order to make it common property, it is inevitable that men, insofar as they are producers, will unite in a chorus of curses against c ompetition . 573 They can become reconciled to it, only by appreciating their relationship to consumption, by thinking of themselves not as members of a clique or a privileged corporation, but as individual men.

It has to be said that political economy has not done enough to dispel this disastrous illusion, 574 which is the source of so much hatred and resentment, and so many disasters and wars. It has worn itself out, given its very unscientific orientation, analyzing the phenomena of production; even its nomenclature, as convenient as it is, is not in harmony with its subject-matter. Farming, manufacturing, or commerce are perhaps excellent headings when it is a question of describing the processes involved in these technical arts, but such description, though of vital significance in technology, is scarcely relevant in social economy, 575 and I would actually say that it is essentially dangerous in this context. When people have been classified as farmers, manufacturers, and merchants, what can you talk to them about, other than their class interests, those special interests that conflict with competition and oppose the general good? It is not for farmers that farming exists, for manufacturers that there are factories, or for merchants that exchanges take place, but in order for people to have access to the greatest possible number of products of all kinds. The laws of consumption , and what promotes it, equalizes it, and makes it moral: that is the true social and humanitarian interest; that is the real focus of economic science; that is on what it should focus its sharpest thinking. For this is where the bond between classes, nations, and races is - the principle and the explanation of human brotherhood. It is therefore with regret that we see economists devoting their powerful minds and dispensing a prodigious wealth of wisdom, in pursuit of the anatomy of production, relegating to appendices at the ends of their books a few brief commonplaces on the phenomena of consumption. What is that I am saying? Not long ago, we saw a justifiably famous professor 576 suppressing this part of economic science totally and devoting himself to the means without ever mentioning the ends , and banishing from his lectures anything relating to the consumption of wealth as belonging, so he said, to the realm of moral philosophy and not to political economy. Should we be surprised that the general public are more struck by the disadvantages of competition than its advantages, since the disadvantages affect it from the particular point of view of production , about which they are constantly being informed, and the advantages from the general point of view of consumption, about which they are never told anything?

What is more, and I repeat and do not deny it, I clearly recognize and deplore as much as others do, the pain that competition inflicts on people, but is this a reason to close one's eyes to the good it does? This good, which I believe competition to be, is indestructible like all the great laws of nature. And how consoling it is to note this fact! If competition could die, it would doubtless have succumbed to the universal resistance of all the men who have ever contributed to the creation of a product since the dawn of time, and especially to the national call to arms which all the modern reformers have promoted. But although they have been crazy enough, they have not been strong enough to do this.

And what progressive principle has there been in the world whose beneficial action has not been mixed up with a great deal of pain and misery, especially at the beginning? The great urban centers created by human beings have encouraged the flourishing of thought, but they often shield private life from the corrective of public opinion and act as a shelter to debauchery and crime. Wealth allied with leisure generates the life of the mind, but it also generates ostentation and arrogance in the great, and resentment and envy in the lowly. Printing shines enlightenment and truth on all the social stratas of society, but it also conveys painful doubt and subversive error. Political freedom has unleashed enough storms and revolutions around the planet, it has modified the simple and naïve habits of primitive nations profoundly enough for serious minds to have asked themselves the question as to whether they did not prefer peace in the shadow of despotism. And Christianity itself has scattered the great seed of love and charity on land soaked with the blood of martyrs.

How has it become part of the plans of infinite goodness and justice that the good fortune of one region or century is bought by the suffering of another region or century? What divine thought is hidden under this great and indisputable law of solidarity of which c ompetition is just one of its mysterious aspects? Human science does not know this. What it does know is that good is constantly expanding and evil constantly shrinking. From the very beginning of the social order, an order created out of conquest, where there were only masters and slaves and in which inequality of condition was extreme, competition was not able to do its work of drawing men of different ranks, fortunes, or minds closer together, without inflicting some individual hardship, the intensity of which constantly lessens as the work progresses, much like the vibrations of sound and the swings of a pendulum gradually diminish over time. To the suffering that is still inflicted, the human race learns daily to apply two powerful remedies, foresight , the fruit of experience and enlightenment, and association , which is organized foresight . 577

8. T.68 " On the Redistribution of Wealth by M. Vidal" (15 June 1846, JDE)↩

Source

T.68 (1846.06.15) " On the Redistribution of Wealth by M. Vidal" ( De la répartition des richesses. Par M. Vidal), JDE , June 1846, T. 14, No. 55, pp. 243-49. [OC1.12, pp. 440-51.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

François Vidal (1812-1872) was a lawyer, writer, and politician who was active in socialist circles during the 1840s. He was particularly interested in political economy and wrote for several socialist magazines such as Victor Considerant's La démocratie pacifique and Pierre Leroux's La Revue indépendante . In the early months of the February Revolution he was the Secretary of the Luxembourg Commission which introduced the state funded unemployment program known as the National Workshops. 578 His book De la répartition des richesses, ou De la justice distributive en économie sociale (On the Redistribution of Wealth, or Distributive Justice in Social Economy) (1846) 579 was published at a time when the political economists began to counter the socialist critique of their views in a more methodical fashion.

Socialists had began their critique of free market economic thought in earnest in the late 1830s with the appearance of several works such as Louis Blanc's L'Organisation du travail (The Organisation of Work) (1839); 580 Victor Considerant's Théorie du droit de propriété (Theory of the Right of Property) (1839); 581 and Proudhon's Qu'est-ce que la propriété? (What is Property?) (1840). 582 These books sparked a debate which continued throughout the 1840s reaching a climax in the months immediately following the Revolution in February 1848 when many policies advocated by these socialist were put into practice. Louis Blanc advocated new co-operative ways of "organising" labour in "social workshops" which existed outside of privately owned factories and workshops where workers were paid wages. As head of the National Workshops program after the Revolution he was able to put these ideas into practice between February and June 1848. Victor Considerant advocated the universal "droit au travail"(right to a job) which would be guaranteed by the State. Socialists and their supporters in the Chamber tried hard to get a clause guaranteeing this right inserted into the new constitution of the Second Republic which was being debated over the summer of 1848 but was ultimately defeated. 583 Proudhon challenged the very idea of property itself and the justice of charging interest on loans and attempted to get the Chamber to support the creation of a People's Bank which would provide zero or low interest rate loans to workers. These socialist experiments came to a bloody end in June 1848 following the riots sparked by the closure of the National Workshops. Socialist activists were arrested in their hundreds, their magazines and political clubs were shut down by the police, and the country was placed under marital law under General Cavaignac.

The political economists began their response to the socialist challenge with Michel Chevalier's long critique of Louis Blanc in the Journal des Débats in August 1844. 584 This was followed by a very long three volume work De la Liberté du travail (On the Freedom of Working) (1845) by the doyen of the economists Charles Dunoyer (the permanent president of the Political Economy Society), 585 of which Bastiat wrote a brief review (see above, pp. 000); and Bastiat himself entered the fray with a series of articles and letters over the next two years: his letter to Lamartine on the right to work (Jan. 1845), his brief review of Dunoyer's book (March 1845), his review of Vidal's book (June 1846), his second letter to Lamartine (Oct. 1846), his essay "On Communism" (June 1847), and his reply to Considerant (Dec. 1847). 586 This first phase of criticism of socialist ideas was followed by a second anti-socialist campaign initiated by the Guillaumin publishing firm in mid-1848 in which Bastiat played a very important role with his series of 12 "Petits Pamphlets" which appeared until shortly before his death. 587

Of particular note in this review are Bastiat's thoughts on the following topics. First, his clear statement of his views about the distinction between "artificial" organisations and associations which are based upon coercion and state compulsion and which the socialists often modeled on the military; and "natural" ones which were based upon non-violent and cooperative agreements between individuals. This was a topic Bastiat would return to in his treatise Economic Harmonies (1850) in the very first chapter "Natural and Artificial Organisation." 588 Secondly, his rejection of the socialists's accusation that the political economists were "fatalists" because they accepted the idea that the world, including the world of economics, was governed by natural laws such as the law of supply and demand and their impact on prices. Bastiat's colleague Gustave de Molinari was to write an entire book on this matter, "Discussions of Economic Laws and the Right to Property", in 1849 as part of the Guillaumin anti-socialist campaign. 589 And thirdly, his critique of the idea of organising labour in state funded or controlled "workshops." This would occupy much of Bastiat's time in the first half of 1848 when he served as Vice-President of the National Assembly's Finance Committee from which he lobbied hard to shut down the National Workshops run by Louis Blanc and François Vidal.

Text

This book has been published under sorry auspices. Its appearance in the world has revived in the depths of literary caverns - "how hatred deepens in the hearts of our great journals" - an echo of insults more intended to sadden than annoy those to whom they are addressed and which heaps damaging prejudice, not only on the journalists but also the authors who have inspired them.

By a strange coincidence, on the very day on which I read in La Démocratie Pacifique 590 the following words of abuse which had been heaped on the heads of our most illustrious economists: ignorant and arrogant men, cursed heretics, idiots, impious beings, fatalists, plagiarists, puppets, traitors , etc. etc., I chanced to see a gallery of handwritten letters in which the greatest men of our century and the greatest friends of the human race, such as Jefferson, Madison, Bentham, Bernadotte, Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, 591 and even Saint-Simon 592 were seen to come forward to pay the most sincere and spontaneous homage to the science and philanthropy of J. B. Say. 593

But let us not seek a painful solidarity between Mr. Vidal and his incriminating critic who, I hope, will blush one day at his injustice and his heated remarks.

I think that it is evidence of overweening pride, when one is dealing with matters of any kind of science, to start by saying: "My predecessors knew nothing and saw nothing. In vain did men like Smith, Malthus, or Say devote their lives and powerful abilities to the study of a subject; they never achieved any understanding of it. As for me, here I am, I am just twenty years old and I have engaged in real science."

Would more confidence not be inspired in the general public if one said: "Science is of its very nature progressive. My predecessors have taken it forward, and with the help of their work I hope to advance it still further. They were obliged to delve into fundamental ideas and analyze the notions of labor, utility, value, capital, production , etc. but I do not think that they have studied sufficiently the phenomenon of the distribution of wealth. I come after them and, taking advantage of the knowledge they have passed on to us, taking up the baton of economic science where they left it, I am trying to take it one step further." 594

However, for Mr. Vidal to be able to say something like this, he would have needed to conform to the method used by his predecessors, observing the way things happen and are linked together. He rejects this method. According to him, limiting science in this way makes it merely an object of pure curiosity. He considers that his mission is to give advice, to teach, and perhaps even to impose rules of conduct. "A fine brand of science", he cries, "which can be summed up by a single negative statement: do nothing !" 595

Mr. Vidal is mistaken. Science never imposes on anyone a duty of inertia or, as we would say nowadays, immobility. It shines on all paths, both those that lead to good and those that lead to evil, and considers that its task is limited to this, since the propensity to action does not lie within it but in men. If the natural inclination of man propels him toward what is harmful, shining light on the consequences of such habits is certain to encourage this sorry direction. However, if man is inclined toward good, it is enough for science to show this, and unnecessary for it to invoke coercion or even duty in order to induce him to follow this path.

What separates us totally from the so-called Socialist, Fourierist, Communist or Saint-Simonian, etc. schools is exactly this. They situate the source of action in the observer while we leave it where it is, in the subject being observed, man.

What is strange is that they accuse us of seeing only figures and abstract quantities in man. "They should cease making an abstraction of man in a science whose aim is the happiness of man," says Mr. Vidal. 596

But it is you who make an abstraction of man and what he possesses in the way of intelligence, morality, life, initiative, and perfectibility, for in your view what is humanity if not an inert matter or clay that scholars under the cloak of being reformers and organizers can and ought to knead at will?

Political economy, as its very name implies, acknowledges that man is a feeling and thinking being and that he possesses the faculties of comparison, judgment, and decision making, that foresight warns him, experience corrects him, and that he carries within himself the idea of progress.

This is why political economy limits itself to describing phenomena, their causes and their effects, in the certain knowledge that men will be capable of choosing.

This is why, like the person who installs signposts at the start of each road, it is content to say: "This is where this one leads; that is where the other leads."

But as for you, all you see in men is matter for experiment, machines that produce and consume, and although, admittedly, in all fairness, you do want wealth to be shared equitably among them, you allocate this function to yourself, convinced that you can step in to do what Providence has not.

"In order to invent a machine, " says Mr. Vidal, "is it enough for an engineer to gather facts and then leave natural forces to act? Absolutely not; he would have to find the means of harnessing these forces and inventing his machine …" 597

"In the same way, in economics …, a particular mode of production and consumption or an economic system can be invented ." 598

Elsewhere he compares society to a regiment:

"Should we then leave each person free to carry out manoeuvres as he will, allow each officer or each soldier to carry out and follow his own little plan of campaign? etc." 599

And also, to an orchestra:

"Like the musicians of a disciplined orchestra, each of us has a useful and essential role …; but for there to be accord and unity, all the performers have to obey the vision of the composer and the direction of the conductor." 600

But when an engineer has cogwheels and springs in his hand, he is holding inert matter and his intervention is essential. Are men then just cogwheels and springs in the hands of a Socialist?

By contrast, although these soldiers whom you give as an example are men, qua soldiers they are no longer men but merely machines. The source of action is no longer with them. Subject, as the very arresting term has it, to passive obedience, they are no longer autonomous; they turn right or left at the slightest signal. Not surprisingly, one has to to draw the lucky straw to avoid being a soldier. 601 Believe me, the human race will not easily let itself be reduced to the passive role to which you assign it.

As to the other case, I happily agree that your musicians will achieve accord and harmony if the conductor imposes his direction.

For goodness sake, though, this is just not true in economics. Who can say that in every case infallible despotism would be the best solution?

But where is this orchestra conductor of society who is able to have his claim to infallibility and his right to power acknowledged?

In his absence, I prefer to leave the musicians to organize themselves by themselves, for, as you say, they are too intelligent not to understand that without this, harmony would be impossible!

You can thus clearly see that we are beginning to understand one another and that you have been led, like us and whether you like it or not, to leave the source of action where God has placed it, within the human race and not in the person studying it.

When we explain phenomena, their causes and their consequences, when we are content to show how a particular harmful act inevitably leads to a particular disastrous consequence; when for example, we say that laziness leads to poverty, over-population to a reduction in and a poor sharing of economic well-being, you cry that we are fatalists .

Let us understand one another. Yes, we are fatalists, in the way physicists are when they say, "If a stone is unsupported, it is bound to fall."

We are fatalists the way doctors are when they say, "If you over-eat, you are bound to have indigestion."

But is the acknowledgement of inexorable laws really fatalism? After all, did we make these laws, as you accuse us of doing when you criticise economists for all the ills of society, irrespectively of the bad habits, preconceived ideas, errors, and vices by means of which this society has drawn these harms upon itself?

True fatalism , I think, is at the root of all of the intellectual systems you employ, in that, however opposed they may be to each other, they agree only in this: the degree of happiness or unhappiness in men, insofar as this is independent of their vices and virtues and something over which, consequently, they have no control, depends solely on an arbitrary invention, on an imaginary organisation, which happens to have been conceived by Mr. Vidal, in the year of grace 1846.

It is very true that in 1845 Mr. Blanc imagined another quite different system. 602 Fortunately, however, the three billion men who cover the earth did not accept it, otherwise they would no longer be in time to try Mr. Vidal's.

What would have happened if the human race had bowed to the model invented by Fourier, which offered a 24 percent return to capital 603 instead of the 5 percent that the new invention guarantees? 604

To gain an idea of the spirit of despotism that is at the root of all these dreams one has only to notice how many formulae come pouring out as in the following examples:

"Production will have to be in proportion to the means of consumption."

"Work will have to be powerfully organized."

"All activities, minds, etc. will have to be called upon."

"Products will have to be distributed in accordance with justice."

"Each worker will have to be raised to the rank of a shareholder."

"He will have to be provided with the means of satisfying his needs, etc."

"A balance will have to be established between production, consumption, and the population."

" It is possible to contrive a proper industrial mechanism."

" It is possible to invent a particular mode of production and consumption."

"Above all, effective solidarity has to be established."

All of this is easily said. But when Socialists are asked: Who, then, will do all these things? If the human race is so passive, who, then, will breathe into it the breath of life? Each of them answers: Me.

We have to be fair to Mr. Vidal. He does not say Me ; he says: The government, the authorities .

However, this is just displacing the difficulty, for if all men are springs, soldiers, and inert matter, if every notion of order and organization emanates from one authority, what are the signs by which we can recognize it?

This is a major problem, and Mr. Vidal needed to take the trouble to solve it.

This is what he has to say:

We assume a priori that a normal government has been properly constituted. We leave to each person right to include under this name any system of government an individual prefers, wants, conceives of, or dreams about. Government, in whatever form , is in our view the source of protection, social support, and representative order for all and in the interests of all, etc. 605

If you assume a priori a normal and infallible government, we agree. Only show me its guarantee of infallibility and I will be ready to let myself be organized.

But if, because of the problem of finding this paragon of government, you recognize any form of authority, one that each person prefers, wants, conceives of, or dreams about , I very much fear that we will have as many forms of authority as there are men, which will take us right back to our starting point.

Here, Mr. Vidal has recourse to the major resource of Socialism, organization . It is just a question of organizing the government.

A bad government, he says, may abuse its use of power, that is true. But a good government, far from hindering true freedom in any way, may encourage its development …; it is therefore not a question of reducing or abolishing the government, but of giving it a proper organization . 606

That is all very good. But who will organize the government? Society, doubtless. But this will not do, since it is the government that ought to be organizing society. I see it now; Mr. Vidal, or any other Socialist who prefers, wants, conceives of, or dreams about it, will organize the government that will organize society. So it still remains to be seen how the first organizer will be organized.

In Mr. Vidal's book, there is a chapter that attracts the reader because of its alluring title: Practical conclusion . 607 We have wanted to see the Socialists formulate a conclusion for so long! At last!, I said to myself, the new social invention will be unveiled to us in full detail, together with the means of execution that enable the structure to be operated.

Unfortunately, basing himself on the premise that we are not in a fit state to understand this, Mr. Vidal tells us nothing.

Current society is a hovel, which we stubbornly refuse to abandon . He really does have the plan for new buildings in his pocket, but what is the use of showing them to us since we will not hear a word of it and we persist in keeping this tumbledown house, this worm-eaten structure? There is therefore no restoration work possible right now. The most that can be done is to install buttresses outside it and cover the cracks with plaster .

Our stubbornness thus deprives us of the advantage of knowing about the new social structure imagined by Mr. Vidal. All that he will let us see are a few props and a bit of plaster which he is quite willing to apply to postpone the collapse of the old building.

Having defined the problem thus, Mr. Vidal returns to his favorite formulae:

In every corner of the kingdom, in every department, we must organise the following:

Workshops in which every man of goodwill is always able to find work with which to earn his living, in which any unemployed worker who has been ousted by mechanization can use his hands; workshops that do not compete with existing workshops, for if this were so the numbers of poor people created on the one hand would be equivalent to the numbers assisted on the other.

Permanent workshops, which will be sheltered from unemployment and off-seasons and commercial crises as well as crises in production and politics.

Workshops in which the introduction of an advanced machine will benefit the workers, with no possibility of causing them harm …

Workshops in which a constant balance can be established between production and the needs of consumption, workshops to which the surplus population in towns can be diverted.

Workshops in which workers will find well-being, independence and security, a permanent job, and decent pay that is always assured. 608

We certainly give Mr. Vidal credit for his good intentions, and we would like to see his philanthropic views realized. 609 Like him, we would like there to be no man on earth who is not always assured of work, well-being, security, and independence and who would not be sheltered from commercial crises, crises in production and politics and even climatic ones, just as we would like there to be a perfect balance between production, consumption, and the population.

But instead of thinking, as Mr. Vidal does, that there is an abstract being called the State that has the means of bringing these fine dreams to fruition, instead of having individual happiness derived exclusively from an organization invented by a journalist and imposed externally on workers, we believe that it depends above all on the habits and virtues of the workers themselves. If some are industrious and others lazy, if among them there are some who are spendthrifts, others thrifty, and yet others who are miserly, some who live an ordered life and others who are profligate, if some marry at sixteen years of age and are responsible for families at an age when others are starting out in life, we cannot see what form of organization can prevent inequality from creeping into your community.

If there are some people who venture into risky enterprises, people who borrow without knowing how they will repay the loan, and others who lend without knowing how they will be repaid, if, for example, the community is seized with a passion for war which makes it hostile to the human race, we do not see how your organization will shelter it from commercial and political crises.

You can repeat ad nauseam that we are fatalists because we believe that harm itself has a purpose, namely to check the vice that has produced them; yes, we have to admit, we believe in the existence of these harms. We do not only believe in them, we see them, and in both the physical and moral sense we have no other alternative to offer the human race than to avoid them through foresight or to endure them though suffering.

Unless, therefore, you make your organizer responsible for having enough prudence for everyone, and enough order, economy, activity, education, and virtue for everyone too, you will have to allow us to continue to believe that the human race can be happy only to the extent that it possesses within itself these causes of happiness.

And certainly, if you allow me to assume the existence of just one vice in the community whose outline you sketch, if we suppose that it is afflicted with laziness, or profligacy, or ostentation, or ambition, or an overweening temperament, according to your reasoning you will understand that this community will soon suffer the fate common to all, it not lying in the power of the most ingenious organization to prevent the effect from following the cause.

Thus the social orders that each of you conceive on a daily basis assume perfection, firstly in the minds of their inventors and then in humanity itself, that same inert matter with which your fertile imagination is playing.

Well, Sir, if you grant us the assumption of human perfection as well, you may be sure that we economists will produce social plans just as attractive as yours.

Socialists criticise us for rejecting association . For our part, we ask them: What form of association are you talking about? Is it a voluntary association or is it a coerced or compulsory association .

If it is voluntary association, how can we be criticised for rejecting it, we who believe that society is one large association and that it is for this reason that it is called society ?

Do people merely want to talk about a few special arrangements that workers in the same industry might want to make among themselves? Good Heavens! We do not oppose any arrangement like this, whether it be a simple society or a business, an association of silent partners, a limited company, a company with shareholders, or even a phalanstery. 610 People may associate as they think fit; who is stopping you? We know full well that there are conventions that are more or less conducive to the progress of the human race and the proper distribution of wealth. For example, have we ever said for farming that farm rents and sharecropping, by the very fact that they exist, have the same effects on all classes of farmers? 611 However, we consider that science has fulfilled its role when it has set out these effects since, once again, we believe that the principle of action and the aspiration for something better exists not in science but in the human race.

You, on the other hand, who see the human race as merely pliable wax in the hands of an organizer, are proposing a coerced association, a form of association that takes away from every individual, except for one, any form of morality and any initiative, that is to say it is the most absolute despotism that has ever existed, not only in the annals of history but also in the imagination of mankind.

I will not end without granting Mr. Vidal the justice due to him. Although he has espoused the theories of the Socialists , he has not borrowed their style. His book is written in French and even good French. There is an occasional neologism but it is not excessive. Mr. Vidal spares us Fourierist vocabulary, with its arpeggios and central dramatic figures, its friendships in flattened fifths, and love stories in diminished thirds. 612 While he views science from an angle different from that of his predecessors, at least he takes it seriously, and does not despise his readers to the point of wanting to impose it on them using verses from the Apocalypse. This is a good sign, and if ever he publishes a second edition of his book I have no doubt that he will take out, if not what is mistaken in the section on theory, at least what is exaggerated or even unjust in the section he devotes to criticism.

9. T.288 "A Light-Hearted Look at Free Trade" (mid or late 1846)↩

Source

T.288 (1846.06.??) "A Light-Hearted Look at Free Trade" (Libre-échange Gai) (mid or late 1846). Unpublished pieces found in his papers. It is in three parts:

1. "One has to see it to believe it" (Il faut le voir pour le croire), pp. 297-99;
2. "The World turned upside down again" (Encore le monde renversé), pp. 299-300;
3. "A Simple Dialog (between a Protectionist and a Free Trader)" (Simple dialogue), p. 301.

In Ronce, Appendix V, pp. 297-301. [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

These short pieces were not published in Bastiat's Collected Works (1862-64) but appeared in an Appendix to Ronce's book (1905). They are not dated but were most likely written during 1845 when he was experimenting with different ways to make economics appealing and understandable to ordinary people. He published several such pieces in the JDE beginning in May with "Economic Sophisms: I Abundance and Scarcity" which was followed by 10 more during the rest of the year. They were published, along with an additional 11 pieces, in January 1846 in the first collection of Economic Sophisms . 613 The short pieces published here did not make the cut. Part of the reason might be that he was unsure about how "gai" (light-hearted) he thought they should be. After he was criticised in a review of ES1 for being too serious he made a concerted effort for the next collection to be both more light-hearted and hard-hitting in its "harsh language."

We can see here good examples of the style of writing Bastiat would use in his many of his sophisms. In "The World turned upside down again" we see a dialog between two unnamed individuals concerning the contradictory positions taken towards government subsidies by certain newspapers, which is the format he would use on many other occasions. 614 In "A Simple Dialog between a Protectionist and a Free Trader" we see another conversation between two stock characters, a "Free-Trader" and a "Protectionist." In later sophisms Bastiat would often use the character Jacques Bonhomme, 615 a kind of French everyman, as the voice of free trade and scepticism about government intervention in the economy.

Text 1. "One has to see it to believe it"

Newspapers which present themselves as the sole defenders of liberty, as the fierce voice of democracy, but which nevertheless support with all their might legal privileges and monopolies. You have to see it to believe it!

A public which closes its eyes to this astonishing inconsistency and does not look for the hidden cause of this. You have to see it to believe it!

A man obtains a concession to open a mine. Every penny which he puts into it costs him sacks of gold because he himself helps to make the laws which bans the import of foreign coal. 616 Meanwhile, the people shiver from the cold. Someone comes along and says to the people "The law is bad." The concession holder of the mine exclaims that "the law is excellent." The shivering people repeat this "The law is excellent." You have to see it to believe it!

I know of a product which is produced in only one factory in France. The factory owner sets whatever price he wants for his goods and becomes a millionaire because he managed to prohibit similar products entering from abroad. I wanted to tell the workers that this measure, besides being unjust, harmed them. But the millionaire factory owner goes out among his workers everyday telling them that "You see that man over there? He is a utopian and a troublemaker who wants to ruin you." 617 And the workers repeat as if in a chorus, "He is a troublemaker and wants to ruin us." The law is kept on the books and the man with 1 million, seeing that before long he will soon be the man with two million, laughs under his hat. You have to see it to believe it!

Someone says to a Minister before the entire Chamber: "You have embezzled funds. You have engaged in the buying and selling of public functions. You are the embodiment of immorality ." The Minister rises to his feet and replies: "I am delighted to see that the Chamber is outraged at my immorality. That is good, very good. Fellow Deputies I am pleased with you. Wipe out immorality. If you go down this excellent path I will support you. This is how we create a good government." You have to see it to believe it!

The Journal des Débats standing for liberty and Le National standing for privilege. 618 You have to see it to believe it!

The press says: "Workers, you don't eat enough meat. Doubtless this is because you don't know what is good for you and that is the fault of the government which ought to teach you this." The workers reply: "We know we should eat meat but the government prevents its importation. That is why we are so thin." The press replies: "You are deluding yourselves. If you are not eating more meat it is because of sheer ignorance. As for letting more meat enter the country, you should oppose this with all your might. And so the workers do what the press advises them to do. You have to see it to believe it!

There are some writers 619 who have acquired considerable renown and broad influence who repeat every day, in the style of the Book of the Apocalypse, that what our country lacks is "property without property" and "liberty without liberty." It is surprising how this discovery is making them a fortune. You have to see it to believe it!

Other writers become popular by calling for the abolition of all taxes and the increasing of all kinds of government spending. Free us, they say to the Ministers, of the tax on salt, that on sending letters, the octroi tax, and customs duties, etc. 620 Increase spending on the army, the building of ships and the navy, the fortifications around our towns, 621 exert the supremacy which belongs to France over all of Europe, give charity to all the unfortunate people, give work and bread to everyone, bring up their children for free. This is called the genius of the organiser. 622 You have to see it to believe it!

2. "The World turned upside down again" (Encore le monde renversé), pp. 299-300; (T1)

Some time ago a question was posed in this way:

Does the law give a subsidy to those who sell meat by making others pay a higher price for it, which is paid by those who eat it?

Le me paint you a picture of the deep surprise felt by a young naval officer who, returning from a long voyage, learns that the Journal des Débats was against and Le National was in favour of the subsidy.

Today another question comes to mind:

Would the farm worker from the South or the textile worker from the North pay a tax to increase the profits of the dancers at the Opéra? 623

A serious-minded magistrate and a popular newspaper have given us their opinion.

— Ah! No doubt the popular newspaper rejected this ridiculous injustice and the serious-minded magistrate defended it?

— Not at all! It is the exact opposite.

— What the hell! That is too much. Either the performers at the Opéra have some talent or they do not. If they have any, their profits would be quite honest ones, and one knows all about those who make 100,000 francs in income and flaunt the most scandalous luxury. If they do not have any talent why should they be subsidised to such an extent by the peasant and the textile worker who will never see them? Isn't it quite natural for those who go to the Opéra to cover there costs?

— That is what the magistrate said.

— So why did Le National support the subsidy?

— Perhaps because the magistrate criticised it?

— There must be some other reason. Give me your thoughts.

— When one is a popular newspaper one has to chase after popularity. Now, there are two infallible means of achieving this? The first is to push up one's expences; the other is to fight against raising the price of the paper.

— But that is contradictory.

— That doesn't matter! The world is made up of two classes: 624 those who can live off abuses and those who pay for them. By pushing up their expences they win over the former; by fighting against increasing their revenue one wins over the latter.

3. "A Simple Dialog between a Protectionist and a Free Trader"

A Protectionist: What do you do when someone treads on you your foot?

A Free Trader: I cry out.

Protectionist: You Englishman! And what if no one hears you?

Free Trader: I scream even louder.

Protectionist: So very English! So very English! Oh come on! What if no one comes to help you?

Free Trader: I would look for other people who were in a similar situation, see if they understood what was happening, and get them to cry out with me.

Protectionist: You Anglophile! 625 And what if they don't understand?

Free Trader: I would make it my task to make them understand.

Protectionist: You Anglo-maniac! And how would you do this?

Free Trader: I would talk, I would write, I would invite those who had a good turn of phrase and a sharp pen to speak and write.

Protectionist: Just like John Bull! God damn it! 626 I no longer recognise who you are. You are no longer French.

Free Trader: However, it seems to me that what I am doing is the most natural thing there is, and I don't see that I could do otherwise.

Protectionist: No doubt, but the English do just that.

Free Trader: Well now, Monsieur, and what do you do when you are hungry?

Protectionist: I eat.

Free Trader: You Englishman! You copycat! And what do you do when are thirsty?

Protectionist: I drink.

Free Trader: You Englishman! That is pure Cobden! 627 And what do you do when your nose is blocked up?

Protectionist: I blow it.

Free Trader: What a mimic! Such a parody! What a lot of monkey business!

10. T.80 "Second Letter to M. de Lamartine (on price controls on food)" (Oct. 1846, JDE)↩

Source

T.80 (1846.10.15) "Second Letter to M. de Lamartine (on price controls on food)" (Seconde lettre à Monsieur de Lamartine), JDE , Oct. 1846, T. 15, No. 59, pp. 265-70. [OC1.13, pp. 452-60.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

Although the liberal-minded monarchist politician Alphonse Lamartine 628 supported free trade and economic deregulation most of the time and even lent his assistance to the French Free Trade Association by giving speeches on their behalf at public meetings, 629 he had his lapses from economic orthodoxy as this angry and frustrated letter from Bastiat shows. See also Bastiat's "First Letter to Lamartine" (Jan. 1845) (above, pp. 000) for another lapse concerning the right to a job which upset Bastiat considerably.

Here Bastiat objects to Lamartine's call for a suspension of free trade in order to alleviate the suffering caused by the high prices and shortages which resulted from the crop failures of 1846 and which extended into 1847. The problem had begun with the potato blight in Ireland in 1845 which led to crop failures and food shortages. Poor weather in Europe led to similar crises on the continent in 1846. These crop failures caused considerable hardship and a rise in food prices in 1847 across Europe. Some historians believe this was a contributing factor to the outbreak of revolution in 1848. The average price of wheat in France was 18 fr. 93 c. per hectolitre in 1845; which rose to 23 fr. 84 c. in 1846. Prices were even higher in the last half of 1846 and the first half of 1847 when the shortage was most acutely felt. In December 1846 it rose to 28 fr. 41 c; and reached a maximum of 37 fr. 98 c. in May 1847. Lamartine wrote an essay for his magazine on "The Food Crisis" in Oct. 1846 630 as the crisis was reaching its height and called for the government to introduce price controls (which Bastiat refers to as the "Maximum" in a reference to the disastrous prices controls introduced during the Terror).

The response of Richard Cobden and the free traders in England to the Irish famine was to call for deregulation and international free trade so that surpluses from other parts of Britain and Europe, such as Odessa in Russia, could be brought in to feed the Irish. The plight of the hungry Irish was an important part of free trade propaganda in England which led to the repeal of the Corn Laws between January and June 1846. The situation in France was complicated by the fact that the country was divided into regional zones which were required by the government to have their own government funded grain storage centres and bans or limits on exporting grain to other parts of France depending upon prices and supplies. Thus, France had a double problem of restrictions on both internal and external movement of grain in times of shortages.

The result of Lamartine siding with the large grain growers and the protectionists in late 1846 was his "demotion" by Bastiat from the pantheon of semi-official poet to the liberal movement:

You fulfill this sublime mission entirely and this, Lamartine, is why you were our favorite poet. And now, will we be condemned to being the witnesses of your downfall, to seeing you descend in your lifetime from the height of your glory and to doubting whether those delicious emotions with which you calmed our youth were anything other than misleading illusions? (emphasis added)

The layout and style of this essays, with a quotation from Lamartine on the left and a reply by Bastiat on the right, much like a "free trade catechism," follows that of one of the leading spokesmen for the Anti-Corn Law League, Thomas Perronet Thompson, who used it in several of much reprinted pamphlets. 631

Text

Sir,

I have just read the article which originally appeared in the Bien Public in Mâcon and has now been republished in all the Paris journals. It would be impossible to express to you how much of what I have read has surprised and saddened me.

It is, then, only too true! No one on earth has the privilege of intellectual universality. There are even mutually excluding abilities and it appears that the arid domain of political economy is all the more forbidden to you because you possess to the highest degree the enchanting and supreme art "Of thinking in images as well as naturally."

Why have you disdained this art, or rather this divine gift? Ah! No matter what you say, you had received the most noble and holy mission of genius in this world. What has become of the period in which, with minds that were cold and methodical and natures still weighed down by the burden of materialism, we tore ourselves with delight from this positive world to follow your flight in the misty and poetic regions of idealism? You revealed to us then thoughts, doubts, desires, and hopes that slumbered within our hearts, like the echoes that slumber in the grottoes of our Pyrenees as long as the voices of our shepherds do not awaken them. Who will now reveal other horizons and other skies to us, adored places in which Love, Prayer and Harmony live? 632 How many times, when you gave me glimpses of these misty domains, did I not cry: "No, this world does not embrace everything; science does not reveal everything. The infinite exists beyond them and imagination also has its torch!"

Oh! How great is the power of the poet! I do not mean a mere "versifier" who tolerates whatever license or tyranny he may come across. But that perception of what is Beautiful and Sublime in nature, that strong emotion that is awoken in the soul when they are seen, this gift of clothing them in a language that is melodious in order for commonplace souls to be included, that is Poetry. And as it rises, it breaks free from any element of selfishness or perversity, for it could never share the sad infirmities here below without losing the sentiment of what is true, lovable, and great, that is to say, without ceasing to be Poetry. As long as the divine light shines on his brow, his aspiration will be to purify, make more spiritual, illuminate, and elevate. Thus, a true poet, whether or not he is aware of this, is the friend of the human race par excellence, the defender of its rights, its privileges, and progress. 633 What am I saying? No one carries it more than he along the path of progress. Is it not he in fact who, by constantly presenting ideal perfection to us, makes us love it, pours into our hearts an aspiration to Beauty and thus raises the pitch of our souls until it feels in union with the eternal models with which it composes its celestial harmony?

Just look what you are up to. Because you seek to emulate the kingdom of science, you have abdicated your own kingdom, the kingdom of poetry. You wanted to base your way of thinking on your imagination and your analysis on numerical figures. Where has this got you? To resurrecting the economic empiricism of imperial Rome, to exhuming theories that have been condemned by experience a hundred times over, and been thought buried forever in the depths of oblivion. At the point of giving way, yield, when, if I may use a common expression, it is natural to clutch at any supports, even the monopoly land interest did not attempt, through its mouthpieces, Bentinck 634 and Buckingham 635 , to ask for salvation or a temporary respite on the basis of these worm-eaten theories; and so the world will be astonished that it is you, the great poet of the century who has disinterred them from who knows where in order to set them out once more, clad in magnificent language, to the accompaniment of public ridicule.

Your muse has definitely become an economist; it was not terrified by this strange transformation. For one moment I thought that your whim was going to succeed; it was when you said: "Leave capital, industries and wages to achieve a level of justice for themselves by way of freedom that our arbitrary and despotic laws could never achieve for them."

I think that no thought as true as this, in such a precise form, could have been uttered by anyone who had not traced out the long sequence of effects of arbitrary and despotic government and freedom alike. And I said to my serious colleagues: A miracle! A triumph! The great poet is on our side!

Alas! I see now that you owed this passing light of truth to your powerful and generous instincts and I am tempted to ask you:

(Whether) when you wrote that charming whate'er they say, Did you yourself fully understand its power? 636

For here, with a stroke of the pen, you have today turned upside down your economic doctrines of last year.

Here in some detail is what you are replacing it with this year.

[NOTE TO LAURA: I can't put footnotes in tables, so I have marked it accordingly]

"The question of cereals is one of the most sensitive, we would say, one of the most insoluble ones that can face economists."

The question of cereals insoluble ! In this case, we should spend no more time on it than we do on squaring the circle . This word therefore should not be taken literally and you wished to speak of "An unsolved problem but not an insoluble one." [see FN]

Note that from the outset you have denied yourself the right to reason.

FN: "An unsolved problem but not an insoluble one." 637

"Through its mass and weight, it escapes the hands of science."

Yes, if 200 and 200 do not make 400 as surely as 2 and 2 make 4; yes, if by its mass and weight one hundredweight escapes the laws of gravity more than one pound does.

"Theory can obviously do nothing. This is a question of experimentation ."

Is there incompatibility between theory and practice, then? I thought that theory was merely experience set out methodically. [FN]

Note that this is already the second time that you have denied yourself the right to reason.

FN: "incompatibility between theory and practice" 638

"Total freedom to trade is a general truth with regard to products, commerce, and trade."

This is a fine maxim. Do you take it from theory or experience?

" Laissez faire, laissez passer has become a proverb with writers."

According to the preceding sentence, you appear to take this proverb for the truth. According to the following sentence, you appear to take this proverb for a falsehood.

"But when it is a question of applying this alleged truth to imports, exports , and the grain trade, it is instantly clear that, while it is not a lie , it is at least a supreme danger, and the theory gives way to practice, since wheat is the lifeblood of the people, and you do not play with life. Lives come first; that is the irrefutable truth. Theories come after the life's necessities, that is common sense."

Here in effect is a general truth that is no longer anything more than alleged truth. In a short time, it will become a lie .

If gravity is a general truth , it is important to respect it at all times, but especially when it is a question of life.

I would not have been surprised if you had not acknowledged freedom as a general truth in commerce, but once you had recognized this, your deduction ought, in my view, to have been formulated as follows:

"When it is a question of the import or export of something superfluous, we might yield to the application of general truth . However, with regard to wheat there should be no hesitation, for wheat is the lifeblood of the people. Well, we do not play with life; life comes first; that is the irrefutable truth. Government experiments should come after life's necessities, that is common sense."

"Well, why does the TRUTH of free trade, free exports, and free imports cause fear and trembling in economists? For example, relating to France, here it is:"

Either freedom is the best way of ensuring abundance and the proper distribution of products (it is only on this condition that it is a general truth ), and in this case it should be applied to everything, and a fortiori to wheat, or there are more certain ways of achieving this work, in which case it is not a general truth , either for toys or for wheat.

"First of all, since wheat is the lifeblood of an entire nation and a passion for life is the most legitimate and fearful passion in people, the slightest fault of commerce, the slightest error in calculation in the imports and exports of wheat, the slightest serious anxiety in the population with regard to life will produce a level of unrest and shortages to which no humane and wise legislator would wish to expose his country."

Since wheat is the lifeblood, and since the slightest error in calculation in the import or export of wheat can produce shortages; since no wise and humane legislator can take the responsibility of exposing his country to it, commerce should then be left free, since, besides, freedom is a general truth , that is to say, the least risky means of ensuring abundance and proper distribution. Is it not clear that an error in calculation, whose consequences can be so fearful, is infinitely more probable in a minister who is not directly involved and has many other concerns than in one hundred thousand traders who spend their lives doing these calculations on whose accuracy their own existence depends?

"Next, as wheat is the largest agricultural product, totaling revenue of two or three billion in the production of the country, if the free import of foreign wheat was able to compete with French wheat without limit at all times and at a price in a ratio to ours of ten to thirty , France would instantly stop producing wheat that nobody would want to buy at that price and three billion of national revenue and ten million farmers would be wiped out simultaneously. What would happen to income? What would happen to taxes? What would become of landowners? What would become of those who work the land? We tremble to think. It would be the suicide of French landowning and the population. This remedy that is being put before us is thus not a remedy but murder."

If what you say about free imports is true for wheat, it has to be true to some extent for anything else, for, Sir, traders do indeed import wheat when they are allowed to, from places where it is cheaper than in France; they do not have the habit of acting differently with regard to other products nor buy them expensively in order to sell them cheaply. For this reason, the free import of iron would be suicide for our forges and the workers they employ. Free imports of fabrics would be suicide for our factories and the populations that they employ. In a word, freedom would result in universal carnage or, as you put it, the murder of every French citizen. In this case, I do not clearly see the reason for your calling it a general truth . To insert some harmony between your premises and your conclusions, you should have begun by establishing that freedom is the general lie in commerce . However, in this case, you would not have had a foot in each camp, a precaution that many people take just now, but one that is unworthy of you. I take the liberty of saying to you that this cowardly tactic has run its course. Let the person who is unfamiliar with the laws of trade either examine them or hold his tongue, but don't let him think that he can obtain the twin advantage of being thought of as a great mind and pleasing everyone by saying to one person: "You are in favor , which makes you a good logician" and to another: "you are against , which makes you a good practical man". Too many people see the inconsistency and denounce it.

As for refuting your sad picture of freedom in agriculture, you yourself have done so in the following paragraph.

"Finally, as wheat is one of the most bulky products, it would be physically impossible commercially to import and distribute throughout the empire all the wheat required for consumption in France. Calculations made in 1816, a year of shortage that was much more alarming than the present one, proves this sad truth through figures: if by an impossible coincidence all the merchant shipping in Europe was devoted to importing wheat for France, it could have imported enough for only fifteen to seventeen days' consumption. Tell me something about unlimited freedom of commerce after that!"

Be afraid of unlimited freedom after that, say I in turn! Come and tell us then that foreigners will sell their wheat into our market for a trivial amount, for almost nothing or perhaps for nothing at all! Come and paint us a picture of every French citizen dying of hunger with folded arms, leaving their cattle to ruminate, their ploughs to rust, their capital idle, and their land unworked while relying on foreign wheat that it is physically impossible to import!

Oh! Let us thank heaven that among our 34 million fellow-citizens someone has been found who has foreseen this, that this should precisely have been a statesman and that he has been able to anticipate all of our deaths by setting this happy Maximum price [ insert FN] that has never been known in Switzerland and that has just been abolished in England.

FN: Maximum price. 639

But perhaps it would be improper to continue this discussion step by step. Sometimes I ask myself how it can be possible for two minds to reach such opposing solutions to the same question. Is it self-interest that blinds me? Certainly not. I do not have other means of existence than one piece of land and this land produces only cereals. 640 If foreign cereals were allowed to enter, I do not think my land would lose its value and do not fear that my hands would remain idle. No, I do not fear this would happen even if the foreign wheat is sold, as you claim, for a price in a ratio to ours of ten to thirty , as you say, or even if it were given away for NOTHING, for in that extreme hypothesis, what the people spend today on bread they would spend on meat, butter, vegetables, yarn, wool, and other farming products. My land would no more be valueless because each person had free bread to fill his stomach than it is valueless now because each person has free air to fill his lungs.

And after all, what right have we, the landowners, over the stomachs of those who are not? Is their hunger made for our wheat or our wheat made for their hunger? Let us not turn the world upside down. Living is the aim, cultivating the land is just a means to this end; it is up to us to subordinate the convenience of our production to the lives of our fellow-citizens and not on the contrary to let ourselves subject their lives to our properly or improperly considered convenience. I find it very comforting that the doctrine of freedom reveals to me only harmony among these various interests and, with your soul, you must be very unhappy, since you see in them just an unavoidable dissonance. 641 As a landowner, you now invoke the generosity of the owners of land. You should in truth be calling on their sense of justice ! You have written a page on charity that I, like everyone else, admires. But I would admire it a great deal more if I did not see it end with the bitter conclusion that "wheat is life; let the law maintain a Maximum price level for it that gives value to our land!" 642 And whose hand has written these lines? The same that was raised in the Chamber in favor of the Maximum and which will then open to receive from the poor the pennies which have been unjustly taken from them. Believe you me, understood this way, charity loses a great deal of its luster. When people demand that foreign wheat should be kept out so that theirs can be sold at a better price, it is no use their speaking of charity, 643 it is no use their carrying this word before them like a banner, they have no right to popularity or at least popularity worth anything. No, they have no right to this, even when they declaim before an anxious population banal indictments of the murderous doctrines of the friends of freedom, of the faults and crimes of the government and the Chambers and of the greed of speculators and the selfishness of commerce . Before broadcasting such dangerous and, I dare to say, unjust popular prejudices, they should at least not come and say: "Let the law increase the people's hunger by a few degrees by keeping out foreign wheat, so that we, the landowner-legislators, can gain a better margin for our wheat."

God forbid, Sir, that I call into question the purity of your intentions. It shines forth from all of your writings. Reading your words, I see clearly that you love the people. It is you, I believe, who were the first to use the expression: "la vie à bon marché" (life at low prices), words that might be the title of our Free Trade association, 644 for life at low prices, is life that is easier, sweeter, and less fraught with tiredness and anguish, more dignified, more intellectual, and more moral. Life at low prices is the result that trade, and above all free trade, tends to produce. On this question, a considerable number of monopolists have tried to mislead the people, which is easy, for any obstacle to progress 645 which happens to employ a sizeable part of the national labor force can readily serve to turn the feelings of the masses against progress, in whatever form it occurs, whether the case be Freedom, Inventions, or Savings. You, Sir, who know how to talk to the people, to whom they listen and whom they love, please help us to dissuade them. But do not be surprised that zeal against monopoly carries us away when what we have to fear is that it has found a champion of your caliber.

I am, Sir, your devoted servant,

11. T.81 "On Population" (JDE, 15 Oct. 1846)↩

Source

T.282 (1846.06.??) "Population", Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle: répertoire universel des sciences, des lettres et des arts avec la biographie de tous les hommes célèbres, ed. Ange de Saint-Priest (Impr. Beaulé, Lacour, Renoud et Maulde, 1846), vol. XX, pp. 110-120. Probably mid-1846. Republished as "On Population" in JDE, Oct. 1846. See T.81. [Not in the OC. DMH] [CW4]

T.81 (1846.10.15) "On Population" (De la population), JDE , 15 Oct., 1846, T. XV, no. 59, pp. 217-234. A revised version of this article appeared as chap. 16 in the 2nd, posthumous edition of Economic Harmonies (1851), with explanatory notes by Fontenay. Not in the OC. [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

Six chapters of what would become Bastiat's book Economic Harmonies were published in other locations between early 1846 and July 1851 when the expanded posthumous second edition was published. These were "On Competition" (Encyc. & JDE, May 1846),"On Population" (Encyc. & JDE, 15 Oct. 1846), "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (JDE, 15 Jan., 1848),"Economic Harmonies: I, II, and III. The Needs of Man" (1 Sept., 1848, JDE), "Economic Harmonies IV" (JDE, 15 Dec. 1848), and "Producers and Consumers" (JDE, 15 June 1851). The most heavily rewritten and revised early chapter was "On Population" which first appeared as an encyclopedia article in early 1846, as a slightly revised article in JDE (Oct. 1846), as a extensively rewritten chapter in the 2nd posthumous edition of EH (July 1851) along with a lengthy Note by Fontenay, and finally the same chapter as written by Bastiat (with one large paragraph cut) but with most of Fontenay's Note cut for volume 6 of the Oeuvres complètes which was published in 1855. We have indicated in the notes below where changes were made and in what version they appeared using the following abbreviations: "E version" (Encyclopedia version), "JDE version" (article in the JDE), and "EH2 version" (the second edition of EH).

To begin with the differences between the E version and the JDE version, there were ten minor corrections and new insertions of words in the JDE version, two longer insertions of new material dealing with the Bureau of Longitudes and the spiritualist and materialist schools of thought, and one new footnote on J.B. Say's theory of the means of existence. The most significant addition was a new ending for the JDE version of 900 words dealing with social harmonies, foresight and planning, sharecropping, the means of existence, philanthropy, progress, and the perfectibility of man.

The differences between the JDE and the EH2 versions were much more significant. There were several minor cuts; a new paragraph in which Bastiat criticised Malthus for underestimating the power of progress to alleviate the economic condition of mankind; and a couple of sentences on J.B. Say's theory of the "means of existence" were inserted; and a couple of sentences were cut which dealt with the right of workers to take advantage of circumstances which might improve the value of their services. However the major change was a new 2,000 word introduction which replaced the first couple of pages of the JDE version. About half of this new introduction was devoted to a defence of Malthus against his critics (Godwin, Sismondi, Leroux) who accused him of being too pessimistic and uncaring about the poor. Bastiat argued that Malthus was largely correct in theory but made the mistake of underestimating the capacity of the free market and human initiative to improve mankind's condition and the ability of people to have some control over the size of their families. Malthus also did not discuss how the actions of other human beings made other people worse off, namely by means of "plunder." Drawing upon what he had written on plunder in the first two chapters of ES2 (published January 1848) Bastiat added here the following very important paragraph to the EH2 version:

I believe that there are several (causes of poverty). One is plunder , or if you prefer, injustice . Economists have mentioned this only incidentally and in so far as it implies some error or erroneous scientific notion. When setting out general laws, they considered that they did not have to take notice of the effect of these laws when they do not work or when they are violated. However, plunder has played and still plays too great a role in the world for us, even as economists, to feel free to disregard it. It is not just a question of casual theft, larceny and isolated crime. War, slavery, theocratic deception, privilege, monopoly, trade restrictions, tax abuses, are all the most obvious examples of plunder. It is easy to understand the influence that such wide-ranging disturbing forces must have had and still have on the inequality of situations by their very presence or the deep-rooted traces they leave. Later, we will endeavor to measure their huge effect.

Bastiat had been developing this idea of "disturbing forces or factors" 646 which upset the harmony and wealth creating function of the free market since early 1845 when he first broached it in his "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine" (JDE, Feb. 1845). 647 In this essay he also contrasted it with its opposite, "les forces réparatrices" (restorative forces or factors), by which the free market attempted to repair itself and return to equilibrium after having been disturbed by various interventions. He planned to have an entire chapter in Economic Harmonies devoted to this topic but did not complete it before he died. 648

One can only speculate on why Bastiat made so many changes and revisions to this essay (more than any other). His more optimistic view about the ability of markets to produce sufficient food and of people to plan the size of their own families put him at loggerheads with the more orthodox political economists, some of whom like Joseph Garnier and Gustave de Molinari were ardent Malthusians. Perhaps Bastiat was trying to answer their objections in his later versions of the essay. He also seems to be thinking more about J.B. Say's idea of a flexible and ever-upwardly expandable "means of existence" (or "standard of living" as we would say today) and how this might be used to answer some of Malthus' concerns. The other side of the coin, was his new idea of "disturbing factors" which prevented many people from producing and keeping what wealth they had acquired out of the hands of various "plunderers", whether "legal" or "extra-legal." The combination of unfettered wealth creation and protection of property rights Bastiat thought would go a long way towards solving the "population problem."

Some of the other topics Bastiat deals with in this essay include the following.

There is a difference between the "means of subsistence" (bare survival) which is biologically determined and the "means of subsistance" (the standard of living) which depends on the level of economic development and the amount of capital in any given society.
There is a difference between the "theoretical" or "potential" growth of a population, which was applicable to plants or animals which are unable to plan for the future, and the "actual" or "historical" growth of human populations.
Human will and foresight play an important role in influencing how the "law of population limits" applies to human populations.
He is optimistic about human perfectibility and the possibilities for almost unlimited progress in the future.
He introduces his theory of exchange as the exchange of "service for service" and contrasts this with Say's narrower theory that one exchanges "products for products." 649
He discusses the nature of labour and the utility it produces and examines the impact competition will have on workers' wages in different "social strata."

Other places where Bastiat discussed Malthus and the problem of population growth:

T.17 "On the Allocation of the Land Tax in the Department of Les Landes" (July, 1844) - a discussion of the impact of the land tax on population levels and the standard of living in Les Landes.
T.23 "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine" (JDE, Feb. 1845) - criticises Lamartine for accusing the economists for being heartless Malthusians.
T.47"Thoughts on Share Cropping" (JDE, Feb. 1846) where he argues that sharecroppers who have the economic incentive to do so, show that individuals can rationally plan the size of their families.
T.66 "On the Railway between Bordeaux and Bayonne" (19 May, 1846) where he talks about population fluctuations and tax burdens.
T.68 "On the Redistribution of Wealth by M. Vidal" (JDE, June 1846) where he argues that men are rational creatures who plan their lives and prosper.
T.282 "On Population" (Encyc. 1846)
T.81 "On Population" (JDE, October 1846)
T.166 ES1 "Physiology of Plunder" (Jan. 1848) where he develops a Malthusian law which governs the maximum size to which the state can grow before popular resistance grows to resist it.
T.244 "Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" (12 December 1849) where he develops a Malthusian law which governs the number of civil servants and state employees.
T.249 First edition of EH (Jan. 1850)
"To the Youth of France" where he wants to replace Malthus's "false law" with a new law: "All other things being equal, the increasing density of population is equal to an increasing capacity to produce."
Chap. 4 Exchange where he claims he has found the solution to the population problem in the "perfecting of the commercial and exchange mechanisms"; and that increasing population density and concentration of people in cities increases the division of labour and the opportunities for mutually beneficial trade.
Chap. 7 "Capital" where he argues that the value of all things increases along with increases in population density.
Chap. 9 "Landed Property" where, according to his "law of prices," as population pressure increases the price of food, more food will be produced.
T.260 Second edition EH:
Chap. 16 "On Population" where the productive power of economies will increase as population grows.
Chap. 18 "Disturbing Factors" where, once these disturbing factors are removed, significant barriers to wealth creation will also be removed which will allow more people to prosper.

Text

The law which governs mankind relative to their numbers has been formulated in these terms:

Populations tend to adjust themselves to the level of the means of subsistence.

It is difficult to explain why the honour or responsibility for creating this expression has been attributed to Malthus. I don't know of a single author who concerned themselves with this material writing before the English economist who did not express the same thought in other or even in identical terms. For example, M. Say substituted the words "the means of existence" (les moyens d'existence) for the words "the means of subsistence" (les moyens de subsistance) 650 based upon his work examining how much food was sufficient for a family to survive , according to the country in which they lived, the social rank to which they belonged, the customs they had adopted, and the various needs the satisfaction of which was important for the maintenance of their lives. 651 The majority of economists have adopted M. Say's expression. But these formulas, one must say, and M. Say would agree, need so many explanations and commentaries of a rigorous and absolute kind and are so contrary to the facts, that their scientific usefulness is at the very least quite debatable. The size of a population is determined by the production of food according to Malthus; by production in general following M. Say, and by income after Sismondi. 652 But, if this is indeed the case, is is hard to see how mankind could ever make any progress if it weren't for the number of its people. As production or revenue increases for a nation or a class, if the number of people who make up this class or nation increase exactly in the same proportion, then the condition of human beings is unchangeable. Ten times more production in the 19th century compared to the 5th century; ten times more income in an industrious nation than in a primitive people; this implies a ten-fold increase in population for the century or the country which has become civilised, but this excludes any notion of individual improvement or progress. This is certainly not what the economists intended to say but it is the logical consequence of their formulas. They are thus more or less incomplete. What is important is to explain the laws of population growth and if it is then possible to summarise them in a brief phrase it would certainly be a happy moment for the advancement and spread of economic science. But if, because of the number and changing nature of the data we find that these laws resist being encapsulated in a formula with the logical rigor which science demands, we would have to give up this attempt and accept the inconvenience of having to use an inevitable wordiness instead of a deceptive concision to explain the problem.

The first fact to determine is the physiological power of the human race to multiply. It is clear that this is the upper limit in all cases beyond which any real growth of a population cannot go. Here we would like to be very clear and not encourage the accusations which, in our view, have been so inappropriately leveled against Malthus. This line of reasoning has been attributed to him: "Population increases in geometric progression; food production increases in arithmetic progression; therefore poverty, sickness, and death have to intervene in order to re-establish equilibrium." Malthus never made this foolish assumption: that people multiply in a geometric progression. He examined from a physiological perspective what the natural power of reproduction was for the human race, how much time it took for a given population to double in size on the assumption that the satisfaction of all its needs did not meet with any obstacle , 653 and concluded that this was a period of 25 years. 654 He came to this conclusion because direct observation of a people which most closely approximated his hypothesis (although still very far away geographically) had shown him. This was the example of the American people. Once he had found this period, and as it was always a matter of the theoretical power of growth, he said that a population tended to increase in a geometric progression. This, most certainly, is a veritable truism , since, according to the assumptions of the author , where the satisfaction of needs were completely assured in advance, there was no reason to believe that 2 thousand, 100 thousand, 1 million couples would not multiply in the same proportion as one thousand. In fact, this will not happen. Why? Because people, according to Malthus' hypothesis, are not like this; because their needs are not satisfied as soon as they appear; because it is necessary to create food so that these new generations imagined in theory can survive, 655 or, if you will, to create the means of existence so that they might live. Well, food cannot be doubled everywhere every 25 years. In fact, this is why populations do not double every 25 years. But what stands in the way of this power of nature, this theoretical force, this abstract principle of population growth? What makes a population, in all countries, instead of following the possible growth of this natural power, only and always follow the growth in food supplies? Obviously, it is because in reality fewer people are born and more people die than in this hypothesis. It is because people abstain from having children when they foresee that their needs will not be indefinitely and immediately be satisfied; or by not foreseeing this, they die. Since births and deaths are the only factors which can change the number of human beings, Malthus' division of checks to population into preventive and repressive ones must be complete.

That is Malthus' theory. I would like to observe here that this economist was wrong to adopt as the limit of human fertility this period of 25 years which was observed in the United States. By doing this he believed he could avoid any criticism of exaggerating and being too theoretical. How, he might say to himself, could anyone dare claim that I give too much latitude to what is theoretically possible if I base my conclusions on what is real ? Thus by mixing the real and the theoretical, by measuring the law of population growth (which was an abstraction which came from the law of population limits) by a period of time based upon facts which came from an historical example where these two laws operated together, he did not take care to avoid being misunderstood, which is what happened. He was mocked for his geometric and arithmetic progressions; he was criticised for taking the United States as being typical of the rest of the world. In a word, people used the confusion which arose from his use of two distinct laws in order to challenge him by pitting one law against the other.

But let it be well understood that when we examine what the power of reproduction means for the human race, we put aside for the moment all obstacles, physical or moral, which arise from the lack of space or food, and it is necessary to begin by recognising what the upper limit to the reproduction 656 of the species is, which human organisation makes theoretically possible. The first question we ask is therefore the following: given the age of puberty and the length of time a woman is fertile, what kind of progression could the reproduction of life follow, if it was not necessary to sustain it? With the human race, as with all other living creatures, this power is such that it is truly unnecessary to determine it exactly. It is sufficient to say that it exceeds by a huge amount all the examples of rapid population growth which one has observed in the past or which might be shown to exist in the future. In the case of wheat, assuming there are 5 stalks per seed and 20 grains per stalk, a single seed has the theoretical power to produce 10 billion in 5 years. For dogs, by reasoning from these two assumptions - that there are 4 pups per litter and 6 fertile years per bitch - that one pair would give birth over 12 years to 8 million offspring. For humans, setting the age of puberty at 16 and the length of child-bearing years at 30, each couple could give birth to 8 children. It is not necessary to reduce this number by half because of infant mortality, since we are reasoning, by hypothesis, that the needs of all kinds are satisfied as soon as they appear, a fact which greatly restricts the empire of death. Even so, these premises give us the following progression with a period of 17 years:

2 — 4 — 8 — 16 — 64 —256 —512, etc. 657

Thus we have more than 50 million people in 2 centuries.

What if we want to set puberty at 16 years and reduce to 6 the number of children that each couple can raise? One would have the following progression with a period of 21 years:

2 — 6 — 18 — 54 — 162 — 486 — 1,458, etc. 658

If one does the calculations according to the method used by Euler 659 the period for doubling will be every 12 and a half years, there will 8 periods in a century, and the growth during this period of time will be in the ratio of 512:2.

It is not useful to pursue this research any further. It is sufficient to recognise that in in our species, as in all others, the power of nature to multiply is greater than actual reproduction. Besides, it implies that there is a contradiction, that the actual exceeds the theoretical, and this is all that we wanted to establish.

In no historical period, in no country, have we seen the number of people increase with this frightening speed. According to Genesis , the Hebrews entering Egypt numbered seventy couples; in the Book of Numbers, two centuries later, we find that the census taken by Moses listed six hundred thousand men twenty-one years of age and over; hence, a total population of at least two million. 660 We may thus reckon that the population had doubled every fourteen years. 661 The statistical tables of the Bureau des Longitudes 662 are scarcely qualified to check biblical facts. Can we say that six hundred thousand fighting men implies a population greater than two million, and conclude from that a doubling period which is less than that calculated by Euler? We are entitled to cast doubt on Moses' census or Euler's calculations, but it certainly cannot be claimed that the Hebrews multiplied in numbers faster than it is possible to multiply. That is all that we ask.

After this example, which appears to be the one in which actual fertility most nearly approximated theoretical fertility, we have that of the United States. Here we know that, over the past three centuries, the doubling of the population takes place in less than twenty-five years. According to the research of M. Moreau de Jonnès, 663 who took as a starting point the growth of population which is taking place in our own time, the same phenomenon of doubling would take 43 years in Russia and England, 76 in Germany, 100 in Holland, 106 in Spain, 135 in Italy, 138 in France, 227 in Switzerland, 238 in Portugal, and 555 in Turkey. Thus there is a force which limits, restricts, and suspends to some degree the action of the physiological power which we have noted, and that this force is no doubt complex since it sets limits, which vary according to time and place, and are thus quite different to a power which had been considered to be uniform. The components of this force, the general factors which prevent all living creatures from reaching the law of doubling in their reproduction (a law which is a theoretical one for them), is also a law (if it is possible to recognise them and put them into a formula). I call it the law of population limits 664 and it is clear that the growth of the population in each country, in each class, is the result of the combined action of these two laws. But what does the law of population limits consist of? I think that one can say in a very general way that the reproduction of life is held back or prevented by the difficulty of sustaining life. It is important to deepen our understanding of this idea. It would be true to say that it constitutes the most important part of our subject.

Organisms that are alive but have no feeling, are entirely passive in this conflict between the two forces. For plants it is true in the most exact sense, that in each species numbers are limited by the means of subsistence. While there is a profusion of seeds, the resources of space and the fertility of the soil are finite. Seeds come to harm and destroy one another; they may fail to mature and if in the end they succeed, only in the numbers the soil can feed. Animals have feelings, but in general they appear to be without foresight; they reproduce, swarm, and breed rapidly, without a thought for their posterity. Only death, premature death, can limit their increase in numbers and maintain the balance between their numbers and their means of existence. 665 Mr. de Lamennais, when addressing the people in his inimitable style, said: 666

"There is a place for all on this earth, and God has made it sufficiently fertile to provide abundantly for the needs of all," And later: "The Author of the universe has not put man in a worse situation than that of the animals; are all not invited to the rich banquet of nature? Is a single one of them excluded?" And again: "Plants in the fields close to one another extend their roots in the soil that nourishes them all and all grow peacefully; none absorbs the sap of another.

It is possible to see this as merely fallacious oratory, which becomes the premises for dangerous conclusions, and to regret that such admirable eloquence should be devoted to popularizing the most disastrous errors. It is certainly not true that no plant steals the sap of another and that all extend their roots in the soil without hurting each other. Billions of plant seeds fall on the earth each year, start to sprout, and die, stifled by stronger and more vigorous plants. It is not true that all the animals that are born are invited to the banquet of nature and that none is excluded. 667 Among the wild species, animals prey on one another, and in the case of domesticated species man eliminates a considerable number. Indeed, nothing is more apt to show the existence of and relationship between these two principles, that of the growth of population and that of the limitation of population. Why are there in France so many bulls and sheep in spite of the massacres they suffer? Why are there so few bears and wolves, although fewer are killed and they organize their lives in ways consistent with their numbers increasing very substantially? It is because man provides food for the first group and removes it from the second. He uses the law of population limits with respect to them in such a way as to leave greater or lesser latitude to the law of fertility. Thus, for plants as for animals, the limiting force appears to show itself in one single form only, destruction . But man is endowed with reason and foresight, and this new element modifies and even changes the way this force acts with regard to him.

Doubtless, as a being equipped with physical organs and, to put it plainly, as an animal, he too is subject to the law of population limits by way of destruction. It is no longer possible for the number of people to exceed the means of existence: 668 that would mean that there would be more people than could exist, which implies a contradiction. Therefore, if reason and foresight have become dulled in man, he is vegetating and becoming brutish and this being so, while it is inevitable that he will increase in numbers given the great physiological law that dominates every species, it is equally inevitable that he should be destroyed by virtue of the law of population limits, of whose action he remains in this instance unaware. But if he is prudent, this second 669 law comes within the bounds of his will; he modifies it and directs it. Its nature changes; it is no longer a blind force, but one that is intelligent. It is no longer just a law of nature, but in addition a social law. Man is the point at which these two forces, matter and mind blend and merge; he does not belong exclusively to either. Therefore, for the human race, the law of population limits reveals itself through two influences and maintains the population at the required level through the twin action of foresight and destruction. These two effects do not have a uniform intensity. On the contrary, one expands as the other shrinks. There is one result that has to be achieved, population limits, and this is achieved more or less by repression or prevention , depending on whether man becomes more brutish or more thoughtful, depending on whether he is more physical or intellectual, and depending on whether he adopts more of a vegetative or moral way of living. The law is more or less external to him or within him, but it has to be somewhere.

We do not fully appreciate here in France how large a role foresight played in Malthus' thinking since the translator of Malthus greatly limited it by using this vague and quite inadequate expression "contrainte morale" (moral restraint), 670 which he further restricted by the definition he has given it; he says: "It is the virtue that consists in not marrying when you do not have the means to support a family and always to live in a chaste manner." 671 The obstacles that an intelligent human society places in the path of a possible increase in its numbers takes on many more forms than that of moral constraint as thus defined. And, for example, what is this revered ignorance of childhood, probably the sole form of ignorance that it would be a criminal act to dissipate, that everyone respects and over which a fearful mother watches as over a treasure? What is the modesty that succeeds ignorance, the mysterious weapon of young girls, which enchants and intimidates lovers and prolongs and embellishes the period of innocent love? Are the veils thus cast initially over ignorance and truth and the magic obstacles subsequently placed between truth and happiness not wonderful things, which would be absurd in any other context? What is the power of opinion that imposes laws that are so severe on the relationships of persons of different sex, stains the slightest infringement of these laws and pursues weakness, the person who yields to it, and those who are its sad offspring from generation to generation? What is this honor that is so fragile and this rigid reserve, so widely admired even by those who are emancipated from it, and what are the institutions, the problematic proprieties, and these precautions of all kinds, if not the action of the law of population limits as manifested in an order that is intelligent, moral, preventive, and consequently exclusively human? If these barriers are overthrown, and the human species takes no notice of convention, fortune, the future, public opinion, or customs, with regard to the union of the sexes, and returns to the condition of plant or animal species, is there any doubt that, for the human as for the plant and animal species, the power of reproduction would become so strong as to require the rapid intervention of the law of population limits , revealed this time in the physical world, one that is brutal, repressive , that is to say by the ministry of poverty, disease, and death? Is it possible to deny that, in the absence of any foresight or morality, there is enough attraction in the idea of the coming-together of the sexes to produce one, in our species as in all the others, from the outset of puberty? If we set the latter at sixteen years and if the civil records prove that people do not marry before the age of twenty-four in a given country, there are thus eight years subtracted by the moral and preventive aspect of the law of population limits from the workings of the law of population growth, and if you add to this figure what has to be attributed to absolute celibacy, you will be convinced that the intelligent human race has not been treated by the Creator like the brutal animal world, and that it is within its power to transform repressive limits into preventive limits. 672 It is rather strange that the spiritualist and materialist schools 673 should, so to speak, have changed roles on this major question. The spiritualist outlook, thundering against foresight, endeavors to have the brutish principle predominate, while the materialist view, exalting the moral aspect of man, exhorts the empire of reason over passions and appetites.

There is in all this a genuine misunderstanding. If the father of a family consults the most orthodox of priests over the management of his family, 674 he will certainly in specific instances receive advice that totally conforms to ideas that science has elevated into principles and that this same priest rejects as such. 675

"Hide your daughter", the old priest will say, "save her as far as you can from worldly attractions. Cultivate as far as you can and as you would a precious flower, the blessed ignorance, and the heavenly modesty which are both her charm and defense. Wait until an honorable and presentable suitor comes forward but nevertheless work to ensure her a reasonable fate. Remember that marriage in poverty brings a great deal of suffering and even greater dangers. Keep in mind the old proverbs that encompass the wisdom of nations and that warn us that prosperity is the surest guarantee of union and peace. Why be in a hurry? Do you want your daughter at the age of twenty-five to have a family that she is unable to raise and instruct in accordance with your social rank and position? Do you want her husband, incapable of overcoming the inadequacy of his wages, to succumb initially to financial distress, then fall into despair, and perhaps finally into misconduct? The project occupying your mind is the most serious of all those to which you can give your attention. Weigh it up, let it mellow, and avoid all haste, etc."

Suppose the father, imitating the style of Mr. de Lamennais, replies: "In the beginning, God gave this commandment to all men: Increase and multiply, fill the earth and subjugate it." And you, you tell a girl: "Renounce the family, the chaste attractions of marriage, and the holy joys of maternity, abstain and live alone; what would you have to increase other than your woes?" Do you think that the old priest would have anything to say against this line of reasoning?

God, he would say, has not ordered people to increase in number thoughtlessly and without measure, nor to couple like beasts with no thought for the future. He has not given his favorite creature reason in order to forbid him its use in the most solemn of circumstances. He has certainly ordered man to increase, but in order to do this he has to live, and in order to live he has to have the means. Therefore, in the order to increase in number is implied the order to provide the means of existence for the younger generations. Religion has not placed virginity in the category of crimes; far from it, it has made a virtue of virginity, honored, sanctified, and glorified it. It is therefore not to be believed that God's commandment is being violated because it is being prepared for prudently with a view to the good, the happiness, and the dignity of the family. Well, this line of reasoning and other similar ones dictated by experience, which we hear repeated daily around the world, which regulate the conduct of all moral and enlightened families, are they anything other than the application in individual cases of a general doctrine? Or rather, what is this doctrine, if not the generalization of a line of reasoning that recurs in all individual instances? 676 The partisan of the spiritualist tendency, who rejects in principle the intervention of preventive limitation, is like a physicist who says to people: "Act in all encounters as though weight existed but do not accept weight in theory."

We are going to see from this reason alone, 677 that man is a rational and moral creature, endowed with the faculty of judging the future by what happened in the past, and in changing his own destiny, that the law of population limits , which has only one component for other living creatures, namely the repressive check, has for mankind a second component, namely the preventive check, which is destined to reduce, neutralize, and absorb the first. Up until now, we have not departed from the Malthusian theory, but there is an attribute of the human race to which I think the majority of writers have not given the attention warranted by its importance, one which plays a huge role in the phenomena relating to population, one which solves several of the problems raised by this great question, and which regenerates in the souls of philanthropists a serenity and confidence that a deficient science seemed to have banished. This attribute, which is included, moreover, in the notions of reason and foresight, is perfectibility . Man is perfectible, he is capable of improvement or becoming worse. If it is called for, he may remain stationary. He is also capable, however, of ascending or descending the numberless steps of civilization. This is true for individuals, families, nations, or races. 678

It is said that the population tends to adjust to the level of the means of existence, 679 but are these means something which is fixed, absolute, and uniform? 680 Certainly not: as man becomes more civilized, the circle of his needs expands and this can even be said of simple subsistence . Considered from the point of view of a perfectible being, the means of existence , which have to be understood to include the satisfaction of physical, intellectual, and moral needs, have as many gradations as there are in civilization itself, that is to say that they are infinite. Doubtless there is a lower limit: to assuage hunger and protect yourself from a certain degree of cold is a condition of life, and we can glimpse this limit in the condition of the primitive peoples of America and the poor in Europe. I do not know, however, of an upper limit: there is none. Once natural needs have been met, they give rise to others, artificial at first, 681 if you like, but which habit makes second nature in turn, and these are followed by others and still more, without assignable limits. 682

Thus at each step that man takes along the path of civilization his needs encompass a circle that is ever-wider, and the means of existence , that meeting point of the two great laws of population growth and population limits, shift position in order to rise. This is because man, while as much subject to regression as to perfection, rejects the former and aspires to the latter. His efforts tend to keep him at the social rank he has achieved and advance him further, while habit , which we have so aptly called second nature, operating in the same way as the valves in our arteries, 683 erects obstacles to any retrograde step. It is therefore very easy for the intelligent and moral action that he exerts on his own reproduction to feel the effects of, be steeped in, and be inspired by these efforts, and combine them with these progressive habits.

The consequences of mankind being constituted in this way are legion: we will limit ourselves to mentioning just a few. First of all, we fully agree with the economists that population and the means of existence balance each other, but since the second of these terms is infinitely changeable and varies with the degree of civilization and with habits, we cannot accept, when it comes to comparing nations and classes, that population is proportional to production , as J. B. Say says, 684 or to income as Mr. de Sismondi claims. 685 Next, with each higher level of culture requiring more foresight, moral and preventive checks ought to neutralize the effect of brutal and repressive ones, at each stage of improvement which is achieved in society as a whole or in some of its parts. From this it follows that any social progress contains the seed of fresh progress, vires acquirit eundo, 686 since well-being and foresight build upon each other in an indefinite upward succession. In the same way, when, for whatever reason, the human race follows a downward path, ill-feeling and lack of foresight are cause and effect reciprocally and the downward spiral would have no end if society were not in possession of this curative force, vis medicatrix, 687 that Providence has placed in all living things. Indeed, we should note that at each period of decline, the effect of population limits in its destructive mode becomes both more painful and easier to discern. First of all, it is just a question of a deterioration and a worsening of conditions; this is followed by poverty, famine, disruption, war, and death, all sorry but unerring methods of teaching. 688

We would like to be able to pause here to show how far the theory explains the facts and how far in turn the facts justify the theory. When, for a nation or a class, the means of existence have dropped to the threshold at which they become confused with the means of mere subsistence, as in China, Ireland, and the lowest classes in all countries, the slightest variations in population or food supplies result in death, and the facts in this respect confirm scientific inference. Famine has not been seen in Europe for many years, 689 and the elimination of this scourge has been attributed to a host of causes. There are probably several, but the most general cause is that, because of social progress, the means of existence have risen high above the means of subsistence. When years of scarcity occur, a great many forms of satisfaction may be sacrificed before we have to cut back on food itself. This is not true in China and Ireland: when people have nothing in the world other than a little rice or potatoes, what will they use to buy other foods if this rice and these potatoes are no longer there?

Finally, there is a third consequence of human perfectibility, which we have to point out here because it contradicts the distressing aspects of Malthus's doctrine. We have attributed the following formula to this economist: "Population tends to adjust to the level of the means of subsistence." We ought to have said that he went far beyond this and that his true formula, the one from which he drew such distressing conclusions is this: "Population tends to exceed the means of subsistence." 690 If Malthus, by saying this, had simply wanted to propose that the human power to propagate life is greater than the power to sustain it, there would be no grounds for our objection possible. But this is not what his thinking is: he claims that, taking into consideration absolute fertility on the one hand and on the other the limitation of population shown by its two modes, repressive and preventive, the result is still a tendency of the population to exceed the means of staying alive. This is true for all living things except the human race. Man is intelligent, and is able to make unlimited use of the preventive limits to population. He is perfectible, he aspires to perfection, and he repudiates the idea of going backwards; progress is his normal condition and progress implies an increasingly enlightened use of preventive limits to population: therefore the means of existence increase faster than the population . Not only does this result derive from the principle of perfectibility but it is also confirmed by the facts , since the circle of satisfactions expands everywhere. If it were true, as Malthus says, that for each increase in the means of existence there will be a greater increase in the size of the population, then the poverty of our race would be doomed to increase, and civilization would be found at the beginning of time and barbarism at its end. The contrary has occurred, and therefore the law of population limits has had sufficient power to keep the flood of increasing numbers of people below the increase in the number of products.

All this shows us how vast and difficult the question of population is. Doubtless, it is regrettable that an accurate formula has not been given for it, and naturally I regret even more that I cannot give it myself. But can it not be seen how far the subject rebels against the narrow limits of a dogmatic axiom? And is it not totally pointless to wish to express the ratios of essentially variable data by an inflexible equation? Let us recall these data.

1. The law of population growth . The absolute, theoretical, and physiological power which exists in the human race to propagate itself, leaving aside the difficulty of maintaining it. This first given, the only one susceptible to a degree of precision, is the only one for which accuracy is likely to be unnecessary, for what does it matter where the upper limit of population growth is in theory if it can never be achieved in the actual situation of man, which is to maintain life by the sweat of his brow?

2. There is therefore a limit to the law of population growth. What is this limit? The means of existence, it is said. But what are the means of existence? They are a collection of satisfactions which are difficult to define. They vary and consequently move the limit being sought, depending on the place, time, race, social rank, customs, public opinion, and habits.

3. Finally, in what does the force that restrains the population within this movable limit consist? It is broken down into two parts with regard to man: the part that represses and the part that prevents. Well, the effect of the first, which in itself is not accessible to any form of rigorous assessment is, in addition, totally subordinated to the effect of the second, which depends on the level of civilization that exists, the force of habit, the inclinations of religious and political institutions, the organization of property, of labor and the family, etc. etc. It is therefore not possible to establish an equation between the law of population growth and the law of population limits that enables us to deduce the actual figure for the population. In algebra, a and b represent given quantities that are numbered and measured and whose proportions can be set, but the means of existence, the moral empire of the will, and the inexorable effect of mortality are three sets of data relating to the problem of population, data that are inherently flexible and which, in addition, take on something of the astonishing flexibility of the subject they regulate, namely man, that being, according to Montaigne, who is so marvelously changeable and diverse. 691 It is therefore not surprising that, by wishing to give this equation an accuracy it does not possess, economists have divided minds more than they have united them, for there is not one of the terms of their formulae that does not lay itself open to a host of objections based on reason and fact.

Let us now enter the field of application; application, apart from helping to elucidate doctrine, is the true fruit of the tree of knowledge. Here we are obliged to sketch out in broad strokes the theory which we have put forward under the term "Competition," a subject which has a close connection to what we are saying here. 692

As we have said, labor is the sole object of exchange. In order to acquire a useful thing (unless nature has given it to us free of charge), effort is required to produce it or to compensate someone for the trouble they have taken on our behalf. Man creates absolutely nothing: he organizes, arranges, and moves things about for a purpose. He does none of these things without effort, and the result of the trouble he takes is his property. If he hands it over to somebody, he has the right to restitution in the form of a service judged to be comparable in value, following free negotiation. Such is the basis of value, remuneration, and exchange, a basis no less true for being simple. In what we refer to as products , are various amounts of natural utility and various amounts of artificial utility , 693 only the latter involves the use of labor and it alone is the subject of human transactions. Without contradicting in any way J. B. Say's famous and fruitful formula: "Products are exchanged for other products," 694 I see as more strictly scientific the following one: " Labor is exchanged for other labor ", or better still, " Services are exchanged for other services ". 695

By this it should not be understood that labor is exchanged for other labor on the basis of duration or intensity, or that the person who hands over one hour of effort or the one whose effort sends the needle of a dynamometer 696 to 100 degrees is always able to demand that a similar effort is made in his favor. Duration and intensity are two elements that influence the evaluation of work, 697 but they are not the only ones: there is work that is more or less repellent, dangerous, difficult, intelligent, farsighted, and even successful. Where free and voluntary transactions prevail, where property is totally assured, each person is master of his own efforts and consequently master of the right not to hand anything over unless it is at his price. There is a limit to what he will agree to do, the point at which it is more advantageous for him to keep his labor rather than exchange it, and also a limit to his claims, the point at which it is to the benefit of the other contracting party to refuse the barter. Workers seek, 698 and it is their right to do so, to take advantage of any circumstances which might increase the value of their efforts; one calls to his aid a natural resource; another an ingenious industrial process, or a tool which he has had the foresight to acquire. The truly harmonious 699 task of competition, that egalitarian force against which people rise up in our time in such a casual manner, is to prevent anyone having a monopoly of these circumstances and to keep within the bounds of justice all excessive claims.

In society there are as many social strata, 700 if I may put it this way, as there are grades in rates of pay. The least well paid of all types of work is the one that is closest to physical and mindless labor. This is an arrangement of providence which is simultaneously just, useful, and inevitable. The ordinary manual laborer rapidly reaches this limit of his claims of which I have just spoken, since there is nobody who cannot carry out the mechanical type of work he offers, and he himself is pushed by the limit of what he will agree to do because he is incapable of taking on the intelligent effort which this demands. Duration and intensity , which are properties of a material nature, are really the only determinants of pay for this type of physical labor and this is why he is generally paid by the day . All the progress made by industry is encapsulated in this: the replacement of a certain sum of artificial utility in each product that consequently has to be paid for, by the same amount of natural utility that is free of charge for this reason. It follows from this that if there is one class in society that has the most interest in free competition, it is above all the working class. What would be its fate if the forces of nature, industrial processes, and the tools of production were not constantly obliged by competition to give the results of their cooperation to everyone free of charge ? It is not the simple day laborer who knows how to take advantage of heat, gravity, and elasticity, or who invents the processes and owns the tools through which these forces are harnessed. When these discoveries are first made, the work of inventors, people of the highest intelligence, is very highly paid; in other words, it is the equivalent of a vast amount of brute, physical labor, or to put it another way, its product is expensive . But competition intervenes, the product decreases in price, the cooperation of the services of nature no longer benefits the producer but the consumer, and the labor that uses these services comes closer in terms of pay to the work whose pay is calculated by its duration. In this way, the common fund of free wealth increases constantly. Products of all sorts tend over time to become more and more like our supply of water, air, and light, which are offered to us free of charge. Therefore the level of the human race is drawn upward and becomes more equal and therefore, if we leave aside the law of population, the lowest class in society is the one whose improvement is the fastest. However, we did say this is so if we leave aside the law of population, which brings us back to our subject.

Let us imagine a basin in which a channel that is growing ever wider brings in water that is ever more abundant. If you take account only of this fact, the level must rise constantly, but if the walls of the basin are mobile and can move backward and forward, it is clear that the height of the water will depend on the way this new situation works in conjunction with the first. The water level will decrease, however rapidly the volume of the water filling the basin increases, if the capacity of the basin increases faster still; it will rise if the perimeter of the reservoir expands proportionally only very slowly, even more if it remains static and, above all, if it gets smaller.

This is the image of the social stratum whose lot we are seeking to ascertain, a group, it has to be said, which constitutes the majority of the human race. Its remuneration, facilitating the purchase of the objects required to satisfy its needs, and to maintain life, is the water entering through the expandable channel. The mobility of the walls of the basin represents the movement of population. As we have shown in our article on "Competition", 701 it is certain that the means of existence reach this population in an ever growing progression; but it is also certain that their numbers can be enlarged by following an even faster progression. In this class, therefore, life will be more or less happy and more or less decent depending on whether the moral, intelligent, and preventive functions of the law of population limits will circumscribe to a greater or lesser degree the absolute principle of population growth. There is a limit to the increase in numbers of the working class, and that is when the growing funds for their pay become nevertheless insufficient to keep them alive. There is no improvement possible for them in this situation, because of the two elements that constitute this improvement, one, namely wealth, is constantly growing, while the other, population, is subject to their will.

All that we have just said about the lowest social stratum, the one that does the heaviest physical work, also applies to all the other social strata lying one above the other, and classified among themselves in inverse order, so to speak, to their respective coarseness and unskilled character. Taking each class by itself, all are subject to the same general laws. In all there is conflict between the physiological power of population growth and the moral power of limiting that growth. The only thing that differs from one class to the next is the point at which these two forces meet, that is the total number of people which their income will support and the habits and customs which limit this number. This limit between the two laws is what we call the means of existence.

But if we consider the various social strata, not in isolation but in their mutual relationships, I think that we can glimpse the influence of two forces pulling in opposite directions and this is certainly where the explanation of the actual situation of the human race lies. We have established how all economic phenomena, and in particular the law of competition, tend to lead to the equality of conditions; that does not seem theoretically deniable. Since no natural advantage, no ingenious industrial process, and none of the tools by which these processes are implemented, can permanently be limited to producers as producers; since , by an unstoppable gift of Providence, the results tend to become part of the common, free, and consequently equal heritage of all people, it is clear that the poorest class is the one that gains the greatest relative benefit from the admirable operation of the laws of social economy. 702 Just as poor people are as liberally treated as the rich with regard to the air we breathe, so they likewise become equal to the rich with regard to that part of the price of things that progress is constantly eliminating. There is therefore in the depths of the human race a prodigious tendency toward equality . I am not speaking here of a tendency at the level of aspiration but of one that is achieved. Nevertheless, equality is not achieved, or else it is achieved so slowly that when you compare a society over a period two centuries you scarcely notice its progress. It is actually so hard to discern that many fine minds deny it, although certainly mistakenly. What is the cause of this delay in merging the classes at a level that is common and constantly rising?

I do not think that we need to seek it anywhere else than in the varying degrees of the foresight present in each social stratum with regard to population. The law of population limits, as we have said, is at the disposal of men with regard to its moral and preventive aspects. Man, as we have also said, is perfectible, and as he advances he uses this law more intelligently. It is therefore natural that as they become more enlightened, these classes know how to subject themselves to more effective efforts and impose on themselves sacrifices that are better understood, in order to maintain their respective population at the level of the means of existence suited to them.

If statistics were sufficiently advanced, they would probably convert this theoretical reasoning into certainty by showing that marriages occur later in the higher levels than in the lower levels of society. Well, if this is so, it is easy to understand why, in the great market 703 to which all the classes bring their respective services and in which labor of a variety of kinds is exchanged, manual labor is in most abundant supply compared to intellectual labor, which explains the persistence of this inequality of situations that so many powerful causes of a different nature unceasingly tend to erase. 704

The theory that we have just set out briefly leads to the practical result that the best forms of philanthropy and the best social institutions are those that, when they operate in line with the Providential plan as revealed to us by the social harmonies, 705 that is to say, equality in progress, 706 spread knowledge, reason, morality, and foresight throughout all of the social strata of humanity, especially the lowest.

We mention institutions because in fact foresight results as much from the requirements of one's situation as from purely intellectual reflection. There is a particular organization of property, or to put it better, a particular way of using property, which encourages more than anything else what economists call knowledge of the market, 707 and consequently planning for the future? It seems certain for example that sharecropping is much more efficient than tenant farming 708 as a preventive check to excessive increases in population among the lower classes. A family of sharecroppers is much more capable than a family of day laborers of seeing the disadvantages of early marriage and uncontrolled increases in their numbers.

We also mention the forms of philanthropy. Indeed, alms may do some good at a specific time and place, but they can have only a very restricted influence on the well-being of the working class as a whole, if in fact they are not disastrous, for they do not develop, and perhaps even paralyze, the virtue that is most likely to improve the condition of this class, which is foresight . Disseminating sound ideas, and above all, habits marked by the spirit of a certain dignity, is the greatest and longest lasting good that can be done for the lower classes.

We cannot repeat too often that the means of existence are not a fixed quantity; they depend on customs, public opinion, and habits . 709 On all the rungs of the social ladder the same repugnance is felt at dropping down from the social position to which one is accustomed, as others may feel about being on the lowest rung of all. Perhaps this suffering may even be greater in the aristocrat whose noble offspring become lost among the bourgeoisie, than in the bourgeois whose sons become day-laborers, or in the day-labourers whose children are reduced to begging. The habit of enjoying a certain standard of living and having some dignity in life is thus the strongest incentive to the practice of foresight, and if ever the working class raises itself up in order to enjoy certain pleasures, it will not wish to fall back down and have to relinquish them. 710 In opposition to the actions of the upper classes to force it to do this, the working class will soon resort to an infallible remedy, namely the law of preventive limitation. It will then have to be given a wage which is in harmony with its new habits, without which it will cease increasing in numbers. This is why I regard as one of the finest demonstrations of philanthropy the decision that appears to have been taken in England by a great many landowners and owners of factories to tear down mud and thatch cottages and replace them with brick-built houses, which are clean, spacious, well-lit, well ventilated, and properly furnished. If this measure were to be generally followed, it would raise the level of the working class, convert into genuine needs what is currently a relative luxury, and would raise this limit which we call the means of existence and consequently the rate of pay at its lower level. Why not? The lowest class in civilized nations is at a level well above that of the lowest class in primitive societies. It has raised itself up; why should it not continue to do so?

However we should be under no illusions; progress is necessarily extremely slow, because it has to be general to some degree. We might imagine it happening rapidly in one part of the world if nations had no influence on one another, but this is not so. There is a great law of solidarity that governs the human race, both with regard to progress and to decline. If, for example, in England the situation of the workers improved considerably as a result of a general increase in wages, French industry would have more opportunity of getting the better of its rival and, through its expansion, would slow the movement toward progress that had arisen on the other side of the Channel. It seems that Providence has not wanted one nation to raise itself over others beyond a certain limit. Thus, both in the larger picture and in the detail of human society, we always find that admirable and inflexible forces tend in the end to confer individual or collective benefits on the masses and to harness all instances of temporary superiority and bring them back to a shared level that, like the ocean at high tide, is constantly spreading out evenly and constantly rising.

To conclude, if we assume as given that perfectibility is the distinctive characteristic of man, and that the effects of competition and the law of population limits are also known, the fate of the human race solely from the point of view of its destiny on earth, seems to us to be able to be summarized in this way. There will be : 1. an improvement of all social strata simultaneously, or of the general level of the human race; 2. a constant convergence of all social levels and the successive elimination of the distance separating the classes up to a limit established by absolute justice; 3. the relative reduction in terms of the numbers of the lowest and highest social strata and an expansion of the middle strata. People will say that these laws are bound to bring about absolute equality. No more than the eternal convergence of a straight line and an asymptote is bound to lead to their intersecting. 711

12. T.105 "To M. de Noailles in the Chamber of Peers (on Perfidious Albion)" (24 Jan. 1847, LE)↩

Source

T.105 (1847.01.24) "M. de Noailles to the Chamber of Peers (on Perfidious Albion)" (M. de Noailles à la Chambre des Pairs), LE , 24 Jan. 1847, no. 9, p. 66. [OC2.38, pp. 216-19.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

In this short essay from his free trade journal Le Libre-Échange Bastiat returns to a topic which greatly interested him, the idea that in general free trade benefits one party at the expense of another, and in particular that England ("Perfidious Albion") stood to benefit from a policy of free trade at the expense of the other European nations, especially France. Bastiat referred to "Perfidious Albion" repeatedly in the Economic Sophisms and very wittily coined his own term "Perfidious Normandy" to make fun of the idea that farmers in Normandy were deliberately trying to destroy the economy of Paris by selling them cheap butter. 712 Both the Normandy farmers and British manufacturers were just selling the things they produced best at prices which were very attractive to Parisian consumers, and both parties benefited from the transaction.

Bastiat thought that Montaigne was partly responsible for the widespread belief that "One Man's gain is another Man's loss." This was the title of one of Montaigne's Essays and Bastiat thought it was the "classical example of a sophism, the root stock sophism from which comes multitudes of sophisms." He planned to write a sophism specifically to refute this idea but did not go beyond writing a draft. 713

Text

M. de Noailles in the Chamber of Peers 714

24 January 1847

Our mission is to combat the mistaken and dangerous form of political economy that promotes the belief that the prosperity of one nation is incompatible with the prosperity of another, that lumps together trade and conquest, and production and domination. For as long as these ideas persist the world will never be able to count on twenty-four hours of peace. Worse: peace would be an absurdity and an irrelevance.

This is what we read in the speech given by Mr. de Noailles recently in the Chamber of Peers:

We know that England's interests lie in the destruction of Spain's trade so that England is in a position to swamp Spain with her own . Anarchy promotes weakness and poverty and England finds it profitable for Spain to be weak and poor . In a word, in the nature of things, England's policy entails her wishing to possess Spain in order to annihilate it, so that she has a populous nation to feed and clothe . (Hear, hear) 715

Of course, we will set aside the questions of Spain and diplomacy. We will limit ourselves to pointing out the absurdity and danger of the theory professed here by the noble Lord.

To say that a commercial and industrial country is interested in destroying all the others in order to flood them 716 with its products and to feed, clothe, house, and lodge their inhabitants is to summarize in two lines so many contradictions that we scarcely know where to begin simply to point them out.

What is at the root of a trader's wealth is the wealth of his customers, and when Mr. de Noailles states that England wants to impoverish those who buy her goods I would be equally gratified to hear him say that our neighbor, the Delisle Company, 717 is waiting for Paris to be ruined, for no more balls to be held, and for women to stop dressing up, in order to make its fortune.

On the other hand, it appears that, according to Mr. Noailles, one nation in particular aspires to feed and clothe all the others, and that in this respect this nation has calculated, and what is very strange, that it has calculated correctly. This nation wants nobody to work anywhere in order to work for everyone. Its aim is to make available to all both food and shelter without ever accepting anything from anyone, since anything it accepted would be a loss for it. Finally, and this is the greatest marvel, Mr. de Noailles believes and says, with a straight face, that England, by giving a great deal and receiving little, is impoverishing others and enriching herself.

Truly, it is high time that a tissue of banalities like this should cease to be the standard intellectual fare of our country. For our part, we are determined to harshly criticize these doctrines whenever they dare to appear, no matter from whose mouth they issue, for they are not only absurd in the extreme, they are above all anarchic and anti-social. In effect, short of gratuitously limiting yourself to puerile outbursts, it has to be acknowledged that the motive behind the actions of the producers is the same in all countries. If therefore the interest of English workers is to reduce prosperity and ruin the world, it is also the same for all Belgian, French, Spanish, and German workers, and then we would live in a world in which nobody can better himself without destroying the entire human race.

But, people will say, Mr. de Noailles is merely expressing a view that is widely held. Is it not true that the English are above all seeking markets and that consequently their main aim is to sell, not to buy?

No, that is not true, and it would not be true even if the English believed it themselves. We admit that, to their misfortune and that of the world, this mistaken principle, which is also that of the protectionist regime, entirely directed their policy for centuries, which explains the universally held distrust of which Mr. de Noailles is the mouthpiece. However, England came in the end to be influenced by a diametrically opposite principle, that of freedom, a system of ideas in which the following truth is much simpler and very much more comforting:

The English want to enjoy a host of things that do not come from their island, or which come only in insufficient quantity. They want sugar, tea, coffee, cotton, wood, fruit, wheat, butter, meat, etc. In order to obtain these things abroad they have to pay for them, and they pay for them with the fruit of their labor. The imports of a nation are the satisfactions it acquires for itself and its exports are the payment for these satisfactions. The real aim of any nation (whatever it thinks itself) is to import the most possible and export the least possible, just as the aim of every man in his business dealings is to acquire a great deal and give away as little as possible.

How much trouble it takes to have such a simple truth understood! And yet it has to be understood. The peace of the world depends on it.

13. T.111 "A Curious Economic Phenomenon. Financial Reform in England" (21 Feb. 1847, LE)↩

Source

T.111 (1847.02.21) "A Curious Economic Phenomenon. Financial Reform in England" (Curieux phénomène économique. La Réforme financière en Angleterre), LE , 21 Feb. 1847, no. 13, pp. 97-98. [OC2.32, pp. 186-93.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

In this article Bastiat provides an early account of what today is known as the "Laffer curve" which describes how cutting high marginal tax rates may increase the tax base so much that tax revenues increase in the long term. 718 He also returned to this topic in the pamphlet Peace and Liberty or the Republican Budget (February 1849). 719 Bastiat attributes the discovery of this seemingly strange idea that cutting tax rates might increase government revenue to the economic journalist James Wilson 720 who described it for the first time in commenting upon the tax reforms which Sir Robert Peel introduced in England between 1842 and 1846. 721

The background to these tax reforms were the two rebellions which broke out in Canada in 1837 in protest against corruption in the local government. The first one broke out in Lower Canada (Québec) in November and was followed shortly afterwards by one in Upper Canada (Ontario). Several of the ringleaders were hanged and others were transported to the British penal colony in Australia. The rebellion led to an Inquiry by Lord Durham which produced a Report on the Affairs of British Canada and then to the British North America Act of 1840. This in turn led to reforms enabling greater autonomy and self-government in many of the British colonies. Repressing the rebellion cost a great a deal and the British government experienced a fiscal crisis which was dealt with by Sir Robert Peel who was Prime Minister between August 1841 until his defeat on 29 June 1846 shortly after the repeal of the Corn Laws. His solution to the budget deficit was to impose an income tax of about 3% which allowed him to raise revenue, cover the deficit, and cut tariffs on many hundreds of items. The income tax had first been introduced in Britain during the war against Napoleon in 1798 by William Pitt (the Younger). It was progressive in that incomes above 60 pounds per annum were taxed at 2 pence in the pound (1/120) up to 2 shillings in the pound (10%) over 200 pounds. It was abolished in 1802 during a lull in the fighting but introduced again in 1803 and lasted until after Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo (1815) in 1816. The tax was re-introduced by Peel in 1842 to cover the growing budget deficit. It was levied on annual incomes above 150 pounds. Although it was intended to be temporary it became a permanent feature of the British tax system.

The struggles of the British government to balance its budget were observed with great interest by the supporters of free trade, especially the economic journalist (and later politician) James Wilson. Wilson founded the magazine The Economist in 1843, and was elected to Parliament in 1847. His pamphlet on Peel's economic and tax reforms The Revenue; Or, What Should the Chancellor Do? (1841) was the source for much of Bastiat's data in this article. 722

It is interesting to see here Bastiat punning on the phrase "le bon marché" in his discussion at the end of the article about what "a good price" means for sellers and for consumers. Sellers want "un bon prix" (a good or high price) so they can make profits, while consumers want to to buy goods "au bon marché" (at bargain or basement prices). The protectionist system made it possible for sellers to have high prices as a result of government privileges; free and open markets made it possible for consumers to have their low prices. Consumers were also beginning to benefit from important innovations in shopping which were taking place in the late 1830s and 1840s in England and France, namely the invention of the "department store" in which a wide variety of goods were sold inside one building, at fixed prices, and with guarantees for returns and refunds if the customer was not happy with their purchase. One of the pioneers in this field in Paris was Aristide Boucicaut who founded a store called "Le Bon Marché" in Paris in 1838. The phrase "la vie à bon marché" (life at bargain prices, or life when things are cheap) was used by Bastiat as one of the three mottoes underneath the title banner of his free trade magazine Le Libre-Échange which appeared between November 1846 and April 1848. He defines what he means by this expression in a letter published in October 1846 thanking Lamartine for inventing it: "It is you, I believe, who were the first to use the expression: "Life when things are cheap," words that might be the motto of our Free Trade association, for life when things are cheap, is life that is easier, sweeter, and less fraught with tiredness and anguish, more dignified, more intellectual and more moral. Life when things are cheap is the result that trade, and above all free trade, tends to produce." (See below p. 000.) The first occurrence of this expression in print can be found in Lamartine's "Speech to the Marseilles Free Trade Association" on 24 August 1847. 723

Text

In the session on the 9 th of February, Mr. Léon Faucher 724 called the Chamber's attention to the financial circumstances that hastened the arrival of the trade reforms in England. There was a whole series of facts, as interesting as they were instructive, which we consider to be deserving of the serious consideration of our readers, in particular those who operate industries which receive government privileges. Perhaps they will learn that monopolies do not always deliver what they appear to promise, any more than high taxes do.

In 1837, when the insurrection in Canada had brought about an increase in expenditure, which was coupled with a decrease in revenue, financial equilibrium was destroyed in England and there was an initial deficit of 16 million francs.

The following year, there was a second deficit of 10 million; 1839 left an overdraft of 37 million and 1840 one of 40 million.

The government thought seriously about how to end this ever-increasing calamity. It had a choice of two methods: reducing expenditure or increasing revenue. Either because, in the view of the government, the round of reforms conducive to reducing expenditure had already been in operation since 1815 or because, according to the way of all governments, it considered itself obliged to exhaust the nation before touching the established rights 725 of the civil servants, the fact remains that its initial thought was the one that comes to all governments: squeeze whatever one can out of taxes.

Consequently, Russell's cabinet 726 instigated and the Commons duly passed a bill that authorized an additional charge of 10 percent to be imposed on land tax, 5 percent on Customs and Excise, and 4 pence per gallon on spirits.

Before going any further, it would be a good thing to cast an eye on the manner in which public taxes were apportioned in the United Kingdom at that time. 727

The figure for revenue was approximately 47 million pounds sterling.

This was drawn from three sources: Customs and Excise , a type of tax that affected everyone more or less equally, that is to say, it fell in huge proportion on the working classes; assessed taxes , 728 or land tax that affected the rich, especially in England, and Stamp Duty which has a mixed character.

The tax on the people produced 36 million or 9/12 of the total;

The tax on the rich, 4 million or 1/12 of the total;

The mixed tax 7 million or 2/12.

From which it follows that commerce, private enterprise, and labor, that is the middle and poor classes in society, paid five-sixths of the public charges, which doubtless caused Mr. Cobden 729 to say, "If our financial code reached the moon with no comment, the inhabitants of this satellite would need no other document to be persuaded that England is governed by an aristocracy that is the master of the land and the legislative process." 730

Let us note in passing, and to France's honor, that while landowners in England pay only a total of 8 percent in taxes, in this country they account for 33 percent, 731 and in addition they pay a much larger share of consumption tax in view of their numbers.

As a result of the issues discussed above, the additional charges thought up by the Whigs were meant to produce:

1,426,040 pounds sterling, being 5 percent for Customs and Excise, not including spirits;

186,000 pounds sterling, being 4 pence per gallon on spirits;

400,000 pounds sterling, being 10 percent on land tax.

Here again the nation was called upon, in a ratio of 4:5, to make good the deficit brought about through the errors of the oligarchy. 732

The bill was implemented at the beginning of 1840. On 5 April 1841, the balance was examined anxiously and it was not without surprise mingled with terror that it was seen that, instead of the expected increase of 2,200,000 pounds sterling, there was a decrease in revenue compared with the previous year, of a few hundred thousand pounds.

This was an unexpected revelation. It was therefore in vain that the nation had been subjected to new taxes, and it would be equally pointless to have recourse to this solution in the future. Experience had just revealed a significant fact, that England had reached the extreme limit of its tax potential, and in future it would be impossible to extract from it another shilling through taxes. Nevertheless, the deficit was still a gaping hole.

The "Theorists," 733 as they are called, started to examine this threatening phenomenon. The idea occurred to them that they might perhaps increase revenue by decreasing taxes, an idea that appeared to imply a shocking contradiction. Apart from the theoretical reasons they put forward to support their view, some previous experiences provided a certain support for their opinion. However, for those people who, although committed to the cult of the facts , are not unduly averse to the reasons behind those facts , we must say how they supported their views.

"The yield of a tax on a consumer item", they said, "depends on the rate of tax and the quantity consumed. For example, if the tax is one and ten pounds of sugar is consumed, the revenue will be ten. This revenue will increase either because the rate of tax is raised with consumption remaining the same, or consumption increases with the rate of tax remaining the same. It will decrease if one or other of these elements changes and will still decrease if, although one of them increases, the other decreases to a greater extent. Thus, even if you raise the tax to 2, if consumption decreases to 4, revenue will be only 8. In this last case, the hardship for the people will be enormous, with no advantage, indeed much worse, with a loss to the Treasury."

This having been established, are the multiplier and the multiplicand independent of each other, or is it possible to increase one only at the expense of the other? The answer of the Theorists was:

"Tax acts just like all production costs, it raises the price of things and puts them out of range of a certain number of people. From this we obtain the following mathematical conclusion: if a tax is gradually and indefinitely raised, for the very reason that at each degree of elevation consumption of the taxable material is gradually further restricted, there will of necessity arrive a time at which the slightest addition to the tax will reduce revenue."

Let sincere protectionists, of whom there are many, allow us to call this phenomenon to their attention. We will see later that overdoing protection will put them in the same position as the Treasury when it imposes excessive taxation.

The Theorists did not stop at this arithmetical theorem. Delving deeper into the question, they said: "If the government were more conscious of the deplorable state of the nation's resources, it would not have taken a step which creates such confusion."

In fact, if the individual situation of its citizens were stationary, the revenue from indirect taxation would increase exactly in line with the population. What is more, if national capital and with it general well-being, increased, revenue ought to increase faster than the number of people. Finally, if the ability to consume is reduced, the Treasury must suffer. It follows from this that when you have before you the twin phenomenon of an increase in population and a decrease in revenue, there is a double reason for concluding that the people are being subjected to gradually increasing hardship. In these circumstances, to increase the price of things is to subject the citizens to additional hardship, with no tax advantage.

Well, from this point of view, what was the situation in 1840?

It had been noted that the population was increasing by 360,361 inhabitants per year.

In this case, assuming only that individual resources remained stationary, what ought the product of Customs and Excise to have been and what was it in fact? The following table will show us this: 734

Year

Population

Expected tax revenue

Actual tax revenue

1836

1837

1838

1839

1840

26,158,524

26,518,885

26,879,246

27,239,607

27,599,968

£ sterling

36,392,472

36,938,363

37,484,254

38,030,145

38,567,036

£ sterling

36,392,472

33,958,421

34,478,417

35,093,633

35,536,469

So even in the absence of any progress in production, and solely because of the force of numbers, the revenue, which in 1836 had been 36 million, ought to have been 38 million in 1840. It fell to 35 million, in spite of the surtax of 5 percent, a result which the downturn of the previous years ought to have predicted. What is strange is that in the five previous years the opposite happened. As Customs and Excise duties were reduced, public revenue increased more than proportionately to population growth.

Perhaps readers will guess the consequences that the Theorists drew from these observations. They told the government: "You can no longer usefully increase the multiplier (the rate of tax) without changing the multiplicand (the taxable material) to a greater extent; by lowering the tax, try to allow the nation's resources to increase."

But this was an enterprise fraught with danger. Even if they admitted that in the distant future it might be crowned with success, it is well known that time is needed for reductions in tax to fill the void they create and, let us not forget, they were facing a deficit.

It was a question, therefore, of doing no less than digging this abyss ever deeper, of compromising the credit of the England of old and opening the gate to incalculable catastrophe.

The problems were pressing. They brought down the Whig government. Peel assumed office.

We know how he solved the problem. He began by imposing a tax on the wealthy. In this way, he created for himself the resources not only to cover the deficit but also to meet the temporary deficits that the reforms he was contemplating were bound to cause.

Through income tax , 735 he relieved the nation of the burden of excise and, in line with the dissemination by the League 736 of healthy economic ideas, of Customs restrictions. At present, in spite of the abolition of a great many taxes and the reduction of all the others, the Exchequer would be flourishing were it not for the unforeseen calamities that have overwhelmed Great Britain. 737

We have to agree that Mr. Peel has led this financial revolution with astonishing energy and force. It is not without reason that he often described these measures as " Bold experiments. " 738 Far be it for us to wish to undermine the reputation of this Statesman and belittle the gratitude of the English working classes and, it might be said, of every country. However, having done it is enough for his glory, and we have to say in all justice that the invention in its entirety is the work of a Theorist, a simple journalist named Mr. James Wilson, whose advice, if it were followed, might perhaps be able to save Ireland in 1847 just as it saved England in 1840.

Now the men who seek the success of their businesses in monopoly will be asking us what analogy there is between the facts we have just recalled and the protectionist regime.

We ask them to look closely at the situation and to see whether they are not in the same rather ridiculous position that the Exchequer was in 1840.

What is protectionism? A tax on consumers. You say that it benefits you. Well, probably, much as taxes benefit the Treasury. However, you cannot prevent these taxes from reducing the economic wherewithal of the consumer, his power to buy, pay for, and consume products. Certainly, he will consume less wheat and woolen cloth than he would have if these products had come to him from all over the world. This is already very harmful, and we would even say a great injustice, but with regard to you and your interests, the question is to establish whether you will not experience the same fate as the tax authorities, whether there will not come a time when this destruction of the power of consumption will not deprive you of markets to such an extent that this outweighs the value of the protection you receive. In other words, if in this conflict between the artificial raising of prices resulting from protectionist duties and the reduction of prices caused by the inability of buyers to pay, the latter element does not outweigh the former, in which case you would obviously lose both on the sales price and on the quantity sold.

To this you will reply that there is a contradiction. That since the powerlessness of consumers to pay can be attributed to the level of prices, it cannot be granted that, under a regime of liberty, prices might rise unless we also grant by the same token that markets might shrink and that, for the same reason, an increase in sales implies a decrease in prices, since one is the effect and the other the cause.

The answer to this is that you are deceiving yourself. A country may certainly be imagined in which everyone is sufficiently prosperous for things to be be sold even at high prices, and another (country) where everyone is so destitute that sales cannot be made even at bargain basement prices. 739 It is to this second state that we are being led, both by the heavy taxes that go to the Treasury and the heavy taxes that go to the manufacturers, and there will come a time when the Treasury and the manufacturers have only one means left to maintain and increase their revenues, and that is to reduce the rates of taxation and allow the general public to breathe.

Moreover, this is not an unsupported argument. Every time the pressure of a protectionist duty has been lifted from a nation, two opposing trends emerge which influence the price. The absence of protection has certainly caused it to drop but the increase in demand has just as certainly driven it up, so that the price is at the very least maintained and the net advantage of the operation is increased consumption. You say that this is not possible. We say that it is, and if you will only check the current prices of coffee, silk, sugar and wool in England in the years following the reduction in protectionist duties, you will be convinced of this. 740

14. T.118 "Two Methods of Equalizing Taxes" (4 April 1847, LE)↩

Source

T.118 (1847.04.04) "Two Methods of Equalizing Taxes" (Deux modes d'égalisation de taxes); original title: "Le libre échange demontré par l'example du sucre de betteraves" (Free Trade makes its point with the example of Beet Sugar), LE , 4 April 1847, no. 19, p. 152. [OC2.40, pp. 222-25.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

Bastiat mentioned sugar several times in his writings 741 because of two factors. Firstly, it was an important source of revenue for the French government. The taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and sugar raised 308 million Fr. in 1848 or 19% of all revenue and these fell most heavily on the poor. And secondly, the sugar industry was in the unique position of being divided into two powerful groups who fought each other for better tax treatment, or what Horace Say called "la rivalité des deux sucres" (the rivalry of the two kinds of sugar). 742 This battle was between domestically produced sugar from sugar beets and foreign produced sugar from sugar cane grown in the French and other countries' colonies, often by slave labour. The domestic sugar beet industry had grown up in France as a result of Napoleon's Continental Blockade which had guaranteed French producers a monopoly for their product. Throughout the Restoration and the July Monarchy the two branches of the sugar industry fought each other in the Chamber over tax and tariff policy.

Originally the sugar beet industry was exempt from paying duties and taxes whereas foreign produced sugar suffered from a nearly prohibitive duty of 45 Fr. per 100 kg. The foreign sugar producers fought back between 1837 and 1839 and were able to get the Chamber to impose a duty of 25 fr per 100 kg on sugar produced from sugar beet in July 1840. Not surprisingly the sugar beet industry formed its own lobby group, the "Comité central des fabricants de sucre de betterave" (Central Committee of Sugar Beet Producers), in May 1840 which was too late to prevent the new tax but they were able to retain the much higher tax on foreign cane sugar at 45 Fr., thus enjoying a 20 Fr differential in duties. However, this differential did not stay for long. The Chamber agreed in principle in July 1843 that there should be "l'égalité des taxes" (equal taxes) placed on the two branches of the sugar industry. This came into effect in August 1847 (so soon after Bastiat wrote this piece) with a common duty of 45 Fr per 100 kg of premium sugar from any source.

This French debate might be likened to contemporary debates about the need for governments to ensure "a level playing field" before introducing a policy of free trade. Bastiat addressed the issue of "equalisation" in this article on the "Equalisation of Taxation" and in an earlier article on "Equalizing the Conditions of Production" in July 1845. 743

Slave produced sugar came to an end when slavery was abolished by the Constituent Assembly on 27 April after the February Revolution of 1848.

Text

Those in favor of free trade have used what has happened to beet sugar as an argument to prove that the fear of competition is often an illusion.

"Everything that has been forecast with regard to foreign competition for iron, woolen cloth, and animals", they say, "has also been forecast with regard to the sugar beet industry from colonial competition. The protected industries are not invoking a single argument that domestic sugar did not invoke when it was faced with a regime of equal taxation. Setting up the two forms of sugar in competition was to condemn the weaker to death. What has happened, however? Under the goad of necessity, manufacturers have made considerable efforts in the fields of knowledge, good administration, and making savings. In doing this, they have recovered more than they lost with regard to protection; in a word, they are more prosperous than ever. Does analogy not tell us that this would also be true for other kinds of industry? Is the path of progress closed to them? Would our manufacturers not make any effort to combat their rivals and, through their adroitness, regain more than they owed to legal privilege."

This form of reasoning places free trade in an unfavorable position. It removes two-thirds of the strength of its case by implying that a reduction in taxes on foreign products and an increase in those on domestic products are the same thing. It tends to make people think that, apart from sudden and unforeseen progress, there is no salvation for our protected industries if competition is allowed. It discourages those whose faith in all this progress is less than total and who, it must be said, may well not be as quick to adapt in other branches of production as was the case in the sugar industry.

People should not be encouraged to think that the maintenance of our industries in a regime of liberty is dependent upon some vague possibility of progress the extent of which nobody is able to precisely predict.

What people have to be made to see is this: the experience of leveling the playing field through taxes is far more dangerous that that of leveling the playing field through free trade, and consequently, if domestic sugar does well from the former, a fortiori , domestic production will do well from the latter.

Two circumstances make these experiences fundamentally different form each other.

The first is obvious to all and we will not dwell on it. This is that Customs reform by its very nature brings a degree of success and economy to every enterprise. At the same time as free trade deprives certain businesses of protection, it supplies them with raw materials, fuel, machines, and food products at a lower price. This constitutes an initial form of compensation that taxes and excise duty certainly did not offer beet sugar.

The second circumstance is less obvious, although far more important. We beg our friends and even more our opponents to weigh its full importance, for the day they take the economic phenomenon to which we refer into consideration they will cease to be our opponents. At least, this is our profound conviction.

Everyone knows that when the price of a product decreases, consumption increases. Well, an increase in consumption implies an increase in demand, and consequently an increase in price.

Let us take an object whose cost price (including the producer's profit) is 100 francs, and which is subjected to a tax of 100 francs; its market price will be 200 francs.

If the tax is removed, the market price will be 100 francs, if consumption remains the same . But consumption will increase, and consequently prices will tend to rise. Industries which produce this good will get higher profits.

This shows that where two similar industries are unequally taxed, it is a matter of importance whether one attempts to achieve a level playing field by increasing taxes on one industry or by cutting taxes on another. In the first case, sales are reduced while in the second they are increased for both.

It is very clear that if the situation of the two forms of sugar had been equalized by reducing the tax on sugar from the colonies instead of taxing domestic sugar, the latter would have been able to sustain the struggle more advantageously than it did, for the reduction in tax would have reduced the market price, expanded consumption, stimulated demand, and in the end, increased the return for both forms of sugar.

The free traders who base their argument on what happened to beet sugar in order to deduce what would happen to other industries if protection were removed from them, deprive their argument of its strength, for they combine two methods for leveling the playing field, one of which one is always advantageous while the other may be fatal.

With free trade, domestic industry has three paths open to it to reach the level of foreign industry:

1. The injection of a greater degree of skill stimulated by competition;

2. A decrease in the costs of raw materials, machinery, food, etc.;

3. An increase in consumption and demand , with its effect on the rate of return.

Beet sugar had only the first of these resources with which to fight, and this was enough. Commercial freedom would place all three at the disposal of our industries. Should we seriously fear that they will fail?

From this observation an economic theory may be deduced to which we will frequently return, and for this reason we will limit ourselves for the moment to outlining it here.

The restrictive trade system claims to raise the price of the product for the benefit of the producer, but it cannot do this without putting this product out of reach of a certain number of people, without paralyzing their ability to consume, without reducing demand , and without in the end tending to reduce the very price it hopes to raise. 744

Its initial tendency , we agree, is to increase the price by favoring the producer while its subsequent tendency is to decrease it by driving consumers away, and this second tendency may even overcome the first.

And when this happens, the public loses by being prevented from consuming goods because of the higher prices caused by the measure, without the producer gaining anything from that higher price.

The producer is then in the ridiculous position in which we have shown the English tax authorities to be. You will remember that, in a situation in which tax was constantly increasing and consumption decreasing in the same proportion, there came a time when, by adding 5 percent to tax rates, the authorities received 5 percent less revenue. 745

15. T.136 "The Salt Tax" (20 June 1847, LE)↩

Source

T.136 (1847.06.20) "The Salt Tax" (L'impôt du sel), LE , 20 June 1847, no. 30, p. 237. Not signed by Bastiat. [OC2.41, pp. 225-28.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

The tax on salt, or "gabelle" as it was known under the old regime, was a much hated tax on an item essential for preserving and flavouring food. It was abolished during the Revolution but revived during the Restoration. In 1816 it was set at 30 centimes per kilogramme and in 1847 it raised fr. 70.4 million for the government. 746 On the eve of the elections of August 1846, the Chamber of Deputies, on the initiative of Philippe Demesmay, had adopted a 2/3 reduction of the tax, down to 10 centimes per kilo. However, the measure was rejected by the Chamber of Peers. 747 Bastiat supported its reduction or even abolition twice the following year - the first time in January 1847 in a very speculative article he wrote for Le Libre-Échange (17 Jan. 1847) 748 on what a radical liberal politician, called in the essay "The Utopian," would do if he somehow got into power, in this case he would cut the tax to 10 centimes per kilogramme; and again in June 1847 with this article in its defence when the measure came up for debate again. Early on in the Revolution of 1848 the salt tax was initially abolished in a decree of 15 April, 1848 to take effect on 1 January 1849, but because of the government's dependency on this tax for revenue it was revoked on 28 December 1848 and a tax of 10c per kg. was imposed, which is what Bastiat's "utopian politician" had advocated the previous year, and what Bastiat himself voted for at the end of 1848.

However during the first half of 1848 Bastiat continued to push for its complete abolition as a way of relieving the economic hardship of ordinary working people. In his first revolutionary street magazine, La République française , in an article called "The Immediate Relief of the People" (12 March, 1848), Bastiat calls for its immediate abolition, along with the city tolls (octroi), and the taxes on cattle, wheat, and wine. 749 These demands were part of a poster which was plastered onto the walls of Paris during the second week of the Revolution as part of the economists' attempt to appeal to the people:

People, be more alert; do as the Republicans of America do: give the State only what is strictly necessary and keep the rest for yourself.

Demand the abolition of useless functions, a reduction of huge salaries, the abolition of special privileges, monopolies and deliberate obstructions and the simplification of the wheels of bureaucracy.

With these savings, insist on the abolition of city tolls, the salt tax, the tax on cattle and on wheat ...

Then, oh people, you will have solved the problem, that of earning more sous and obtaining more things for each sou. 750

Also in March, he wrote an article for the Journal des Économistes in which he stated the official position of the Economists calling for the abolition of all taxes on the working people including, interestingly, on their tools of trade:

The school of thought known as the Economist School proposes the immediate dismantling of all privileges and all monopolies, the immediate elimination of all non-useful state functions, the immediate reduction of all excessive salaries, deep reductions in public expenditure, and the reorganization of taxes so that those that weigh heavily on public consumption, those that hamper their movement and paralyze their work, are got rid of. For example, this school demands that city tolls, the salt tax, the duties on the import of subsistence items and working tools to be abolished forthwith … 751

The salt tax was also referred to repeatedly in his second revolutionary street magazine, Jacques Bonhomme , which he and his economist friends published for a month during June 1848. Apparently he thought their opposition to indirect taxes would make their message appealing to ordinary workers, such as the following. In "A Hoax" a fictional Minister of Finance ominously named "Mr. Budget" tells the worker how things really are:

This was when I invented indirect taxation. Now, each time that workers buy two sous' worth of wine, one sou goes to me. I am taking something on tobacco, something on salt, something on meat and something on bread. I am taking from everything, and all the time. I am thus gathering, not thirty but one hundred million at the expense of the workers. I strut in grand hotels, I lounge in fine carriages, I have myself served by fine servants, up to ten million's worth. I give twenty to my agents to keep an eye on wine, salt, tobacco, meat, etc., and with what remains of their own money I set to work the workers. 752

In "Taking Five and Returning Four is not Giving" the character of Jacques Bonhomme argues that:

I am not a scholar but a poor devil called Jacques Bonhomme, who is and never has been anything other than a worker.

Well, as a worker who pays tax on my bread, wine, meat, salt, my windows and doors, on the iron and steel in my tools, on my tobacco, etc., I attach great importance to this question and repeat:

Do civil servants enable workers to live or do workers enable civil servants to live? 753

When the reduction of the salt tax to 10c per kg. finally became law on January 1, 1849 Bastiat pointed out in an article in the prestigious Journal des Débats that the government was in disarray as the expences of the Republican government continued to escalate while taxes like the one on salt fell. He thought that this provided a great opportunity for reformers like him to force the government into a wholesale rethinking of taxation and expenditure and to get the new regime onto a completely new path. It was an opportunity to slash spending on public welfare (what he called "false philanthropy') as well as the army and the navy (what he called the "warlike passions") and pursue his preferred policy of "peace and freedom":

This is a wonderful, and one might say providential, opportunity to go down a new path, to put an end to false philanthropy and warlike passions and, converting its failure into triumph, to deliver security, confidence, credit, and prosperity from a vote that appeared to compromise it and at last to found a republican politics on these two great principles, peace and freedom. 754

There are two other issues which Bastiat discusses in this article which should be mentioned. The first is the elasticity of demand for salt, and the second is his conception of the proper role of government. Many defenders of the salt tax argued that it provided a good example of a highly inelastic commodity which had no substitutes and which was so essential for life that the state could increase the tax almost without limit and consumers would still have to pay. Thus, the tax on salt was the perfect tax and explains why it was imposed all across Europe as well as in India and China. Critics of the tax on the other hand believed that lowering the tax would help the poor as well as increase the sales of salt and eventually, in the long run, lead to greater revenues for the state in an early version of the "Laffer curve" argument. Bastiat's argument against the tax was simpler and more complicated at the same time. He wanted to abolish it outright on the simple grounds of morality - because it was so essential for life it should be available at the lowest cost possible immediately.

His more complex and sophisticated argument against it was a result of his understanding of "opportunity cost," the idea of which he was perhaps the inventor. Because people would pay so much for an essential item in their diet, they were making considerable sacrifices to their standard of living by cutting back on purchases of other items, like clothes or furniture, which had a flow on effect on other sectors of the economy. Bastiat called this "flow on effect" caused by government interventions in the economy the "ricochet effect" on which he had hoped to write on at length but was never able to. The French editor Paillottet mentions this in a footnote towards the end of the article. In a speech he gave in January 1848 for the Free Trade Association in Paris, Bastiat says he intended to devote an entire article (or Sophism) to it. By "ricochet" he meant the many indirect and longer term consequences of some intervention in the economy, such as a tax on salt or a tariff on manufactured goods. These consequences were like the ripples on a pond which spread out in expanding concentric circles when a stone is bounced across its surface. Initially, he viewed the ricochet effect in purely negative terms (e.g. the impact of a tariff) but later came to see another version of it having positive effects, for example the impact of the invention of printing in dramatically lowering the cost of the dissemination of information, the introduction of railways in lowering the cost of transport across the board. 755 In the case of the tax on salt, he thought the bad effects on consumers were even worse than those of protective tariffs in the "flow on effect" they had on the rest of the economy.

The second remaining issue is Bastiat's conception of the proper size of government in a free society. Bastiat concludes his call for the abolition of the tax on salt by reminding the reader that taxes can't be cut until the functions of government have been cut first. Once it has been limited to its proper duties, then a whole range of onerous taxes can be abolished or drastically cut. As he states:

Moderate excessive public services , merely leaving the State its proper functions; it will then be easy to reduce expenditure, and subsequently, taxes.

But what functions Bastiat reserved to the state is not explained here. Elsewhere it is made clear that he is an advocate of a very strictly limited government along the lines of the "nightwatchman state" whose only functions were the supplying of police and defense services, along with a very limited number of public goods. Paillottet refers to two essays by Bastiat where he goes into more detail on this question. I would also add "The Utopian" mentioned above. A good summary of his views can be found in his "Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" (12 Dec., 1849):

The number of things included in the essential functions of the government is very limited: to ensure order and security, to keep each person within the limits of justice, that is to say, to repress misdemeanors and crimes, and to carry out a few major public works of national utility. These are, I believe, its essential functions, and we will have no peace, no financial wherewithal, and we will not destroy the hydra of revolution if we do not regain, little by little if you like, this limited governance toward which we should be aiming. 756

Before taxes could be cut to this level he believed a number of entire areas of government expenditure could and should be cut first, such as publicly funded education, subsidies to religion, the departments in the Ministry of the Interior which dealt with agriculture and commerce, the colony in Algeria, the virtual army of bureaucrats who administer the collection of tariffs and other internal trade regulations, and the abolition of the standing army and its replacement by local militias. Once these measures had been introduced Bastiat believed that the total annual expenditure of the French state could be reduced from over 1.5 billion fr. to only 200 or 300 million fr., in other words a reduction of over 80%. This would then make it possible to replace the burden of indirect taxes (such as salt) which lay so heavily on ordinary workers, with a fairer system of very low direct taxes along with some "fiscal tariffs" of 5%. He concluded his speech with the optimistic claim that:

I will suppose for the sake of argument that France has been governed for a long time according to my proposals, which would consist in the government's keeping each citizen within the limits of his rights and of justice and abandoning everything else to the responsibility of each person. This is my starting point. It is easy to see that in this case France could be governed with two hundred or three hundred million. It is clear that if France were governed with two hundred million, it would be easy to establish a single, proportional tax. 757

Text

For the second time, a motion to reduce the salt tax has been passed almost unanimously by the Chamber of Deputies and the only consequence of this, it appears, will be that the government will instruct the minister concerned to study the matter next year.

Among the arguments used in the debate, there is one that comes up with regard to any reduction in taxes and in particular in connection with Customs duty. For this reason, we think it will be useful to put straight the ideas expressed on this subject.

The deputies who supported the proposal by Mr. Demesmay 758 believed they had to assume that there would be an increase in consumption, from which they concluded that the Treasury deficit would soon be almost wiped out.

Those who rejected the measure asserted on the contrary that the consumption of salt, with regard to its direct use by people, was currently as high as it could be, that it would never be changed by a reduction in the tax, not even if the salt were free, from which the conclusion was drawn that the Treasury deficit would be exactly in proportion to the reduction of the tax.

At this point we consider that we have to make a rapid and general examination of the following question:

"Does a reduction in tax, and consequently in the market price of the object being taxed, have the invariable result of increasing consumption?"

It is certain that the phenomenon at issue has happened so often that it can almost be considered a general law.

However, a distinction must be made.

If the object subject to the tax is so essential that it is one of the last things people agree to do without, consumption will always be at the highest possible level, whatever the tax. In this case, as the tax increases its price, people may well deprive themselves of everything except for the object they think is essential. In the same way, if its price decreases as a result of a reduction in tax, it is not the consumption of the object that will increase, but that of the things of which people had been obliged to deprive themselves in order not to do without this essential object.

In order to breathe, people require a certain quantity of air. Let us assume that it becomes possible to inflict a high tax on this; people will obviously do everything they can to continue to have the quantity of air without which they cannot live. They will do without their tools, clothes, and even food before depriving themselves of air, and if this abominable tax were to be decreased, it is not the consumption of air that would increase, but that of clothing, tools, food, etc.

We therefore consider that those deputies who rejected the reduction of the salt tax on the premise that consumption is at its maximum level, in spite of the tax, have unconsciously produced the strongest argument imaginable against an increase in this tax. It is as though they said: "Salt is so indispensable to life that, in all walks of life, in every class, it will always be consumed in a quantity that is determined and invariable, whatever its price. Keep it at a high price, that makes no difference; workers will be clothed in rags, do without drugs when ill, deprive themselves of wine and even bread rather than give up any portion of the salt that they need. If we decrease its price, we will see workers better clad and fed, but no increase in the consumption of salt."

It is therefore impossible to escape the following dilemma:

The consumption of salt will either increase following a reduction in its price, in which case the Treasury will not suffer the loss forecast,

Or it will not increase, which will prove that salt is an object so necessary to life that even the most onerous tax will not induce people, even the poorest, from consuming any less of it.

And, for our part, we cannot imagine any more potent argument against this tax.

It is true that the Treasury's needs are always present, like some insurmountable legal impediment . What does that prove? Alas, something very simple, although it appears to be little understood. It is that, if people want to vote for tax reductions like this, they should not start by constantly voting for increases in expenditure. How much longer does the constitutional education of a nation have to go before it finally makes the discovery or at least the application of this trivial truth? This is a problem that is not easy to solve.

Reduce excessive public works , cried the elder Mr. Dupin 759 who, moreover, seems to us to have given this debate its proper perspective. We will repeat this phrase with a slight alteration. Reduce excessive public services , merely leaving the State its proper functions; it will then be easy to reduce expenditure, and subsequently, taxes.

16. T.139 "Mr. Ewart's Proposal for a Single Tax in England" (LE, 27 June, 1847)↩

Source

T.139 (1847.06.27) "The Single-Tax in England. The Proposal of Mr. Ewart" (La taxe unique en Angleterre, proposition de M. Ewart), LE , 27 June 1847, no. 31, pp. 245-46. [OC2.37, pp. 209-16.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

Bastiat had a complex relationship with England. On the one hand he opposed what he called the "l'Angleterre oligarchique et monopoliste" (oligarchic and monopolistic England) but admired and wanted to emulate in France "l'Angleterre démocratique et laborieuse" (democratic and hard working England). 760 Of the things he admired, mention should be made of the free trade movement (1838-1846) organised by Richard Cobden and John Bright, the reform of the postal system (1842), and these proposals for a simplification of the tax system being put forward by William Ewart.

William Ewart (1798–1869) was a British liberal politician who represented Liverpool (1830-1837), Wigan (1839-1841), and then Dumfries Burghs (1841-1868) in Scotland. He agitated for the repeal of capital punishment, the creation of public free libraries, the Reform Act of 1832, and was a member of the Anti-Corn Law League. A speech he gave in the House of Commons on 28 May, 1847 urging a reduction of indirect taxes (especially tariffs) which harmed the poor, and a broadening of the tax base to include a direct tax on property, which would be felt more strongly by the wealthy, caught Bastiat's attention. 761 In the speech Ewart criticised "the effect of the present excessive amount of indirect taxation on the trade and labour of this country." He argued that "The present system of indirect taxation was oppressive to the labouring classes of this country, not only because it taxed trade, the principal source of their employment, but because the mode of its imposition was, towards them, unjust." His solution was to broaden the base of taxation with a direct tax on property and a reduction in indirect taxes such as duties on imports. His call for a reduction in duties on French wine would have caught Bastiat's attention as well. In the course of the Speech Ewart quotes very approvingly an address of the Free Trade Association of Bordeaux to Lord John Russell, one which Bastiat probably gave. He concluded his speech by putting forward the following motion:

"That it is expedient that a more direct system of Taxation on property should (as far as possible) be substituted for the indirect system (by Customs and Excise Duties) now in use:" "That such a change would, by removing restrictions caused by the Excise, encourage trade, and the free application of science to trade:" "That, by removing the restrictions caused by Customs Duties, it Would extend commerce, and be the most natural means of prolonging the peace, by promoting the intercourse, of the world:" "That it would be highly beneficial to the poor, (who now pay the great mass of indirect Taxation,) by giving them more abundant means of subsistence and of employment; and would tend generally and finally to the good of all classes of the community."

Bastiat also agitated for a simplification of the French tax system. 762 He wanted to see the abolition of direct taxes, such as the tax on salt and drink, and doors and windows; as well as protective duties and tariffs which kept out of France cheaper food and clothing, all of which hurt the poor the most; and their replacement by a very low direct tax of some kind and much lower "fiscal" tariffs of 5% on imported, and interestingly, on exported goods. The overall level of tax would be much lower as he also planned to abolish a very large part of what the French state did outside of its core duties of protecting citizens lives, liberties, and property. He gave several important speeches in the Chamber during 1848 and 1849 on tax matters, such as calling for the abolition of the tax on letters, salt, and alcohol. 763 In other writings he called for drastically cutting the size of the military to a quarter of its existing strength and its replacement by local militias. His essay on "The Utopian" (Jan. 1847) provides a good indication of what he would do if he were made "dictator of France." 764

Text

A few newspapers, interested in turning national prejudice against us, point out that we often draw facts and lessons from across the Channel. The Moniteur industriel 765 even goes so far as to call us an English newspaper , an insult which the good sense of the public will treat as it deserves.

Nevertheless, we owe it to our dignity to explain why we follow the development of ideas and of the legislation in England attentively, on subjects that are linked to the particular aim of this publication.

However one judges England's policies and the role that country has assumed in the world, it is impossible not to acknowledge that in everything concerning trade, industry, finance, and taxation, it has been through experiments that other nations can and should study for their own benefit.

In no other country have the various systems been more rigorously put into practice. When England wanted to protect its navy, it devised a Navigation Act 766 that was much stricter than all the imitations made of it elsewhere. England's Corn Laws 767 are far more restrictive than those applied in our country, its colonial system is far more widespread. Government expenditure there has reached prodigious levels for a long time, and consequently every conceivable form of taxation has been tried out there. Banks, savings-banks, and poor laws are already old institutions over there.

Thence it follows that the effects, whether good or bad, of all those measures must be more apparent in England than in any other country; firstly because they were taken in a more absolute manner, secondly because they have been applied for longer over there.

Furthermore, the representative system, debate, publicity, the practice of surveys and statistics have established the facts more clearly than in any other country.

So it is in England first of all that the reaction of public opinion against false systems must have occurred - against legislative practices that were in contradiction with the laws of social economy, against institutions that seemed attractive in their immediate effects, but were disastrous in their long-term consequences.

Under these circumstances, we should feel that we were failing in our duty and showing proof of cowardice, if, allowing ourselves to be impressed by the strategy of the Moniteur industriel and of the protectionist party, we were to deprive ourselves of a source so rich in information. It has been rightly said, experience is the best teacher; and if the example of others can preserve us from a few mistakes, why should we not try to take advantage of the tests and trials carried out elsewhere for the guidance of our own country?

A tendency well worthy of note, is the inclination that has been apparent in England for some time to solve problems of economy through principles, which does not mean that reforms are carried out overnight, but that they are designed to implement comprehensively an idea that is judged to be founded on justice and on the general interest.

While in other countries it is traditionally considered that when it comes to taxation, finance, and trade there are no principles, 768 that one must be content to grope, to patch up, and to alter from day to day, in view of the most immediate result, it seems that, across the Channel, the Reform Party 769 accepts as indisputable the fact that the general interest is to be found in justice. Consequently, everything comes down to examining whether a reform is in keeping with justice; and once that point has been accepted by public opinion, the reform is vigorously put into action without people bothering too much about the drawbacks that are inherent in any transition, knowing full well that there are eventually more benefits than harms to be expected from substituting what is just for what is not.

That is how the abolition of slavery was brought about. 770

That is how the postal reform was carried out. 771 Once it had been recognized that affectionate or business relations through correspondence were not taxable material , postage was reduced, as according to principle, to the cost of the service rendered.

The same conformity with a principle governs the reform of commerce. Having clearly established that protection is a deception in that it only benefits some at the expense of others, with a dead loss for the community into the bargain, the following words were set up as a principle: No more tariff protection. That principle is destined to bring about the downfall of the Corn Laws, of the Navigation Act, of the colonial system, - the complete overthrow of the old political and diplomatic traditions of Great Britain. 772 No matter, it will be pursued to the end.

A process is taking place in people's minds at the moment to found religious life, 773 education, 774 and banking 775 on the principle of freedom. These questions have not fully matured yet; but of one thing we may be sure, which is that if, on the above subjects, freedom emerges triumphant from the debate, it will not be long before it is achieved in fact.

And now a member of the League, Mr. Ewart, has brought forward a motion in Parliament to convert all taxes into a single tax on property, meaning thereby capital of whatever nature. It is the idea of the Physiocrats, 776 corrected, completed, broadened, and made practicable.

Readers may imagine that such an extraordinary proposal, conducive to nothing less than the outright suppression of all indirect taxes (including customs), 777 must have been rejected and considered by everyone, and particularly by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to be the work of a dreamer, of a crackpot, or at the very least of a man too far ahead of his time. Not at all. Here is the Chancellor of the Exchequer's answer: 778

The CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER felt confident that he expressed the opinion of the whole House when he said that it was quite unnecessary for the hon. Member (Mr. Ewart) to say anything in defence of the purity of his motives. He believed that there was no man who stood less in need of any defence on that score, as every one knew the disinterested motives which always actuated his hon. Friend; and certainly it was impossible to overrate the importance of the subject he had brought before the House. At the same time, he hoped his hon. Friend would not consider it any disrespect to him if he declined to follow his hon. Friend into the details of the various points he had brought under the notice of the House, relating to almost every article of taxation in the Customs, the Excise, and the Stamps and Taxes. It was evident that in the course of next Session it would be his duty to bring before the House the subject of taxation—that it would be indispensably necessary to deal one way or another with one great item of taxation—he meant the income tax; and that it would then be for the House to consider the question of the permanence, and perhaps the increase of the system of direct, as contradistinguished from indirect taxation. It would be obvious, therefore, to every one, that it would not be proper on the present occasion to say anything which would indicate the course which—supposing that he continued to hold his present situation—he might consider it his duty to take on this question. His hon. Friend had satisfactorily proved that there was no tax against which some plausible objection might not he made; and he was certainly not sanguine enough to expect that he would be able to do what so many of his predecessors had failed in doing—he meant make taxation of any kind palatable. He assured the House, however, that it was his anxious desire to see our taxation put on a footing the least oppressive to those who paid the taxes; and to foster industry and commerce to the greatest degree of which they were susceptible. Beyond this general explanation he thought it better to abstain from saying more on the present occasion; and after the full and able way in which the hon. Member had submitted his views on the subject of taxation, he thought it very desirable that the subject should not be prolonged.

No doubt, what may have induced the Chancellor of the Exchequer to receive Mr. Ewart's motion so favorably, was the desire to ensure the definitive triumph of income tax 779 for next year, that measure having always been hitherto presented as temporary. 780 In every country, the minister of finance proceeds in this way with regard to new taxes. It is a tithe for war , an income tax ; it is this or that, born of the occasion, and certainly destined to disappear with it, but which nonetheless never disappears. So it is possible that the Chancellor of the Exchequer merely displayed skill and foresight regarding taxation. But if income tax only develops along with corresponding abolition of indirect taxes, it will still be true to say, whatever the intentions were, that a great step has been taken towards the advent of the single tax. 781

Whatever the case may be, the question has been raised; it will not be dropped.

It is not our intention to come to a conclusion on so serious and still so controversial a matter. We shall limit ourselves to putting a few considerations before our readers.

Here is what the advocates of the single tax say:

However one goes about it, tax eventually always falls on the consumer. It is therefore indifferent to him, when it comes to the amount, whether the tax be levied by the Fisc (Inland Revenue) at the time of production or at the time of consumption. But the former system has the advantage of having lower collection costs, and of freeing the taxpayer from a mass of inconveniences that hinder the movement of labour, the circulation of goods, and commercial transactions. An inventory of all capital should therefore be drawn up: land, factories, railways, public funds, ships, houses, machines, etc., etc., and a proportional tax levied. As nothing can be done without the intervention of capital, and as the capitalist will incorporate the tax in his cost price, it would so happen that the tax would be spread throughout the whole economy; and all subsequent transactions, whether at home or abroad, as long as they were honest, would enjoy the most complete freedom.

The supporters of indirect taxes do not lack good reasons either. The main one is that in the latter system the tax is so merged with the market price, that the taxpayer can no longer tell one from the other, and pays tax without realizing it; which cannot fail to be convenient, especially for the Fisc (Inland Revenue), which thus progressively manages to extract some five or six francs from an item that is not worth 20 sous (or 1 franc).

Eventually, if ever the single tax is achieved, it will only be after a prolonged debate or a widespread propagation of knowledge in economics; for it depends on the triumph of other reforms that are still further from gaining public assent.

For example, we believe it to be incompatible with a costly administration, which consequently meddles with many things.

When a government needs one, two, or three billion francs, 782 it is reduced to squeezing them out of the population by trickery , 783 so to speak. The question is how to take from people half, two thirds, three quarters of their income, drop by drop, hour by hour, and without their understanding a thing. That is the beauty of indirect taxes. The tax is so intimately merged with the price of goods that it is absolutely impossible to disentangle them. If one is careful to institute only a moderate tax at first, as was the policy during the Empire, in order not to cause too visible a variation in prices, one can afterwards achieve surprising results. With each fresh increase, the Fisc (Inland Revenue) says: "What is a cent or two per person on average ?" or else: "Who can claim that the increase does not result from other causes?"

It is improbable that with the single tax , which cannot surround itself with all those subtleties, a government could ever succeed in absorbing half its citizens' wealth.

The first effect of Mr. Ewart's proposal will therefore very likely be to turn public opinion in England in favor of a serious reduction in expenditure, that is to say, in favor of the non-intervention of the State in all matters in which its intervention is not part of its essential nature.

It seems to me impossible not to be struck by the probable effect of the new direction imparted to the taxation system in Great Britain, combined with the reform of trade.

If, on the one hand, the colonial system collapses, 784 as it must necessarily collapse in the face of free trade; if, on the other hand, the government is reduced to being unable to seize anything from the public beyond what is strictly necessary for the administration of the country, the unfailing result must surely be to strike at the very root of our neighbors' traditional policy, which, under the names of intervention, influence, supremacy, and dominance, has sown into the world such causes of war and discord, and has subjected all nations and the English nation more than any other, to so crushing a burden of debt and taxation.

17. T.143 "On Mignet's Eulogy of M. Charles Comte" (11 July 1847, LE)↩

Source

T.143 (1847.07.11) "On Mignet's Eulogy of M. Charles Comte" (Sur l'éloge de Ch. Comte. Par M. Mignet). Original title: "Variétés: Notice sur M. Charles Comte. Par M. Mignet", LE , 11 July 1847, no. 33, p. 264. [OC1.11, pp. 434-39.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

Soon after the tenth anniversary of the death of Charles Comte (he died on 13 April, 1837) Bastiat published a tribute to him in his free trade magazine Le Libre-Échange . Charles Comte (1782-1837) was one of the four most important French classical liberals in the first third of the 19th century, along with the economist Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), the political philosopher Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), and his friend and colleague the economist and social theorist Charles Dunoyer (1786-1862). 785 Comte had been a lawyer, a critic of the repressive policies of Napoleon and then the restored monarchy, and the son-in-law of the economist Jean-Baptiste Say. He founded, with Charles Dunoyer, the journal Le Censeur in 1814 and Le Censeur européen in 1817 and was prosecuted many times for challenging the press censorship laws and criticizing the government. He came across the economic ideas of Say in 1817 786 during a period of enforced inactivity when their journal had been suspended by the government, and discussed them at length in the magazine's successor Le Censeur européen . After his conviction for again violating the censorship laws in 1820 he spent 5 years in exile in Switzerland and England, before returning to France where he published two important books on liberal social theory, Traité de législation (1826-27) and Traité de la propriété (1834). Following the Revolution of 1830 he became a deputy representing La Sarthe and permanent secretary of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques (Academy of Moral and Political Sciences) in 1832.

In this tribute Bastiat reflected upon Comte's belated eulogy which had been given by François Mignet, the Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, the previous year. 787 This was a curious thing to do as Comte, although an important figure in the classical liberal movement in France during the Restoration, had been trained as a lawyer and had written important works on the political issues of his day, namely censorship, the rule of law, the National Guard, and constitutional limits to government power, as well as several original works on liberal social theory, such as the theory of property, the historical emergence of free institutions in Europe, and classical liberal class theory. Thus, his connection to the free trade movement in 1847 was rather tenuous. Nevertheless, Bastiat must have been thinking about him in July 1847 and included these theoretical reflections in the "Variety" section at the end of a typical issue of his magazine with its standard articles on the grain trade, coal exports, the American tariff, British customs revenue, and debates with the protectionist press.

A clue to why he did this can be found in his correspondence earlier that month with Richard Cobden who was travelling in Italy as part of his celebratory tour of Europe following the repeal of the English Corn Laws in June of 1846. (As part of this, the Parisian economists had hosted a dinner in Paris in August 1846 to celebrate Cobden's great victory and Bastiat had given one of the toasts.) As the defeat of the French free trade movement to get the Chamber of Deputies to reform France's protectionist laws became apparent over the summer of 1847 perhaps Bastiat was returning to theoretical issues after a hiatus of a couple of years. In his letter to Cobden of 5 July (Letter 80) 788 he thanks him for purchasing and sending him a 50 volume, a "precious collection," of classic works of Italian political economy (edited by Custodi) 789 and he talks about his own plans to give lectures on economics to students in the law and medical faculties in Paris, and to write his own treatise on what he called "la vraie théorie sociale" (true social theory) the first part of which later became his treatise on political economy, the Economic Harmonies . It is possible that, as Bastiat began thinking about how to explain classical liberal economic ideas to young students in a lecture series, 790 he returned to thinking about the people who had most influenced his own thinking when he was a young man, i.e. Jean-Baptiste Say, Charles Comte, and Charles Dunoyer. As he noted in his "Draft Preface":

We (in the Preface Bastiat is ironically talking to himself) used to say: "It is useful and fortunate that patient and indefatigable geniuses, like Say, concentrated on observing, classifying, and setting out in a methodical order all the facts that make up this fine science. From now on, knowledge can stand securely on this unshakeable base and lift itself to new horizons." How much did we also admire the work of Dunoyer and Comte, who, without ever deviating from the rigorously scientific line drawn by M. Say, mobilize these acquired truths with such felicity in the domains of morality and legislation. 791

The man who gave Comte's eulogy, François Mignet (1796-1884), was a liberal lawyer, journalist, and historian who was an editor of the Courrier français , a magazine which published several of Bastiat's articles in 1846. He was also an important figure in the Academy of Moral and Political Science which had been abolished by Napoléon in 1803 because of the opposition to his rule by many of its members, and then resurrected in 1832 by King Louis Philippe. Several liberals were founding members of the new Academy, including Destutt de Tracy (Philosophy), Charles Comte (Political Economy), Charles Dunoyer (Moral Philosophy), and Mignet (History), and many more were to become members in the coming years. This made the Academy an important institution for the encouragement and spread of liberal scholarship and ideas. Bastiat came into contact with Dunoyer when he was welcomed to Paris by the Political Economy Society in May 1845 (Dunoyer was the Society's president) and then Mignet when he began writing for his magazine the Courrier français in 1846. Both men no doubt used their position in the Academy to assist Bastiat in being elected a "corresponding" (or junior) member of the 4th section (Political Economy) on 24 January, 1846 on the basis of the two books which had appeared since Bastiat's arrival in Paris: his book on Cobden and the League (1845) and the first series of the Economic Harmonies (January 1846).

Bastiat's reflections on Comte focus on the first part of what was to have been his magnum opus in four volumes published after his return to France after his exile in Switzerland and England. Comte originally conceived his project as a multi-part work covering jurisprudence, law, history, anthropology, political theory, and economics. The writing of it was interrupted several times by political events which distracted Comte in 1814, 1820, 1824, and 1830. The work was finally published in two parts, the 4 volume Traité de législation in 1826-27 and the 2 volume Traité de la propriété in 1834. 792 The entire work was conceived as a whole and his plan had been to publish them one after the other between 1826 and 1830 but events again intervened to prevent this from happening. In the Preface Comte states that he wanted to combine a theoretical analysis of jurisprudence and natural law with an empirical and historical study of how law had been created and carried out in practice and to explore its impact on wealth creation:

The double purpose I set myself was to introduce philosophical considerations into the study of the law, and at the same time to introduce into the assessment of legislative or political theories the knowledge which had been acquired in practice. This method of verifying one thing against another, things which had almost always been kept separate, pleased me even more since it was the only way to reconcile a profession which I had adopted by choice, with a taste which had become a passion.

The subtitle he gave the work, with echoes of the titles of both Adam Smith's and Say's great works on economics, gives a better idea of his intentions, "exposition des lois générales suivant lesquelles les peuples prospèrent, dépérissent ou restent stationnaire" (an exposition of the general laws under which nations prosper, perish, or remain in a stationary state). It is also a hint of what Bastiat himself had in mind for his own multi-volume treatise on social theory which went under the working title of Social Harmonies , or Economic Harmonies .

The first part of the book, Traité de législation , was awarded the Prix Montyon from the Académie française in 1828 for its contribution to moral philosophy. 793 Bastiat shared the sentiments of the Academy and mentions the importance of Comte in the development of his ideas in several letters, for example "I refer to M. Charles Dunoyer … together with those (articles) by M. Comte … (who) settled the direction of my thought and even my political actions a long time ago" (Letter 33). 794 So it is not surprising when he states at the end of the essay that a friend told him that, if he were to choose a "desert island" book, it would be this one by Comte. One senses that Bastiat might have agreed with that choice.

Text

Life, it has been said, is a tissue of illusions and deceit. This is true, but life also includes a few memories which permeate it like some exquisite perfume.

This was how the day of 30 May 1846 was for me.

Dragged from the depths of the provinces by an unexpected caprice of fortune, I was attending a public session of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, for the first time.

Around the chair of the President, Mr. Dunoyer, were all the members of the illustrious company. Opposite, the rostrums, galleries, and amphitheatre were scarcely sufficient to contain the intellectual elite of Paris society.

The permanent secretary was due to give the eulogy on his predecessor, Mr. Charles Comte.

People were anxiously wondering: "How will Mr. Mignet, whatever his talent, succeed in holding the attention of the audience? What is there that is striking about the life of a writer whose every day was taken up by a now forgotten controversy and by detailed work on the philosophy of legislation, a man who was also an upright, conscientious and meticulous journalist, virtuous to the point of brusqueness, a hard-working and profound writer but one who in his work appears to have voluntarily renounced that touch of art which, although it adds nothing to the truth of his ideas and sometimes even undermines it, is nevertheless the sole element adding brilliance, popularity and the power to spread its message to the works of the intellect?"

Nevertheless, Mr. Mignet began his speech. His words, spoken neither too slowly nor too fast, reached the far corners of the hall. He varied his theme with musings at once pertinent and true; he lightened it with judicious interjections of that piquant Attic style whose traditional use is alleged, probably wrongly, to be disappearing in France. His delivery was always clear, his intonation true and conveying every subtlety of the speech and every one of the orator's intentions. For an hour, the audience hung onto every word of this account, so poor in arresting facts but so rich in noble and pure emotion.

Why the fascination? Was it the apposite, elegant and incisive phrases used by the orator, was it his fine diction that held the assembly captive and sent a shiver of enthusiasm rippling along the benches, uniting every heart in a common sentiment of pure joy and rapt admiration?

No. But Mr. Mignet had perceived and was showing everyone the fine side of his subject. The picture he painted was of an upright man, of manly resolution, of athletic vigor, an intrepid defender of public freedoms, an unwavering political journalist whom neither the temptation of corruption, nor threats, nor persecution, nor the appeal of popularity, nor need for rest nor, in short, any human consideration, could lure away from the righteous path mapped out for him by his profound and stubborn sense of his own virtue.

It appeared that this warm picture of such a fine life, contrasting with the selfishness and indifference that characterizes modern times, touched the hearts of all those in the assembly and moved them all the more powerfully given that they might have been expected to have dozed off long since. The audience might have been described as one of Plutarch's, their sensibilities still fresh and innocent, listening to Plutarch recounting the tale of one of the noblest lives of the heroes of antiquity. With what truly French discernment did the auditorium seize and applaud the traits of courage, sacrifice, and proud independence found so abundantly in the journalist's noble career. Each of us went back to the long-gone time of our youth when the orator said:

The time in which Mr. Comte distinguished himself is already long gone. Far from us is the memory of these generous convictions, these dogged struggles, this intrepid devotion, which sparked so many doughty spirits and inspired so much noble conduct. At that time, ideas were believed in with a faith that was fervent and the public good was loved with disinterested passion. These fine beliefs that are the honor of the human intellect, Mr. Comte had in abundance. These strong virtues, which are just as necessary for a nation to remain free as it is to become free, Mr. Comte expressed with straightforward bluntness. 795

So what are we to make of this? That in spite of the sad and discouraging sights all around us, that although we no longer perceive any strongly-held convictions, civic courage, or resistance to corruption, we cannot despair, nevertheless, of a country in which the simple narration of the life of Mr. Comte arouses so much lively and unanimous satisfaction! No, skepticism has not permeated, changed, or debased everything in a place where this anchor of the nation's salvation remains visible, along with the intelligence to honor that which is honorable, and where the power of admiration is still alive!

Two circumstances contributed to adding a touching and almost dramatic interest to this literary solemnity. Behind the orator, the President's chair was occupied by Mr. Dunoyer. Everyone felt that the eulogy by Mr. Mignet and the enthusiasm of the assembly was addressed indirectly to the colleague and friend of Mr. Comte, the person who had shared the same projects, suffered the same persecution, and shown the same devotion. In the first row of the audience could be seen Mr. Comte's four children, clad in mourning for the father whom a premature death through overwork and persecution had taken from them. 796 After ten long years, they were finally receiving the sole but precious inheritance that a man of this caliber can leave: a solemn homage of admiration made to his memory by an eloquent speaker and sanctioned by its favorable and enthusiastic reception by an enlightened audience.

However, I must say that, while the honorable permanent secretary gave a fair account of the man with regard to his actions, character, courage, and virtues, for me he did not allot the author his true stature. Perhaps in this connection his verdict has been too influenced by the opinion of the general public, who appear not to have appreciated the philosophic value of Mr. Comte's work adequately, very far from it. We might understand this judgment if it related solely to style. I have already said that in a work that deals, in scientific fashion, with the huge canvases on which Rousseau and Montesquieu spread the hues of their brilliant imagination, Mr. Comte does not appear to have taken the trouble to highlight his thoughts through the vividness of form, the variety of tone, the unexpectedness of the antitheses, and all the resources of studied rhetoric. It can be imagined that a man such as described by Mr. Mignet might have rejected these vain ornaments which, to his way of thinking, are traps for the reader if not for the writer. The closer Mr. Comte came to simplicity of expression, the further he believed that he was keeping his work away from possible error, and Truth was the sole object of his worship, the object to which he was prepared to sacrifice much more than his literary reputation, if need be.

Nonetheless, we should not believe that his work is devoid of eloquence. "Although he wished to apply a rigorous and dry analytic method", said Mr. Mignet, "Mr. Comte was too resolute in spirit and his soul too ardent for him to set out the long journeys made by the human race dispassionately, and I praise him for this." 797 And elsewhere, "Under the guise of a somewhat harsh attitude and slightly cold appearance was a heart of gold, a warm soul and the lofty sentiments and lively convictions that can be seen both in his writings and his life." 798

But if Mr. Comte often rises to eloquence (taking this word in its usual meaning), when he castigates injustice and the abuse of force in lively language, 799 I am bold enough to say that eloquence of quite a different nature that is just as true presides over all the pages of his writings. Reading his work, the reader always senses the forming of light in his mind. He feels lost in admiration of the harmonious simplicity of the laws 800 set out by the author, and this sentiment is all the more vivid in that it is always allied with that of certainty. For my part, I know of no trick of rhetoric capable of filling the soul with such delicious emotions. Is there not eloquence, the truest of all forms of eloquence, in the simple, clear exposition of the harmony that governs the movement of the heavenly bodies? When a subject has beauty and grandeur, the more the author succeeds in concentrating your attention on the picture and making himself invisible, the more, I am bold enough to say, does he attain the pure sources of art.

Mr. Comte has one single aim: to lay things out. However, he lays out the consequences of human action so clearly that by addressing only the mind he speaks to the heart. Few writers communicate such a sincere level of admiration for what is good and such a great hatred for injustice and tyranny to the soul. Not that he declaims; he is content to describe. But the impression that he is not acting as a counselor comes from his prose and I even believe that, if true eloquence can be felt on every one of his pages, it is because declamation is strictly banished from them. When the reader clearly sees the sequence of cause and effect, positive and negative feelings arise inextinguishably in his mind without his knowing and without its being necessary to tell him what ought to be hated and what loved.

I will not discuss whether the Treatise on Legislation ought to have been conceptualized on a more methodical basis. When you have read it you understand that it is just the foreword of an immense work interrupted by death and forever lost to the ardent souls of those who love the human race.

What I can say is this: I do not know of any book that makes one think more, which affords one newer and more fertile views both of man and society, or which produces in one to the same extent a feeling for the evidence. In view of the unjust way that young students appear to have abandoned this magnificent monument of genius, I would perhaps not have the courage to say such things aloud, knowing how careful I have to be of my own actions, if I were not able to rally to this opinion the patronage of two authorities; one is the Academy, which has acclaimed Mr. Comte's work, and the other a man of the highest merit to whom I put the question that book-lovers often ask each other: If you were condemned to solitude and were allowed only one modern work, which would you choose? The Treatise on Legislation by Mr. Comte, he told me, for if this is not the book that has the most in it, it is the one that most makes you think.

18. T.151 "A Letter (to Hippolyte Castille) (on intellectual property)" (9 Sept. 1847, Travail Intel.)↩

Source

T.151 (1847.09.09) "A Letter (to Hippolyte Castille) (on intellectual property)" (Lettre), Mugron, 9 Sept. 1847; originally published in Castille's Le Travail intellectuel , no. 2, 15 Sept. 1847, p. 3, in a section called "Nouvelles adhésions" (new supporters). [OC2.49b, pp. 340-42.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

This is the first of three pieces on literary and intellectual property rights Bastiat wrote. The first was this "Letter to Hippolyte Castille" in Castille's journal Le Travail intellectual , no. 2, 15 Sept. 1847, in which he strongly endorsed the new journal and its mission; the second was his "Speech to the Publishers' Circle", 16 Dec. 1847 (below, pp. 000) in which he outlined his thoughts on literary property rights as part of a more general theory of the natural right to property of all kinds (also published in Castille's journal); and a "Letter to Jobard", 22 Jan., 1848 (below, pp. 000) on intellectual property as it applied to inventions (which was not published in his lifetime).

Hippolyte Castille (1820-1886) 801 was a journalist who wrote for the Courrier français , 802 as did Gustave de Molinari and, after his arrival in Paris in 1845 occasionally also Bastiat. Bastiat and Molinari shared several interests with Castille. One was Castille's regular "soirée" which was held in his large home on the rue Saint-Lazare, no. 79 (the old residence of Cardinal Fesch) where radicals of various kinds met to discuss politics and economic ideas. Castille had links to left leaning radicals and was also able to reach out to some of the liberal political economists, such as Bastiat, Molinari, Joseph Garnier, Alcide Fonteyraud, and Charles Coquelin, who also attended his soirée which met regularly between 1844 and early 1848. It was Castille's home which supplied the name for Molinari's book, Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare (1849), and the various attendees from both the left and the right no doubt supplied Molinari with the arguments which he used in his "conversations" between a Socialist, a Conservative, and an Economist. 803

The second shared interest was the question of intellectual property. Castille began a journal devoted to this issue in August 1847, Le Travail intellectuel , which lasted for 7 issues until it closed on 15 February 1848 just before the Revolution broke out. 804 Molinari is mentioned as a "collaborator" and other leading economists, such as Frédéric Bastiat, Charles Dunoyer, Horace Say, Michel Chevalier, Joseph Garnier, were listed as "supporters", although they did not appear to contribute much in the way of articles. The economists were deeply divided on the question of intellectual property, with some being "absolutists" in defending the right of authors and inventors to a perpetual property right in their creations, such as Molinari, Laboulaye, Frédéric Passy, Modeste, and Paillottet; while others such as Wolowski, Renouard, de Lavergne, Foucher, and Dupuit, believed that it should be a limited right of short duration, that it was a "license" for first use but not an absolute and eternal property right. 805 Bastiat wrote this piece as a letter of support and endorsement for Castille's new journal and it appeared in the second issue of 15 Sept. 1847, p. 3, in a section called "Nouvelles adhésions" (new supporters). It seems from his remarks in this letter that he was closer in his views to the absolutists like Molinari than to the advocates of a limited "license."

A third shared interest was in starting a daily newspaper, La République française , the day after the Revolution broke out on 26 February, 1848. Castille joined Frédéric Bastiat and Gustave de Molinari in writing and editing the paper which appeared in 30 issues between 26 February and 28 March. The format of the magazine was only one or two pages which could be handed out on street corners or in a larger format pasted to walls so that passers by could read them. By mid-1848 Castille had gradually drifted apart from his economist friends and eventually sided with the left-leaning radical republicans.

Text

Mugron, 9 September 1847

Sir,

It is with great satisfaction that I have learnt of the arrival in this world of the journal which you are publishing with the aim of defending intellectual property .

My entire economic doctrine is summed up in these words: Services are exchanged for other services 806 or, in more vulgar idiom: Do this for me and I will do that for you , which applies to intellectual property just as much as to material property.

I believe that both the efforts made by men, in whatever form, and the results of these efforts belong to them, and that this gives them the right to dispose of them for their own use or to exchange them. Like anyone else, I admire those who make voluntary sacrifices for their fellow men, but I cannot see any morality or justice in having the law impose this sacrifice on them systematically. It is on this principle that I defend free trade, since I sincerely see in restrictive regimes an attack of the most burdensome kind on property in general and in particular on the most respectable, the most immediate and generally essential of properties, the property which comes from our labor.

I am therefore, in principle, a fervent partisan of literary property. In practice, it may be difficult to guarantee this type of property. However, this difficulty is not an insurmountable legal impediment for the claimants involved.

The right to property of what one has produced through one's own labour and the exercise of one's own faculties is the essence of society. The right to property exists prior to the law and, far from law having any obligation to impede its enjoyment, it has no other purpose in the world than to guarantee it.

I consider that the most illogical of all laws is the one that regulates literary property in our country. It gives it a reign of twenty years following the death of the author. 807 Why not fifteen or sixty? On what principle has this arbitrary number been selected? On the unfortunate principle that the law creates property, a principle that has the power to turn the world upside down.

'What is just is useful' is an axiom the truth of which political economy often has the opportunity of acknowledging. It has one more application in this question. When literary property has a very limited legal life, it may happen that the law itself places the full weight of self-interest on the side of short-lived works, shallow novels or articles that encourage the passions of the moment and satisfy current fashion. Sales are sought among the current reading public given to you by the law and not in the future reading public of which it deprives you. Why would people devote time to a long-lasting work if all that they can leave their children is some literary wreckage? Do you plant oaks on common land for which you have received a short concession? An author would be strongly encouraged to add to, correct, and polish his work if he were able to say to his son, "It is possible that this book will not be appreciated in my lifetime. However, it will gain an audience through its intrinsic value. It is the oak that will shelter you and your children and give you shade."

I know, Sir, that these ideas appear very mercenary to many people. It is the fashion today to base everything on the principle of the disinterestedness of others . If those who make this claim were willing to examine their consciences a little, perhaps they would not be so quick to forbid writers from caring about their future and their family or the sentiment of self-interest , since it has to be given its proper name. Some time ago, I spent an entire night reading a brief work in which the author denounced energetically anyone who obtained the slightest reward from intellectual work. 808 The next day, I opened a journal and, by a strange coincidence, the first thing I read was that this same author had just sold his works for a considerable amount. This encapsulates selflessness in this century, the moral code we impose on each other without observing it ourselves. In any case, such selflessness, admirable as it is, is not worth its name if it is required by law, and the law is very unjust if it demands this solely from those who work with ideas.

For my part, persuaded as I am, through constant observation and by the actions of the very people who rail against it, that self-interest is an indestructible individual motive and an essential social stimulus. 809 I am happy to see that, in this circumstance as in many others, its general effects coincide with justice and universal well-being of the highest order, and for this reason, I am a wholehearted supporter of your worthwhile enterprise.

Your devoted servant,

Frédéric Bastiat.

Editor in Chief of Le Libre-Échange

19. T.299 (late 1847) "The Difference between doing Business and an Act of Charity"↩

Source

T.299 (late 1847) "The Difference between doing Business and an Act of Charity" (late 1847). This previously unpublished sketch was discovered by the original French editor Paillottet among Bastiat's papers and inserted in a footnote to "Justice and Fraternity". He dated it late-1847. [OC4, p. 311] [CW2, p. 70] </titles/2450#lf1573-02_label_163>

Editor's Introduction

This short piece was found among Bastiat's papers by the French editor Paillottet who included it in a footnote to one of Bastiat's anti-socialist pamphlets, "Justice and Fraternity" (June 1848), 810 which Paillottet republished in Bastiat's Collected Works in 1854. 811 Paillottet thought Bastiat had written it in late 1847 before the revolution had broken out in February 1848 but included in with this pamphlet which was first published just a few days before one of the bloodiest moments of the 1848 Revolution, namely the June Days uprising. The link between the sketch and the essay was the topic of "fraternity" which was a major part of the socialist critique of the free market system which Louis Blanc and his followers had been making throughout the late 1840s. When the monarchy of Louis Philippe was overthrown, Louis Blanc moved swiftly to implement socialist reforms in the workplace by means of the National Workshops program which he established and ran from the Luxembourg Palace. In addition to requiring the state to provide a guaranteed job for everybody, the socialists wanted to replace wage labour with a more "cooperative" and "fraternal" way of organising labour which would also be encouraged and possibly even established and enforced by the state. Bastiat denounced this as "the dogma of fraternity":

I believe that what radically divides us is this: political economy reaches the conclusion that only universal justice should be demanded of the law. Socialism, in its various branches and through applications whose number is of course unlimited, demands in addition that the law should put into practice the dogma of fraternity. 812

In this short sketch Bastiat makes the argument that business transactions are different from acts of charity and that it is a mistake to conflate the two, even though the same person may engage in both. According to Bastiat's theory of exchange the two parties to an exchange enter it voluntarily and both expect to benefit, not out of a sense of charity towards each other, but out of personal self-interest. As with "legal" or state-imposed charity, "legal" or state-imposed fraternity along the lines proposed by socialists like Louis Blanc, would destroy the true fraternity which springs from voluntary cooperation among individuals.

Text

In practical terms, men have always distinguished between a business transaction and an act of pure benevolence. I have on occasion been pleased to observe the most charitable man, the most selfless heart, and the most fraternal soul that I know. The parish priest of my village 813 raises love for his fellow men and particularly for the poor to an exceptional level. It goes so far that when he has to extract money from the rich in order to assist the poor, this fine man is not very scrupulous in his choice of means.

He had taken in a nun in her seventies as a lodger in his house, one of those people that the Revolution had scattered around the world. In order to give an hour's entertainment to his lodger he, who had never touched a playing card, learned to play piquet, 814 and it was a sight for sore eyes to see him pretending to be enthusiastic about the game so that the nun was persuaded that she was being helpful to her benefactor. This lasted for fifteen years. But here is what turned an act of simple charity into one of heroism. The good nun was suffering from a generalized cancer that caused an abominable odor to emanate from her and of which she was unconscious. In spite of this, the priest was never seen to take tobacco during the game for fear of making the unfortunate patient aware of her situation. How many people who received the cross this past May 1 would be capable of doing for one day what my old priest did for fifteen years?

Well then! I observed this priest and was able to ascertain that when he engaged in business , he was as vigilant as any trader in the Marais. 815 He defended his territory, watched out for the weight, the measure, the quality, and the price, and at no time ever thought of combining charity and fraternity in the matter.

Let us therefore strip the word fraternity of all the false, puerile, and high-flown trappings that have lately been added to it.

20. T.300 (1847.11.28) "On the Difference between Illegal and Immoral Acts" (LE, 28 Nov. 1847)↩

Source

T.300 (1847.11.28) "On the Difference between Illegal and Immoral Acts" (LE, 28 Nov. 1847, no. 1, 2e année, pp. 1-2). The piece in LE had no title so we have given it one. The original French editor Paillottet inserted a shortened version of it in a footnote to "Plunder and Law". We include the complete article in CW4. [OC5, pp. 2-4] [CW2, pp. 267-68] and [CW4] </titles/2450#lf1573-02_footnote_nt243>.

Editor's Introduction

The original French editor Paillottet cut four paragraphs from the beginning of Bastiat's essay and one and half paragraphs from the end and inserted the shortened piece in a footnote to the pamphlet Plunder and Law (May 1850). We have translated the full version of the original article here.

Bastiat here is replying to criticism levelled at Le Libre-Échange by the Le Moniteur industriel which was the journal of the protectionist "Association for the Defense of National Employment" (also known as the Mimerel Committee) and the arch-foe of the free traders. 816 They accused Le Libre-Échange of defending smugglers who broke the law by selling goods which were either banned by the state or heavily protected and taxed for the benefit of special interests. The Moniteur industriel even went as far as accusing the free traders of "sedition". 817 This accusation was partly true as the language used by the free traders like Bastiat had increased in intensity and "harshness" over the previous two years. Ironically, Bastiat had started the ball rolling with his call for more direct and even "hash" language in "Theft by Subsidy" (Jan. 1846) in which he described subsidies to protected industries as a form of theft and told his readers that "Frankly, my good people, you are being robbed." 818 He gradually developed an entire vocabulary to describe the actions of the government in protecting and subsidising domestic industry. This included words such as "spolier" (to plunder),"dépouiller"(to dispossess), "voler" (to steal); "piller" (to loot or pillage), "filouter" (filching), and "violer" (rape). This of course offended those farmers and manufacturers being protected who argued in reply that what they were doing was perfectly legal. In turn, Bastiat retorted that there was a distinction between "la spoliation extra-légale" (extra-legal plunder), committed by highway robbers, which was universally condemned, and "la spoliation légale" (legal plunder) 819 committed by landowners and manufacturers who used their influence in the Chamber of Deputies to get laws passed in their favour, and even "la spoliation gouvernementale" (plunder by government), an expression he used in late 1847. 820 It would seem to be a small step to go from denouncing government actions as criminal theft, to urging people to avoid it as best they can, or to take steps to combat it, and perhaps then praising those who did so.

An example of the latter can be found in some of the speeches given at the Congrès des Économistes hosted by the Belgian Association for Commercial Freedom held in Brussels 16-18 September 1847, 821 which so incensed the members of the Association for the Defense of National Employment. Adolphe Blanqui, 822 who taught political economy at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers and was elected Deputy representing the Gironde from 1846-48, argued that the smugglers he had met in Spain were "un être très-positif" (good people), who were overall very good businessmen, who carried a large stock of items which they could deliver on time to their customers, who employed many people of all ages, both men and women, and who were quite professional in their dealings with their customers. Blanqui concluded from this that "I then realised that the protectionist system had a canker within itself which would end up killing it without the economists getting involved." This produced considerable laughter and applause from those economists in attendance. 823

This was followed by a speech by Joseph Garnier, 824 the editor of the Journal des Économistes , who literally sang the praises of the goguettier (political song writer) Jean-Pierre Béranger 825 who had written "cette chanson qui est réellement libre échangiste" (this really free trade song) "Les Contrebandiers" (The Smugglers). The verse he quoted has an interesting pun on the phrase "the balance of trade" and he very much likes the verse which shows the smugglers' utter disregard for artificial national borders:

Aux échanges l'homme s'exerce.

Mais l'impôt barre les chemins.

Passons; c'est nous qui du commerce

Tiendrons la balance en nos mains.

Men are busy engaged in trade,

But taxes block the roads.

Lets us pass; it is we who hold

The balance of trade in our hands.

À la frontière où l'oiseau vole,

Rien ne lui dit: Suis d'autre lois.

L'été vient tarir la rigole,

Qui sert de limite à deux rois.

At the frontier where the birds fly above,

Nothing says to them: Obey another law.

Summer comes to dry up the stream,

Which serves as the border between two kings.

Prix du sang qu'ils répandent,

Là leurs droits sont perçus.

Ces bornes qu'ils défendent,

Nous sautons par-dessus.

They demand a price in blood,

Here where their duties are collected.

These borders that they defend,

We (just) jump over them.

[Source] 826

Le Moniteur industriel responded angrily to these pro-smuggler sentiments expressed at the Congress of Economists and this in turn prompted an equally angry rebuttal by an unnamed author in Le Libre-Échange on 21 November 1847 entitled "Always Smuggling." Normally, unsigned articles in Le Libre-Échange should be attributed to the pen of Bastiat, and since the word "la ruse" (fraud, trickery) appeared in the essay and was one commonly used by him in his theory of plunder, his authorship would be plausible. However, in the essay below he denies it was him, or any "professor of political economy," thus ruling out Garnier and Blanqui. Hence it may have been written by Gustave de Molinari who was the more radical of the two on the issue of the immediacy of introducing free trade (he wanted it introduced immediately with no phasing in period, while the FFTA wanted a lengthy one); and he firmly believed protectionist duties were a form of theft as bad as "brigandage on the back roads of Calabria" and that doing deals with the protectionists on the Odier Committee was like paying protection money to Italian criminals. 827 Whoever the author may have been, perhaps Bastiat was forced to retract the radical piece under pressure from the more moderate backers of the FFTA.

The main argument of both the author of "Always Smuggling" and Bastiat in the piece below is that there is a difference between something being immoral and something being illegal, that smuggling was an illegal activity, but that protectionism was "a much greater (act of) immorality" than smuggling, even though it was technically legal.

Text

The mouth-piece of the committee run by Odier-Mimerel, Leboeuf, and company - the Moniteur industriel - commands us to assume responsibility for the article on smuggling which appeared in the previous issue of Libre-Échange . This article was not written by any professor of political economy, nor by the director of the journal (i.e. Bastiat), but M. Bastiat assumes full responsibility for it.

In its zeal to find us responsible, even criminal, the Moniteur asserts that we support a socially disruptive thesis, that we are justifying a revolt which is permanent, constant, organised, armed, and which is against the law and the constitution of the country . At the same time, the Moniteur quotes our own words: smuggling is immoral because it is a violation of the laws of the State .

We declare in the most formal manner possible that obedience to the laws of the State is in our eyes a sacred principle. As long as citizens have under the constitution a means, however imperfect, of obtaining redress from bad laws, it is for them not only a duty but good politics to resort exclusively to this means. Our Association, all our efforts, all our words and deeds attest to the fact that obedience to the law has always been our rule, our limit, and our hope. We appeal to the majority. We announce in advance that we have the patience to wait for its verdict. So how can the Moniteur industriel have the audacity to say that, according to us, the first person who comes along can declare that such and such a law is immoral and thus immediately has the right to engage in permanent revolt ?

Where does this confusion of the Moniteur industriel come from when it attempts to introduce into this debate the idea that we consider trade restrictions more immoral than smuggling? But to say that one act is more immoral than another, does this exonerate the lesser? In particular, does it allow one to say that one can carry it out by force of arms? 828

We would ask the reader to forgive us if we become casuists for a moment. Our opponents oblige us to put on our doctor's mortarboard. This is appropriate since it often pleases them to refer to us as doctors .

An illegal act is always immoral for the sole reason that it disobeys the law, but it does not follow that it is immoral in itself. When a mason (we apologize to our colleague for drawing his attention to such a small point) exchanges his wages from a hard day's work for a length of Belgian cloth, 829 his action is not intrinsically immoral. It is not the action that is immoral in itself; it is the violation of the law. And the proof of this is that, should the law be changed, no one would find anything wrong with this exchange. It is not immoral in Switzerland. But what is immoral in itself is immoral everywhere and at all times. Will Le Moniteur industriel claim that the morality of acts depends on their time and place?

If some acts can be illegal without being immoral , others are immoral without being illegal . When our colleague changes our words by trying to find a meaning in them that is not there, when certain people, after privately declaring that they are in favor of freedom, write and vote publicly against it, when a master makes his slave work by beating him, it is possible that the Code is not violated, but the consciences of all honest men are revolted. It is at the head of this category of actions that we place these trade restrictions. A Frenchman says to another Frenchman who is his equal or ought to be, "I forbid you to buy Belgian cloth because I want you to be forced to come to my shop. That may upset you but it suits my purpose. You will lose four francs but I will gain two and that is enough." We would say that this action is immoral. If someone is bold enough to carry it out himself by force or by means of the law, this does not change the character of the act. It is immoral by nature, in essence; it would have been so ten thousand years ago and would be in the Antipodes or on the moon, since whatever Le Moniteur industriel says, the law, which can do a great deal, cannot, however, turn something that is bad into good.

We are not even afraid to say that the contribution of the law increases the immorality of the act. If it were not involved, if for example the manufacturer had his wish for trade restrictions executed by those in his pay, the immorality would be blindingly obvious to Le Moniteur industriel itself. 830 What then! Because this manufacturer was able to spare himself this effort, because he was able to make use of the services of the power of the State and saddle those oppressed with part of the costs of repression, what was immoral has become praiseworthy!

It is true that the people thus trampled on may imagine that it is for their own good and that oppression results from an error common to both oppressors and those oppressed. This is enough to justify the intention and remove from the act the heinous character that it would otherwise have. Where this happens, the majority approves of the law. We have to accept this and would never say otherwise. However, nothing will stop us from telling the majority that in our opinion, it is mistaken. 831 After all, we must have considered trade restrictions to be immoral since we are attempting to destroy them. Isn't the Moniteur doing just as much with regard to freed trade?

We cannot end the discussion without thanking our esteemed colleague for the opportunity he has given us to clarify these questions which are still troubling to the majority. Without him we would not always have known what objections we had to respond to, and in doing so he assuredly provides us with a valuable service to our cause.

21. T.161 "On the Export of Gold Bullion" (LE, 12 Dec. 1847)↩

Source

T.161 (1847.12.12) "On the Export of Gold Bullion" (Sur l'exportation du numéraire), LE , 12 Dec. 1847, no. 3 (2nd year), p. 13. [OC2.21, pp. 112-16.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

During the eighteen months prior to the publication of this essay in the journal of the French Free Trade Association, Le Libre-Échange , Bastiat had written or spoken about the balance of trade on several occasions. He first touched upon it in the Introduction he wrote to his first book on Cobden and the League (July 1845) and then in the article "Balance of Trade" in JDE Oct. 1845 (which was later republished in ES1 6 under the same title). 832 Over the course of 1846 and 1847 when he began working full-time for the free trade movement he mentioned it in letters he wrote to the editors of newspapers, wrote articles on it for Le Libre-Échange , and discussed it in public speeches he gave for the Association. This essay on "The Export of Gold" was the last time he mentioned it except in passing for the next two years as the events of the Revolution of 1848 overtook him. He would not return to the topic until March 1850 when he wrote an article explicitly on "The Balance of Trade" for a journal which would also be republished as a pamphlet. 833

He clearly thought that the idea of the balance of trade was "radically false" and was just another economic sophism that needed to be debunked. He traced its origins back to an idea expressed by Montaigne that he had discussed several times before, namely that "One man's gain is another man's loss," an idea which Bastiat called "the root stock of sophisms". 834 He also thought that people who believed in the truth of Montaigne's principle would be inevitably drawn to the use of violence to expand their country's sales abroad and to reduce the sale of foreign goods in their own country. As he stated in Le Libre-Échange the previous February:

One theory that we believe to be radically false has dominated people's minds for centuries under the name of the mercantilist system . This theory, basing wealth not on the abundance of the means of satisfaction but in the possession of precious metals, inspired in nations the thought that in order to become wealthy two things were necessary: to buy as little as possible from others and to sell as much as possible to others . It was thought that this was the certain way to acquire the sole true treasure, gold, and at the same time to deprive one's rivals of it; in a word to place the balance of trade and power on one's side.

Buying little led to protective tariffs. The national market had to be protected, even by force, from foreign products that might have been able to enter and be traded for gold.

Selling a great deal led to imposing, even by force, (our) national products on foreign markets. Subjugated consumers were required. This led to conquest, domination, invasion and the colonial system.

A great many well meaning people continue to believe in the economic truth of this system, but we think it is impossible not to realize that, when practiced simultaneously by all nations, it places them in an inevitable state of war. It is clear that the actions of each are in conflict with the actions of all. It is a collection of perpetual efforts that contradict one another. It can be summarized in this axiom by Montaigne: "One man's gain is another man's loss." 835

In this essay he focuses on the idea that if a nation buys "too much" from other countries there will be net drain of gold which will have a harmful impact on the domestic economy. Bastiat debunks this notion by rejecting the idea that the " general balance of trade " of a nation has much meaning, and by claiming that the real gauge of a nation's overall wealth is determined by the balance of profit and loss of "each trader, taken individually." The key passage below where he state this is:

It is a fact that each trader, taken individually and very conscious of his own balance , takes not the slightest notice of the general balance of trade . Well, it is worth noting that these two balances assess things in a way that is so diametrically opposed that what one calls a loss , the other calls a profit, and vice versa .

Bastiat believes that the presence of money (or gold bullion) is in fact a distraction, that the real issue is the exchange of "services effectifs" (real or actual services) between individuals, where money is just a token or voucher to be used to claim other services at some future date. Each participant to a trade or exchange calculates their own personal "balance of trade" and this, Bastiat believed, was "a more faithful thermometer" of the true state of wealth and prosperity in a country than any calculation of a "national balance of trade."

The context of the concern about an "unfavourable balance of trade" was a combination of a stock market recession caused by speculation in railroad stock and a series of poor harvests in Ireland and France. Britain suffered a financial crisis between 1846 and 1847 as a stock market boom spurred by speculative sales in railroad stocks came to an end. As de Soto observes,

As of 1840 credit expansion resumed in the United Kingdom and spread throughout France and the United States. Thousands of miles of railroad track were built and the stock market entered upon a period of relentless growth which mostly favored railroad stock. Thus began a speculative movement which lasted until 1846, when economic crisis hit in Great Britain. It is interesting to note that on July 19, 1844, under the auspices of Peel, England had adopted the Bank Charter Act, which represented the triumph of Ricardo's currency school and prohibited the issuance of bills not backed 100 percent by gold. Nevertheless this provision was not established in relation to deposits and loans, the volume of which increased five-fold in only two years, which explains the spread of speculation and the severity of the crisis which erupted in 1846. The depression spread to France and the price of railroad stock plummeted in the different stock exchanges. 836

Bastiat discusses the balance of trade in other works listed below:

in the Introduction to his first book on Cobden and the League (July 1845)
the article "Balance of Trade" in JDE Oct. 1845 which was later republished in ES1 6 under the same title (CW3, pp. 44-49); also ES1 14 "Conflict of Principles" (c. 1845)
two letters written in 1846: one to the Minister of the Interior M. Tanneguy-Duchâtel which was published in Mémorial bordelais , 30 June, 1846] [OC7.24, 114] [CW6]; and "To the Editors of La Presse," Courrier français , 2 Sept., 1846 [OC7.33, p. 148] [CW6]
several references in 1847 in articles written for Libre-échange or in speeches given for the French Free Trade Association, and in a letter to Richard Cobden
"England and Free Trade," Libre-Échange , 6 Feb. 1847 [OC2.32, p. 177] [CW6]
Letter 80. To Richard Cobden (July, 1847) [CW1.80]
"Plan for a Speech on Free Trade to be given in Bayonne" (c. 1847) [OC7.38, p. 178] [CW6]
"The League's Second Campaign," Libre-Échange , 7 Nov. 1847 [OC3.33, pp.449-58} [CW6]
"On the Export of Gold Bullion," Libre-Échange , 11 Dec. 1847 [OC2.21, p. 112] [CW6]
nothing in 1848 (no doubt because of the distraction of the Revolution and his work in the Chamber of Deputies
he returns to it briefly in 1849 in 3 pamphlets
Protectionism and Communism (January 1849) [OC4.9, p. 504] [CW2.12, pp. 235-65]
Peace and Freedom or the Republican Budget (February 1849) [OC5.9, p. 407] [CW2.15, pp. 282-327]
"Balance of Trade," (29 March 1850) [OC5.8, pp. 402-406] [CW4][see below, pp. 000]

Text

On the subject of the financial and commercial situation of Great Britain, Le National 837 expressed itself in the following words:

The crisis must have been all the more serious because foreign products and cereals were not being traded for English products. The balance between imports and exports was totally to Great Britain's disadvantage and the difference was paid in gold. This being the case, it might have been opportune to examine the share of responsibility that can be laid at the door of free trade in this state of affairs but we will do this later. For the moment we will be content to record that the outworn idea that is known as the balance of trade, and that is incidentally so despised and scorned by a certain school of economists, is nevertheless worth being taken into consideration, and when Great Britain compares what it has imported with what it has exported in the last year, it has to see that the finest theories are powerless when faced with the simple fact that when you buy wheat from Russia and Russia does not take English calico in exchange, this wheat has to be well and truly paid for in cash. Well, once the wheat is consumed and the cash exported, what is left to the purchaser? His calico, perhaps, that is to say, a value for which he has no use and which is rotting in his hands.

We would be curious to know if Le National effectively sees the balance of trade as an outworn idea or if the object of this expression, used ironically, is to pour scorn on a certain school that allows itself to see the balance of trade effectively as an outworn idea . "The question is worthy of being taken into consideration", says Le National . Yes, it is certainly worthy of being taken into consideration, and it is for this reason that we would have liked this broadsheet to be a little more explicit.

So the trader who has bought 10,000 francs' worth of wine in France and sold it for twice this price in the United States, receiving in payment and importing into France 20,000 francs' worth of cotton, considers that he has done good business. And the balance of trade teaches us that he has lost his capital in its entirety .

We can see how important it is to know what to refer to with regard to this doctrine, for if it is accurate traders tend irrevocably to ruin themselves and ruin the country, and the State should be in a hurry to put them all into a condition of guardianship, which is what it does.

This is not the only reason that obliges any political writer worthy of his salt to have an opinion on this famous balance of trade, for depending on whether he believes in it or not he is necessarily led to a policy that is quite different.

If the theory of the balance of trade is true, if national profit consists in increasing the mass of cash, as little as possible ought to be bought abroad in order not to allow silver and gold to leave the country, and a great deal sold in order to allow these coins to enter. To do this, you need to prevent, restrict, and prohibit. So, there is no freedom within, and as each nation adopts the same measures, hope lies only in the use of force to reduce foreigners into the harsh situation of being consumers or tributaries . This leads to conquests, colonies, violence, war, huge armies, powerful navies, etc.

If, on the other hand, the balance of an individual trader is a more faithful thermometer than the balance of trade for any given value that is exported from France, it is to be desired that as great a value as possible should be imported, that is to say that the figure for imports should outweigh as much as possible those for exports in the records of the Customs Service. Well, as all the efforts of traders have this aim in view, as long as this is in line with the general good, all that is needed is to leave them alone . 838 Freedom and peace are the inevitable consequences of this doctrine.

As the view that the exporting of cash constitutes a loss is widespread, and disastrous in our opinion, may we be allowed to take the opportunity of saying something about it?

A man who has a trade, for example a hatter, provides a real service 839 to his customers. He protects their heads from the sun and rain and in return he expects to receive in turn real services in the form of food, clothing, accommodation, etc. For as long as he keeps the écus that have been given to him in payment, he has not yet received these real services . What he holds in his hands is, so to speak, the vouchers that give him the right to receive these services. Proof of this is that if he personally and his descendants were to be condemned never to use these écus, he certainly would not take the trouble to make hats for others. He would devote his own work to satisfying his own needs. This shows us that, through the intervention of money, the barter of one service for another is broken down into two exchanges. First of all a service is provided for which money is received and subsequently money is paid for a service that is received. It is at this point that the barter is completed.

This is also true for nations.

When there are no gold and silver mines in a country, as is the case for France and England, it is necessary to provide real services to foreigners in order to receive money from them. Foreigners are fed, their thirst is quenched, and they are provided with furniture, etc. but for as long as we have only their cash we have not yet received the real services to which we are entitled. We have to achieve the satisfaction of the genuine needs we desire when we work. The very presence of this gold proves that the nation has provided satisfaction over and above genuine needs and that it is a creditor for services that are equivalent to those it has provided. Therefore, it is only by exporting this gold in return for consumer products that it is efficiently paid for its work. 840

In the end, nations among themselves, just like individuals among themselves, provide reciprocal services to each other. Cash is merely an ingenious means of facilitating this barter of services . To hinder, whether directly or indirectly, the exporting of gold is to treat the people in the same way as the hatter who is forbidden to draw from society, by spending his money, services that are as real as those he has provided to it.

Le National confronts us with the current crisis in England, but Le National has fallen into the same error as La Presse , 841 by talking about the exporting of cash without taking into account the loss of harvests or even mentioning them.

The day on which the English, after having ploughed, hoed, and sown their fields, saw their wheat destroyed and their potatoes rot, 842 it was determined that they had to suffer one way or another. The form this suffering should take naturally, in view of the nature of the phenomenon, is starvation . Fortunately for them, they had previously provided services to other nations in return for the vouchers known as money, which give them the right to equivalent services at a time that is suitable. They used these vouchers in this situation. They handed over gold and received wheat, and instead of manifesting itself in the form of starvation , suffering manifested itself in the form of impoverishment , which is less harsh. However, this impoverishment has not been caused by the exporting of cash, but by the loss of harvests.

This is exactly like the case of the hatter we mentioned just now. He sold a great many hats and, by depriving himself, succeeded in accumulating gold. His house burnt down. He was obliged to part with his gold in order to rebuild it. He was the poorer for it. Was this because he had parted with his gold? No, but because his house burnt down. A disaster is a disaster. It would not be a disaster if you were as rich after it as before.

"Once the wheat has been consumed and money exported, what is left for the purchaser?," asks Le National. What is left for him is not to have died of hunger, which is something significant.

In our turn, we ask: If England had not consumed this wheat and exported this money, what would be left for it? Corpses.

22. T.163 "A Speech on intellectual property given to the Publishers Circle" (16 Dec. 1847, Travail int.)↩

Source

T.163 (1847.12.16) "A Speech given to the Publishers Circle (on intellectual property)" (Huitième discours, à Paris : Discours au Cercle de la librairie) 16 Dec. 1847. Later published as "La propriété littéraire au Cercle de la librairie; Discours de M. Frédéric Bastiat" (Literary Property. Speech given to the Publisher's Circle), Le Travail intellectuel , no. 6, samedi 15 janvier 1848, pp. 4-6. [OC2.549b, pp. 328-39.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

This is the second of three pieces on literary and intellectual property rights Bastiat wrote. 843 This speech reflects Bastiat's association with Hippolyte Castille whom he got to know after his arrival in Paris in 1845. Castille was a journalist at the Courrier français (where Molinari also worked) which had favourably reviewed his book on Cobden and the League. As their friendship developed Bastiat was invited to attend Castille's regular Soirée at his home on 79 Saint Lazarus Street which many radicals, liberals, and economists also attended. By late 1847 when Castille began a journal to defend "Intellectual Labour" ( Le Travail intellectuel ) Bastiat agreed to lend his name to the endeavour as a "collaborator."

There are several reasons why the issue of intellectual property rights came up at this time. The first is that Lamartine, himself a successful author and poet, had raised the matter in the Chamber of Deputies in 1841 when he put forward a proposal to extend the author's exclusive ownership of a work to a period of 50 years after their death. A debate took place on 13 March 1841 and Lamartine's proposal was decisively defeated. 844 It should be noted that Bastiat, Molinari, and Castille were all journalists who made a precarious existence by selling their writing to journals and newspapers. They did not have steady and secure jobs in schools or colleges so they had a vested interest is protecting the value of their own intellectual labour (although Bastiat was a landowner in Gascony and did have a steady income from his sale of wine and land rents to supplement his journalism in Paris). Molinari wrote a very moving and impassioned plea for the rights of journalists like him to own their own work in an early lecture in his course on political economy which he had begun giving in the fall of 1847 at the Athénée royal. In a wry aside, he wonders about the possibility of a magician one day creating "un automate-journaliste" (a mechanical journalist) which would take the drudgery and hard work out of being a journalist but which also make it possible for owners of newspapers and journals to dispense with having to employ human writers to write their material. Before that time arrived, Molinari wanted ownership of the products of both his creativity and this drudgery and any financial rewards which might come from this. 845

The second is that as industrialisation began to take off in France there arose the problem of protecting and thus profiting from industrial patents and trade marks, especially for designs for goods in which French industry specialised such as elaborate designs for textiles and bronze work. This was a topic of some debate among the economists, a summary of which can be found in several articles in the DEP. 846 They were divided into two opposing groups: those who believed in an "absolute" property right of ideas in perpetuity (such as Castille, Molinari, Bastiat, Jobard) and those who believed in a fixed period of years of exclusive ownership after which the ideas passed into the public domain (Lamartine, Louis Wolowski, Charles Renouard, Charles Coquelin).

A third reason was the criticism launched by socialists like Louis Blanc against all forms of private property, including intellectual, artistic, and industrial property. Bastiat addressed many of the criticisms of the socialists in the dozen or so anti-socialist pamphlets which he wrote from late 1848 to mid-1850. Here he focusses on the chapter dealing with literary property in Blanc's 4th edition of The Organisation of Labour which appeared in 1845 and intensified the growing socialist critique of all forms of property immediately before the Revolution. 847 Socialists like Blanc wanted to "organize" everything cooperatively under the guiding hand of the state. For example, industry would be organised into "national workshops" and literary production would have its own system of state regulation and control. Blanc wanted to organise the production of books as he did all other areas of economic activity which he describes in Part I of "The Organization of Labour". Instead of "National or Social Workshops" where all industrial work would be done cooperatively and workers would be paid out a common pool organised by the state, intellectual work such as book writing, publishing, and sales would be organised by a national "librairie sociale" (social publishing house). The state would set the prices of books (with more serious and important books selling for less than more frivolous books), "un comité d'hommes éclairés" (committee of enlightened men) would oversee the selection and payment of authors, and the National Assembly would appoint every year a citizen who would audit the activities of the Social Publishing House. 848

Bastiat was invited to speak at a meeting of an association of Paris publishers and book sellers on 16 November 1847 on the topic of literary property rights in the light of these concerns. He was part of delegation of economists who also were present, such as Joseph Garnier, the editor in chief of the Journal des Économistes , Gustave de Molinari who was teaching economics at the Athénée royal, 849 and Alcide Fonteyraud who was translating and editing the works of David Ricardo 850 for the Guillaumin publishing firm. 851 He took the opportunity not only to talk about a topic which was dear to the hearts of the publishers (as counterfeiting from Belgium and Switzerland was widespread in the book industry) but also to place literary property rights in the broader context of natural rights to property in general. This speech is thus unusual in that it is one of the few places where Bastiat gives us an account of his own understanding of property rights as natural rights inherent in human nature (man is born a property owner, at least in their own personal and faculties), 852 the historical origin of property (based upon the work done by Charles Comte in the 1820s and 1830s), 853 its evolution and corruption under the Old Regime, and the changes (both good and bad) which were introduced during the Revolution of 1789.

In his typical fashion, Bastiat was able to insert an anti-military although still patriotic twist into his conclusion when he stated:

I want France increasingly to retain and extend the legitimate and glorious supremacy of its beautiful language which, more than its bayonets, will carry the principles of our Revolution to the four corners of the world.

It should be noted that the stenographic report of Bastiat's lecture which was published in Le Travail intellectual also included some comments and audience reactions which are provided in brackets.

Text

16 December 1847

Sirs,

One of my friends who was present at a recent session of the Academy of Moral and Political Science 854 told me that when the conversation turned to property , which, as you know, in one form or another is frequently attacked these days, 855 one of those present summed up his ideas in the phrase: Man is born a property owner . 856 This phrase, Sirs, I am pleased to repeat here as being the most forceful and accurate expression of my own thought.

Yes, man is born a property owner , that is to say, property is the result of the way he organizes his life.

People are born property owners, for they are born with needs that have to be satisfied in order for them to develop, advance, and even live, and they are also born with a set of abilities in line with these needs.

They are thus born having property in their person and their faculties. 857 It is therefore ownership of their person that leads to the ownership of things, and it is the ownership of their faculties that leads to the ownership of what they produce.

The conclusion from this thinking is that property is as natural as the very existence of man.

Is this also true when rudiments of this can be seen in animals themselves? For as long as there is an analogy between their needs and faculties and ours there has also to be one in the necessary consequences of these faculties and needs.

When a swallow gathers pieces of straw and moss and cements them together with a little mud to form a nest, we do not see its fellows snatching away the fruit of its work.

In the same way, property is acknowledged in primitive tribes. 858 When a man has gathered a few branches of trees and made bows or arrows from them, when he has devoted time taken from work that is more immediately useful to do this, and inflicted hardship on himself in order to equip himself with weapons, the entire tribe recognizes that these weapons are his property, and common sense dictates that, since they have to be useful to someone and produce a benefit, it is only natural that this should go to the person who has taken the trouble to make them. A stronger man is certainly able to snatch them away, but this would result only in rousing general indignation, and it is precisely to prevent such theft more effectively that governments have been established.

This, Gentlemen, shows that the right to property is prior to the law. It is not law that has given rise to property but on the contrary property that has given rise to law. This observation is important, for it is very common, especially among lawyers, for the origin of property to be attributed to law, from which we derive the dangerous consequence that lawmakers can overturn everything with perfect peace of mind. This mistaken notion is at the root of all the socialist plans for organization with which we are inundated. On the contrary it has to be said that law is the result of property, and property the result of the way the human race is organized.

The circle of property is expanding and consolidating as civilization advances. The weaker, the more ignorant, excitable, and violent the human race is, the more property is restricted and uncertain.

Thus in the primitive tribes I mentioned a moment ago, although the right to property is acknowledged, the appropriation of land is not; the tribe benefits from it in common. It is barely the case that a certain area of land is recognized as being the property of each tribe by the neighboring tribes. That recognition requires a greater degree of civilization and the observation of what the other peoples are doing.

What happens then? In the primitive state, since land is not personal property, everyone spontaneously gathers the benefits it provides but nobody thinks of working it. In these places, the population is few in number, poor, and decimated by suffering, disease, and famine.

Among nomadic peoples, the tribes benefit in common from a determined area; at least herds can be raised. The land is more productive and the population greater in number, stronger, and more advanced.

Among civilized nations, property has breached the final barrier; it has become individual. Each person, in the certainty of gathering the fruits of his labor, makes the land produce all it can. The population increases in number and wealth.

In these various social conditions, the law follows these phenomena, and does not precede them. It regularizes relationships and brings back to the law those who stray from it, but it does not create these relationships.

Gentlemen, I cannot refrain from drawing your attention for a moment to the consequences of this personal right to property linked to the land.

At the time appropriation takes place, the population is very sparse compared to the extent of the land; each person is therefore able to fence an area as large as he is able to cultivate without causing any harm to his brethren, since there is plenty of land for everyone. Not only is he not harming his brethren, but he is useful to them and this is how: however crude farming methods are, they always produce more crops in a year than the farmer and his family are able to consume. Part of the population is thus able to devote itself to other forms of work, such as hunting, fishing, making garments, house building, the manufacture of weapons, tools, etc. and trade these profitably for agricultural products. Observe gentlemen, that for as long as there is an abundance of land that has not yet been appropriated, these two types of activity will develop in parallel and in a harmonious manner. It will be impossible for one to oppress the other. If the agricultural class puts too great a price on their services, people would abandon other industries in order to clear more land. If, on the contrary, industry demanded exorbitant prices, capital and labor would prefer industry to agriculture, in such a way that the population would be able to grow for long periods whilst maintaining a balance, doubtless with a few partial disturbances, but in a much steadier manner than if legislators meddled with it.

However, when the entire territory has been occupied, a notable development occurs.

The population does not cease to grow. The new arrivals have no choice of occupation. However, more food is needed because there are more mouths to feed, and more raw materials are needed because there are more human beings to be clothed, housed, heated, provided with lighting, etc.

I think it cannot be denied that these newcomers have the right to work for foreign populations and to send their products abroad in exchange for food. Moreover, if, on the basis of the country's political constitution, the agricultural class has legislative power and if they take advantage of this power to pass a law that forbids the entire population from working for foreigners, the equilibrium will be upset, and there is no limit to the amount of labor that landowners would be able to demand in return for a given quantity of food.

Gentlemen, following on from what I have just said with regard to property in general, it seems difficult not to admit that literary property falls into the category of a commonly held right? 859 (Sounds of Assent). Is not a book the product of work done by a man using his abilities, his effort, his care, his vigilance, the commitment of his time and of funds he has raised? Does this man not have to live while he is working? Why then should he not receive some voluntarily given services from those to whom he is supplying his? Why should his book not count as his property? The manufacturer of paper, the printer, the bookseller, and the bookbinder, who have all contributed to the production of a book, are rewarded for their work. Should the author be the only one excluded from the rewards generated by his book?

The question would be greatly advanced if it were treated historically. Allow me therefore to give you a very succinct summary of the state of the law in this respect.

I have defined property for you. I said: All production belongs to whomever made it, because he made it. Gentlemen, there was a time when people were far from recognizing a principle that today appears so simple to us. You will understand that this principle could not have been accepted either in Roman law, or by feudal aristocracy, or by absolute monarchs, for it would have overthrown a society based on conquest, usurpation, and slavery. How could you think that the Romans, who lived off the work of the nations they conquered or of slaves, or the Normans, who lived off the work of the Saxons, 860 would have been able to base their public law on the following maxim that undermines all forms of organized plunder: "An object produced belongs to the person who made it."

At the time when printing was invented, another form of law existed in Europe. The king was the master and universal owner of both things and men. The permission to work was a right held by the Church and the King. The rule was that everything came from the Prince. Nobody had the right to exercise a profession. Rights could result only from a royal concession. The king selected the people he favoured and made them an exception in being able to undertake a specific type of work, either through a grant of monopoly, privilege, or privata lex (private law), 861 and thereby granted them the ability to live by working.

Writers could not escape this rule. Thus, the edict dated 26 August 1686, 862 the first to deal with these matters, stated the following: "All printers and booksellers are forbidden to print and offer for sale any work in respect of which no exemption has been granted, on pain of confiscation and exemplary punishment."

And note, gentlemen, that the entire theory of property, as still taught in our schools is drawn from Roman and feudal law. And unless I am mistaken, the official definition of property as given in the classroom still involves the jus utendi et abutendi (the rise to use and to abuse). 863 It is therefore not surprising that many lawyers do not bother to seek a relationship between property and the nature of man, especially with regard to literary property.

It happened that, with regard to those granted royal privilege , monopoly had all the effects of property. Declaring that nobody, except for the author, would have the authority to print the book was to make the author its owner, if not by right at least in practice.

The 1789 revolution was bound to overturn this state of affairs and this is indeed what happened. The Constituent Assembly acknowledged the right of everyone to write and have his work printed, but it considered that it had done everything by recognizing the right, and did not think of setting out guarantees in favor of literary property. It proclaimed a right held by a man not a right to a kind of property. It thus destroyed this kind of guarantee that, under the Old Regime, resulted incidentally from monopoly. Therefore, for four years, everyone was able to reproduce and sell for his own benefit copies of the books of living authors as he wished; it was as though the Constituent Assembly had said: "To cultivate the land is a human right," and that, as a result, everyone was entitled to take over his neighbor's field.

By a very strange coincidence, which proves how often the same causes have the same effects, the very same things had happened in England. There too, the right of working (to engage in work) 864 was a royal attribute. There too, this right had initially been merely a concession or privilege. There too, these monopolies had been destroyed and the right to work recognized. 865 There too, people thought they had done everything by paralyzing royal action, and when they had recognized that everyone had the right to write and print they omitted to stipulate that the work belonged to the person who had done it. Finally there too, this interregnum in the law, during which literary property was pillaged, lasted three or four years.

In England as in France, the sight of such disorder brought in laws that more or less govern both countries.

Following Lackanal's report, the Convention issued a decree 866 whose terms deserve to be quoted. (The speaker reads them out). 867

De toutes les propriétés, la moins susceptible de contestation, celle dont l'accroissement ne peut ni blesser l'égalité républicaine, ni donner d'ombrage à la liberté, c'est sans contredit celle des productions du génie; et si quelque chose doit étonner, c'est qu'il ait fallu reconnoître cette propriété, assurer son libre exercice par une loi positive, c'est qu'une aussi grande révolution que la nôtre ait été nécessaire pour nous ramener sur ce point, comme sur tant d'autres, aux simples élémens de la justice la plus commune.

Of all the kinds of property, the one which is least susceptible to dispute, whose increase can injure neither republican equality nor give umbrage to liberty, is without contradiction that of the productions of the mind. What is surprising is the fact that one might need to recognize this property and to ensure its free exercise by a positive law, that for such a great revolution as ours that it would be necessary in this matter, as with so many others, to have to return to the most common and simple elements of justice.

Le génie a-t-il ordonné, dans le silence, un ouvrage qui recule les bornes des connoissances humaines, des pirates littéraires s'en emparent aussitôt, et l'auteur ne marche à l'immortalité qu'à travers les horreurs de la misère. Et ses enfans ! ... Citoyens, la postérité du grand Corneille s'est éteinte dans l'indigence. L'impression peut d'autant moins faire des productions d'un écrivain une propriété publique, dans le sens où les corsaires littéraires l'entendent, que l'exercice utile de la propriété de l'auteur, ne pouvant se faire que par ce moyen, il s'ensuivroit qu'il ne pourroit en user, sans la perdre à l'instant même.

Has a mind created in silence a work which pushes back the limits of human knowledge only to see literary pirates seize it and for the author to march towards their immortality only by crossing the horrors of indigence. And what about his children! … Citizens, the heirs of the great Corneille have passed away in poverty. Printing can just as easily turn the works of an author into a publicly owned property, in the sense understood by literary privateers, and since the useful exercise of the authors's own property right can only be carried out by this same method, it follows as a consequence that he cannot make use of it without losing it at the same moment.

This latter observation is a reply to the objection often raised against literary property. It is said: "As long as the author has his manuscript in his hands, nobody will dispute his ownership of his work. But as soon as he has handed it over for printing, ought he to be the owner of all future editions of this work? Has not each person the right to reproduce and sell these subsequent editions?"

Gentlemen, the law ought not to be either a play on words or a surprise. There is no way of profiting from a book other than making copies of it and selling them. To bestow this right on those who did not write the book or who have not bought the rights to it is to declare that the work does not belong to the person whose work it is and to deny property itself. It is as if we were saying: " The field will be privately owned but the crops it produces will be the property of the first person to gain possession of them. " (Applause)

After reading the preamble of the decree, I find it difficult to explain the decree itself. It limits itself to attributing to authors, as a legislative gift, the usufruct of their work. In fact, just as declaring a man the usufructuary in perpetuity is to declare him the owner, to say that he will be the owner for a given number of years is to say that he will be the usufructuary. 868 This is not a word which creates a right: the law might as well call me Emperor ; if it leaves me in my present situation, it is merely proclaiming a lie.

Our current legislation does not seem to me to be based on any principle. Either literary property is a right which is above the law, in which case the law ought not to do anything other than confirm it, regulate it, and guarantee it, or literary works belong to the general public, and in this case it is not clear why its usufruct is attributed to the author.

It seems to me that these legal arrangements echo the ideas with which our old public law had imbued people's minds. The Convention 869 took the place of the King; it believed that it was being magnanimous to authors in an act that it was in its gift to regulate and delimit. It assumed that the authority for deciding on whom the right was bestowed inhered in the Convention itself and not in the person of the author, and on this basis it handed over exactly what it considered proper. But if this were the case, why was there this solemn declaration of the right?

… 870 A talented writer 871 has devoted some eloquent pages to combating the very principle of literary property. He bases himself on what is sad and degrading, according to him, in the sight of genius seeking its reward in a handful of gold. 872 I cannot help seeing a residue of aristocratic prejudice in this way of considering the question nor help also fearing that, involuntarily, the author has yielded to that contempt for work that was a distinctive characteristic of the old slave-owners and which is inculcated in all of us during our university education. Are writers different in nature from other men? Do they not have needs to be satisfied and families to provide for? Is there something intrinsically despicable in having recourse to intellectual work in order to do this? The words mercantilism , industrialism, and individualism pile up under Mr. Blanc's pen. Is it therefore base, ignoble, or shameful to exchange services freely because gold is used as the intermediary in these exchanges? Are we all noble by nature? Do we descend from the gods of Olympus?

Having disparaged this feeling, I might say this necessity, that obliges men to get services in exchange for those (services) which they provide, in a word, to work for payment, Mr. Blanc dreams up a whole and detailed system of payment. The only thing is that he wants it to be national and not individual. I will not go into Mr. Blanc's proposed system, which I consider to be open to a great deal of criticism. But is it certain that writers will retain more dignity when intrigue and solicitation become the road to reward? (Laughter)

I agree with Mr. Blanc that, as things stand, books that are amusing, dangerous, occasionally corrupting, and always written in haste are more lucrative than substantial and serious works that have required much effort and sleepless nights. Why is this? Because the general public demands works like this, and people are given what they want. This is true for all forms of production. Wherever the masses are willing to make sacrifices to obtain something, this thing is produced; people will always be found to make it. Legislative measures will not correct this; an improvement in standards is needed. In all such cases, the only answer lies in a progressive improvement in public opinion.

People will say that all this is a vicious circle, since bad books serve only to increase the corruption of the masses and public opinion, but I do not think this is so. I am convinced that there are some types of books that time discredits.

Furthermore, I think that literary property is an obstacle to this danger. Is it not obvious that, the less valuable the usufruct, the more incentive there is to write quickly and follow the fashion?

As for the selflessness spoken of so warmly by Mr. Blanc and, I may say, in such elevated and eloquent terms, God forbid that I should differ from him in this matter. It is true that men who wish to provide a service to society in whatever sphere, be it military, ecclesiastical, literary or any other, without any remuneration, are worth all our esteem, admiration, and homage, and this is all the more true if, in the great examples he cites, they work in extreme penury and suffering. Hold on though! Would it be generous on the part of society to latch onto the devotion of a particular group in order to fashion a claim against it, one imposed on it as a legal obligation, such that this group were denied the common right to receive services in return for services provided? 873 (Murmuring)

Among the objections made, not to the principle of literary property but to its application, there is one that I consider extremely serious, and that is the state of the legislation in the nations that surround us. I think that this is an example of the type of progress in which the solidarity between nations is most in evidence. What good would it do to recognize literary property in France if it were not recognized in Belgium, Holland, or England, and if the printers and booksellers in these countries were able violate this property right with impunity? This is the present state of things people will say, and it has not stopped our legislation from awarding authors the usufruct of their works. Recognizing intellectual property would not worsen the existing situation.

However, everyone knows the abnormal position in which our booksellers are placed by counterfeiting with regard to the works of living authors. What would their position therefore be if literary property had been recognized in France and if the works of Corneille, Racine, and all the great men of centuries past were still subject to copyright, which did not apply to Belgian publishers? These days, there is at least a huge body of works for whose reprinting our booksellers are in the same situation as foreign ones. Without this, it is doubtful whether they could survive.

There are some who think that by saying this I am countering the principles of commercial freedom that I advocate in other circumstances, since I appear to fear the effect of foreign competition on our booksellers.

I reject this accusation and comparison with my utmost strength.

If, because of some natural circumstance or superiority in personnel, the Belgians are able to publish more cheaply than we, I would consider it an injustice and folly to prohibit Belgian books, for this would be to sustain an industry that is making a loss by inflicting a tax on book buyers. I would attack this type of protection like all the others. But what is the connection between this and the issue of counterfeiting? Logically the two cases would have to be similar in order to be treated in common. Let us imagine that a factory for woolen cloth were established on Belgian soil and that the Belgians found some way of removing wool and dye from French factories; obviously, this would not be competition but plunder. Would we not have the right to demand the reform of Belgian legislation and also insist that French diplomacy, acting usefully just for once, should promote this notable act of international justice?

To sum up, gentlemen, although my views are not those of Mr. Blanc, I am bold enough to say that my desires are the same as his. Yes, like him, I want our literature to rise in stature, to be cleansed and morally refined. I want France increasingly to retain and extend the legitimate and glorious supremacy of its beautiful language which, more than its bayonets, will carry the principles of our Revolution to the four corners of the world. (Applause)

23. T.167 "Barataria" (c. 1848)↩

Source

T.167 (1848.??) "Barataria" (Barataria). An unpublished fragment of what was intended as a short pamphlet. 1847 or early 1848 (internal evidence suggests 1848). [OC7.77, pp. 343-51.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

Bastiat is parodying here an episode in Cervantes' novel Don Quixote (1615) where Don Quixote's squire Sancho Panza is made the governor of the island of Barataria by some noblemen as a prank. They wanted to see how an apparently simple-minded commoner like Sancho would handle the duties of a ruler who would normally be an aristocrat. The name of the island "Barataria" is a play on the Spanish word "barato" which means cheap, easy, or simple. Sancho outsmarted the noblemen by acting as a "Solomonic" ruler who could settle disputes quickly and fairly, and who could see through the sophistry of his advisors. 874 In one of the chapters describing Sancho's exploits as ruler there is an exchange of letters between him and Don Quixote which is what Bastiat uses in his parody of the story. After 10 days of ruling Barataria Sancho resigns in disgust preferring the life of a simple labourer to that of a privileged and pampered ruler. Sancho concludes that "A reaping-hook fits my hand better than a governor's sceptre." 875

This short piece is undated and incomplete. Bastiat's French editor Paillottet spoke to Bastiat about it shortly before he died and he told Paillottet that he did not complete it because he had qualms about putting ideas about liberty and free markets in the mouth of Sancho Panza and the language of socialism and utopia in the mouth of Don Quixote. This is a pity as Bastiat had no such qualms when he put ideas about liberty and free markets in the mouth of Friday and protectionist ideas in the mouth of Robinson Crusoe in some of his economic sophisms. 876 The story is also quite similar to ES2 11 "The Utopian" (January, 1847) 877 in that it concerns a legislator or ruler who wishes to radically reform society but who ultimately resigns his position like Sancho. In Cervantes' novel Sancho, after ruling the island for 10 days, resigns as governor with the following statement:

Make way, gentlemen, and let me go back to my old freedom; let me go look for my past life, and raise myself up from this present death. I was not born to be a governor or protect islands or cities from the enemies that choose to attack them. Ploughing and digging, vine-dressing and pruning, are more in my way than defending provinces or kingdoms. Saint Peter is very well at Rome ; I mean each of us is best following the trade he was born to. A reaping-hook fits my hand better than a governor's sceptre ; I'd rather have my fill of gazpacho than be subject to the misery of a meddling doctor who kills me with hunger, and I'd rather lie in summer under the shade of an oak, and in winter wrap myself in a double sheep-skin jacket in freedom, than go to bed between holland sheets and dress in sables under the restraint of a government. God be with your worships, and tell my lord the duke that "naked I was born, naked I find myself, I neither lose nor gain ;" I mean that without a farthing I came into this government, and without a farthing I go out of it, very different from the way governors commonly leave other islands. Stand aside and let me go. 878

In Bastiat's version of the story Sancho is made governor of the island and Don Quixote advises him as a socialist of 1848 might have done, namely to "organise" society along the lines of a machine controlled by a socialist "mechanic." 879 It is his servant and companion, Sancho Panza, who is the liberal who has severe reservations about Quixote's ideas. Another similarity is with the essay "The State" (June 1848) 880 in which Bastiat warns against a system in which "tout le monde vole tout le monde" (everybody steals from everybody). A third article which has a similar theme is "Prendre cinq et rendre quatre ce n'est pas donner" (Taking Five and Returning Four is not Giving) (June 1848). 881 In "Barataria" the ratio is 'taking 12 and giving 10' (or 6 and 5). Given the similarities with the pieces written in June 1848 and the strong anti-socialist sentiments this suggests that "Barataria" might have been written in mid-1848.

Bastiat may well have seen himself as fighting similar battles as Don Quixote had done. In the article "The Man who asked Embarrassing Questions" (Dec. 1847) Bastiat describes the protagonist (i.e. himself) as "a new Don Quixote" who mounts his steed to do battle against Proudhon and his slogan "Property is Theft." The protagonist is armed with his own slogan "prices rise when and because things are scarce."

PRICES RISE WHEN AND BECAUSE THINGS ARE SCARCE. With this discovery in my pocket, which ought to bring me as much fame as Mr. Proudhon expects from his famous formula: Property is theft, I mounted my humble steed like a new Don Quixote and went off to campaign. 882

Text

There is nothing like the waters of the Pyrénées. You meet people from every country there, people who have seen a great deal and retained much, and who besides are ready to tell a lot of tales. What is no less precious is that you also find a great many other people, especially at Eaux-Bonnes, 883 who are prepared to listen, and for good reason.

For the last few days, we who are truly ill, seriously ill as we are called now (which does not stop us from being happy) 884 have been gathered in a circle around a hidalgo from Valencia who has visited the Island of Barataria thoroughly and who has been telling us wonderful things about it. It is well known that this island has had as its legislator the great Sancho Panza who believed it was his duty, in the institutions he set up, to move away from the classical models of Minos, Lycurgus, Solon, Numa and Plato. 885 In Barataria, the founding principle of government is to leave those being governed to judge and decide for themselves on all matters and to require from them merely a respect for justice. The government does not promise anything either; it is responsible for nothing and does not take charge of anything other than universal security.

Another day, I will tell you about the effects of this system as Don Juan José tells it. For today, I will just transcribe a few letters exchanged between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza during the reign of the famous farm labourer from La Mancha, letters regarded as very precious and carefully preserved in the Library of Barataria.

Unfortunately, neither the knight of the Mournful Countenance nor his squire thought to date their correspondence. It is thought that it must have taken place only a few months after Sancho took possession of his island. This much can be gleaned from the style. It shows that Don Quixote has lost the little common sense remaining to him and that Sancho has somewhat less of his lovable naivety. Whether this is the case or not, everything that remains of these two heroes is too precious not to be preserved.

Don Quixote to Sancho

Sancho, my friend, I cannot call to mind how difficult it is to govern men without feeling some remorse for having proposed you as the governor of the Island of Barataria, a mission for which your intellect and heart were perhaps not sufficiently prepared. For this reason, I have resolved to give you frequent advice from now on, and hope that you will follow it with the submissiveness imposed on squires by the laws of chivalry.

How you must now regret the rough existence you led up to the day on which you and your donkey joined my glorious enterprises and noble destiny. The great feats that you witnessed and in which, on occasion, you did not hesitate to take part, will have taken your mind away from common village preoccupations. But has it had time to rise to the full height that a legislator's mind ought to reach?

I fear, Sancho my friend, that now that you have been called upon to play the role of a Minos, a Lycurgus, a Solon or a Numa on the world stage, you may not have sufficiently identified with the ideas and aims of these great men. Like them, you are more than a prince, you are a legislator, and do you know what a legislator is? 886

Whoever ventures on the enterprise of setting up a people must be ready, shall we say, to change human nature, to transform each individual, who by himself is entirely complete and solitary, into a part of a much greater whole, from which that same individual will receive, in a sense, his life and his being. The founder of nations must weaken the structure of man in order to fortify it, to replace the physical and independent existence we have all received from nature with a moral and communal existence. In a word each man must be stripped of his own powers, and given powers which are external to him, and which he cannot use without the help of others. 887

Sancho my friend, you have first to be the inventor and then the operator of a machine of which the inhabitants of Barataria will be the springs and wheels. Do not forget that everything has to be combined in this machine, not for the glory of the inventor or the good fortune of the technician, but for the good fortune and glory of the machine itself.

The first difficulty you will encounter is in having your laws accepted. It would be no bad thing if you could persuade the Baratarians that you are in secret league with some goddess or other. 888 You should proclaim your laws on a stormy day in the middle of thunder and lightning. They will thus remain etched in their minds with a feeling of healthy terror. Your code will not just be a code but a religion; to violate the law would be to commit sacrilege and risk not only human punishment but also the punishments of the gods. In this way, you will give your town stability and force its citizens to " bear with docility the yoke of the public welfare." 889

It is true that imposture of this sort would be odious in others, but it is perfectly acceptable in a legislator. All legislators have used it, from Lycurgus to Mohammed and even at the present day, and if you read what is written by political writers who aspire to remodeling society you will note a mystical tone that proves that they would not be upset at being taken for inspired souls and prophets. Those who have recourse to such deceit are more than excusable; they are worthy of merit because they " attribute their own wisdom to the Gods." 890

You will then have to resolve the following important matter: do you or do you not establish slavery?

There are many pros and cons.

If, as we enlightened people have, you have spent your entire youth with the Greeks and Romans, 891 you will know that virtue is incompatible with work, that the only noble occupation is that of the soldier and the only great occupation is war, and that our hands can be worthily used only in the arts that are linked with domination and destruction, since those that keep us alive are basically low, shameful and servile.

From this it follows that, to make virtue flourish in your island, work has to be banished. However, banishing work is to banish life.

This is how you can solve the problem.

You should divide the Baratarians into two classes.

One (approximately 95 percent) would, as slaves, be devoted to servile work. Their foreheads will be branded so that they can be recognized and they will be chained by the neck to prevent revolts.

The others will then live in noble fashion. They will practice wrestling and boxing; they will become expert in the art of killing and in a word, their sole occupation will be virtue. This is how you will achieve freedom. "What? Is freedom to be maintained only with the support of slavery? Perhaps." 892

Reflect on these words, Sancho my friend, and reply to me quickly.

Sancho's Reply

I had your letter read to me by my secretary and, although my understanding is very limited, I am making haste to reply. To tell the truth, I do not think that I have learnt anything really useful to my government during the course of our adventures, and it is even very strange that most of your speeches have gone out of my head, whereas the sermons of our parish priest, Carasco's proverbs and above all the maxims of Thérèse Panza 893 are still of great help to me. As for the exploits you speak of, and in which you are good enough to tell me that I played a part, I do not remember them either, as I can scarcely recall your particular struggles against windmills or sheep, of which, indeed, I was a passive spectator. On the other hand, I remember clearly the cudgel blows that broke my bones in the wood where we fought twenty mule drivers.

Anyway, here I am, as you say, a legislator, prince, and governor.

First of all, I note that, in your opinion, Baratarian society should be a machine in which the Baratarians are the raw materials and of which I have to be the inventor, operator, and mechanic. I had this passage of your honored letter reread to me three times without ever being able to understand a word of it.

The Baratarians, whom you have perhaps never seen, are made just like you and me or nearly so, for few of them have achieved either your skinniness or my corpulence. Apart from this, they resemble us closely. They have eyes to see with, ears to hear with, and their heads, unless I am mistaken, contain brains. They move, think and speak and all appear to be very occupied in busying themselves with the things they need in order to be happy. To tell the truth, they never do anything else and I do not understand how you can have taken them for raw materials.

I also noted that Baratarians resemble the inhabitants of my village in one other way; they are so keen on happiness that sometimes they seek it at the expense of others. For several weeks, my secretary did nothing other than read me astonishing petitions on this subject. All of these, whether they came from individuals or communities, can be summarized in these words: Do not take our money, give us some instead. This made me think a great deal.

I sent for my minister of the hacienda and asked him whether he knew of a way of always giving money to the Baratarians without ever taking money from them. The minister assured me that he knew of no such method. I asked him whether I could not at least give the Baratarians a little more money than I took from them.

He replied that it was quite the opposite and that it was totally impossible to give ten to my subjects without taking at least twelve from them, because of the costs.

I then reasoned as follows: If I gave each Baratarian what I have taken from him, except for the costs, the operation would be ridiculous. If I gave more to some I would have to give less to others, and the operation would be unjust.

All things considered, I have decided to act quite differently, in accordance with what I consider to be just and reasonable.

I therefore convoked a grand assembly of Baratarians and spoke to them as follows:

"Baratarians!

Having examined what you are like and what I myself am like, I have found a great deal of resemblance. This led me to the conclusion that it is no more possible for me than for the first law giver who arose from among you to make you all happy, and I have come to you to say that I am abandoning any effort to do so. Do you not have hands and feet and the will to direct them? Therefore, you must make your own happiness for yourselves.

God has given you land. Cultivate it and produce crops from it. Exchange these with one another. Let some plough, others weave, still others teach, plead in court or cure illness; let each person work as he wishes.

For my part, my duty is to guarantee two things for every person: the freedom to act and the freedom to dispose of the fruits of their work.

I will constantly endeavor to repress your disastrous inclination to rob each other, wherever this is evident. I will give all of you total security . The rest is up to you.

Is it not absurd for you to ask anything more from me? What do these piles of petitions mean? If I took them seriously, everyone would steal from everyone else in Barataria, and with my connivance! On the contrary, I believe that my mission is to prevent anyone from stealing from anyone else . 894

Baratarians, there is a great difference between these two systems. If in your view I am to be the instrument by means of which everyone steals from everyone else , it is as though you were saying that all of your property belongs to me, and that I can dispose of it as well as your freedom. You will no longer be men, but brutes.

If I were to be the instrument by means of which nobody would be robbed, my mission would be the more limited the more honest you were. In this case I will ask you for just a small amount of tax, and you will be able to blame only yourselves for anything that happens to you. In any case, you will not, in all honesty, be able to blame me. My responsibility will be very limited and my position all the more assured.

Baratarians, this is what we will agree:

Do as you please, get up late or early, work or relax, have banquets or eat sparingly, spend your money or save it, act on your own or in common, agree with each other or not. I care about and respect you too much as a men to intervene in matters like these. I will certainly not be indifferent to them. I would prefer to see you active than lazy, thrifty than spendthrifts, sober than intemperate, or charitable than merciless, but I have no right, and in any case I have no authority, to cast you in the mold that suits me. I place my trust in all of you and in the law of responsibility to which God has subjected man.

All that I will do with the power of the state that has been entrusted to me do is to ensure that each person is content with his freedom and his property, and that he remains within the bounds of justice."

This is what I said, dear Master. Having thus communicated to you my words, deeds, and actions, I would like to know what you think of them before replying to the rest of your letter. Besides, I have a pressing need to rest, for I have never dictated anything as long as this before.

24. T.176 "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (JDE, 15 Jan., 1848)↩

Source

T.176 (1848.01.15) "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (Organisation naturelle Organisation artificielle), JDE , T. XIX, No. 74, Jan 1848, pp. 113-26; also EH1. [OC6] [CW5] [CW4]

EH 1st ed. Jan. 1850, pp. 25-51. EH2 2nd. edition July 1851, pp. 15-33.

Editor's Introduction

This article was published only a few weeks before the February Revolution changed Bastiat's life completely. Even though his health was not good throughout 1847 he had been very active in the Free Trade Association editing its weekly magazine, Le Libre-Échange , writing most of its articles, and giving speeches at several large public meetings. In the fall he also had begun giving a course of lectures on economic theory to students at the School of Law thus fulfilling one of his long-held dreams of writing a treatise on the Social Harmonies . All this came to a sudden end when revolution broke out on 22 February, the July Monarchy collapsed, a Provisional Government under Lamartine was formed, and the Second Republic was proclaimed. The sudden rise of socialist groups and the creation of the National Workshops under Louis Blanc frightened the political economists and their supporters in the free trade movement. In March they decided to dissolve the French Free Trade Association (thus putting Bastiat out of a job) and focus their attention on attempting to gain some influence within the Provisional Government and to oppose the growing socialist movement both within and without the government. Bastiat gave up editing Le Libre-Échange and giving his lectures and devoted himself to publishing a new daily magazine, La République française , which he and some friends handed out on the streets of Paris, organising and participating in one of the new political clubs which sprang up once the censorship laws were no longer being enforced by the police (theirs was called "Le Club de la Liberté du Travail" (the Club for the Freedom of Working)), and then standing (successfully) for the April elections to represent his home district of Les Landes.

When Bastiat wrote and published this article on "Natural and Artificial Organisations" he had very different hopes and thoughts in his mind. Here we see the first fruits of Bastiat's course of lectures on economics, the notes for which would eventually become his treatise Economic Harmonies the first volume of which would appear in January 1850. Two articles he had written in 1846 ("On Population" and "On Competition") 895 would also be turned into chapters in the book, however here and in the two other articles he wrote for the JDE in 1848 (Sept. and December) he is laying the theoretical foundation for his other ideas. 896 This consisted of a discussion of the idea of a "social mechanism," the distinction between artificial and natural orders, the existence of harmonies within a free economic order, the importance of the three interlocking ideas of "needs," "efforts," and "satisfactions" which he used to explain why economic activity takes place, and a deeper exploration of the nature of human needs in general. Together, the three articles he wrote in 1848 would make up a good proportion of the first volume, some 86 pages or nearly 20%. The rest would be written over the summer of 1849 in the seclusion of the Butard hunting lodge on the outskirts of Paris after the tumultuous first year of the revolution was over.

Bastiat discussed the structure and plan for the book in a number of letters to Richard Cobden and Félix Coudroy written between June 1846 and August 1848, and in a couple of unpublished sketches which included an undated "Note on the "Economic and Social Harmonies" (c. June 1845) and "A Draft Preface to the Economic Harmonies" (Fall 1847). These plans are discussed elsewhere in this volume. 897

There are several things to note in this article. The first is his understanding of society as a "mechanism" (le mécanisme social) or what we might today call a "process." He used several terms to describe this: "le mécanisme social" (the social mechanism), "la mécanique sociale" (the social machine, engine), "le mécanisme de la société" (the mechanism of society), and "la machine sociale" (the social machine), with "le mécanisme social" (the social mechanism) being the one he used most often. The social mechanism had moving parts, like a watch or a clock, which consisted of "les rouages" (cogs and wheels), "les ressorts" (springs), and "les mobiles" (the movement, or driving or motive force). 898 Bastiat described the social mechanism as "a prodigiously ingenious mechanism (which) is the subject of study of political economy."

Secondly, there is his distinction between "artificial" forms of organisation and "natural" forms. By "natural organisation" he meant "une organisation sociale fondée sur les lois générales de l'humanité" (a social organisation based upon the general laws (which govern) humanity). Natural organisations were the voluntary creation of free people who associated with each other for mutual benefit through economic activities such as free trade and production. Bastiat argued that the driving forces ("le moteur" or "le mobile") of the social mechanism of a free and "naturally" organised society were competition and self-interest.

In stark contrast to this were "artificial organisations" which Bastiat defined as an organisation which was "imaginée, inventée, qui ne tient aucun compte de ces lois, les nie ou les dédaigne" (dreamt up, invented, and which took no account of these laws, denied their existence, or disdained them.) This type of organisation was based on coercion, control, and direction from a "Legislator" or "Prince" who arranged men in society according their whim. Bastiat traced this line of thinking back to Rousseau and his followers such as Robespierre during the Convention in the 1790s, 899 and Louis Blanc and Victor Considerant in the 1840s. In this article Bastiat provides a lengthy critique of Rousseau's idea of the "Legislator" which exemplified what Bastiat disliked about "artificial organisations". He summarised it as follows:

(M)en are the parts of a machine that the prince operates, and the design of which the legislator has suggested. The philosopher positions himself at an unmeasurably great distance above the common people, the prince, and the legislator, (where) he floats above the human race, moves it, transforms it, kneads it, or rather teaches the Fathers of Nations how to go about doing this. … 900

Bastiat uses several derogatory terms to describe the people who attempt to run this "artificial social mechanism", such as "un mécanicien" (a mechanic, engineer), "le grand Mécanicien" (the Great Mechanic), "l'inventeur" (the inventor), "le législateur" (the legislator), "le jardinier " (the gardener), and "le Prince" (the Prince). In an unpublished story, "Barataria", written probably sometime in 1848 901 Bastiat tells an amusing alternative version of the story about Don Quixote's and Sancho Panza's visit to the island of Barataria where Sancho is appointed by some local aristocrats to run the island but Sancho refuses to be the "mechanic" who runs the lives of the people of Barataria and resigns in protest.

The third thing to note is the story Bastiat tells here to describe the benefits provided by the harmonious operation of a complex natural social mechanism based upon property rights and free markets, namely story of the "Village Carpenter and the Student in Paris" (our title not his). In this section of the article he reverts to the style he used so successfully in the Economic Sophisms to popularise economic ideas. The similarity to Leonard Read's 1958 story of "I, Pencil" 902 is striking and it is quite likely that Read knew of Bastiat's story as he was instrumental in having some of Bastiat's works translated into English by the Foundation for Economic Education during the 1950s and 1960s.

Overall, the article below is very similar to the chapter which appeared in EH1 with the following exceptions:

the insertion of a number of additional sentences here and there
the addition of a footnote in which he quotes Considerant
changing some of the examples he gave, e.g. trading with "the Antipodes" is changed to "China"

The most significant change in the EH1 version is the rewriting of an entire paragraph with an important new sentence about how "the principle of action" lies within individuals themselves. It is quite clear that Bastiat rejected the idea that men were inert cogs in a machine being operated by an aloof Legislator. (The added sentence is in bold.):

Its wheels are men, that is to say, beings capable of learning, reflecting, reasoning, making mistakes, rectifying them, and consequently acting to improve or worsen the (operation) of the mechanism itself. They are capable of feeling satisfaction and pain, and this makes them not only cogs and wheels but also the springs of the mechanism. They are also its driving force because the principle of action ("le principe d'activité") resides in them. They are still more than that, they are the object of the mechanism itself, and its purpose, since it is in individual satisfactions and pain that everything is finally resolved.

All these changes and variations are indicated in the footnotes.

Text

Are we really certain that the social mechanism, like the celestial mechanism, and like the mechanism of the human body, obeys universal laws? Are we really certain that it is a harmoniously organized whole? Above all, is it not the absence of any organization that leaps to the eye? Is it not precisely organization that all good-hearted men with an eye to the future, all progressive writers, and all the pioneers of thought are seeking? Are we not a mere juxtaposition of individuals who have no ties to each other, who live without (any) harmony, and are given to an anarchical freedom? Now that they have painfully recovered all their liberties one by one, do not our numberless masses wait for some great genius to coordinate them into a harmonious whole? After engaging in destruction, do we not have to lay (some new) foundations? 903

If these questions had no other bearing than to ask whether society can do without written laws, rules, and repressive measures, whether each man can make unlimited use of his faculties even though he might infringe the liberties of others or cause damage to the community as a whole, whether, in a word, we should not see in the maxim " Laissez faire, laissez passer " 904 the absolute principle of political economy?

If, I say, that were the question, nobody would be in any doubt as to the answer. Economists do not state that a man may kill, pillage, or commit arson and that society has no choice save to let it happen; 905 they say that social resistance to such acts would occur as a matter of course, even in the absence of any legal code, and that, in consequence, this resistance constitutes a general law of humankind. They say that civil or penal laws should regularize and not counter the action of these general laws that they presuppose . There is a gulf between a social organization based on the general laws of humanity and an artificial, abstract, and contrived organization which several modern schools of thought appear to wish to impose (on us). 906

For, if there are general laws that act independently of the written laws whose action such written laws have only to confirm, these general laws must be examined; they may be the worthy subject-matter of a science, and political economy (already) exists to do this. If, on the contrary, society is a human invention, if men are no more than inert matter into which a great genius, in the words of Rousseau, has to infuse sentiment and willpower, movement and life, 907 then there is no such thing as political economy, only an indefinite number of possible and contingent arrangements, and the fate of nations depends on the founder to whom chance has entrusted their destinies.

To prove that society is subject to general laws, I will not indulge in a long dissertation. I will limit myself to pointing out a few facts, which although somewhat commonplace, are nonetheless important.

Rousseau has said: "A great deal of philosophy is needed for us to take account of those facts that are too close to us." 908

Such are the social phenomena in the midst of which we live and move. Habit has familiarized us with these phenomena to such an extent that we no longer pay attention to them, so to speak, unless something sudden and abnormal brings them to our notice.

Let us take a man who belongs to a modest class in society, a village carpenter, for example, 909 and let us observe all the services he provides to society and all those he receives from it; it will not take us long to be struck by the enormous apparent disproportion.

This man spends his day sanding planks and making tables and wardrobes; he complains about his situation and yet what does he receive from this same society in return for his work?

First of all, each day when he gets up he dresses, and he has not personally made any of the many items of his outfit. However, for these garments, however simple, to be at his disposal, an enormous amount of work, industry, transport, and ingenious invention needs to have been accomplished. Americans need to have produced cotton, Indians indigo, Frenchmen wool and linen, and Brazilians leather. All these materials need to have been transported to a variety of towns, worked, spun, woven, dyed, etc.

He then has breakfast. In order for the bread he eats to arrive each morning, land had to be cleared, fenced, ploughed, fertilized, and sown. Harvests had to be stored and protected from pillage. A degree of security had to reign over an immense multitude of people. Wheat had to be harvested, ground, kneaded, and prepared. Iron, steel, wood, and stone had to be changed by human labor into tools. Some men had to make use of the strength of animals, others the weight of a waterfall, etc.; all things each of which, taken singly, implies an incalculable mass of labor put to work , not only in space but also in time.

This man will not spend his day without using a little sugar, a little oil, or a few utensils.

He will send his son to school to receive instruction, which although limited, nonetheless implies research, previous studies, and knowledge which would startle the imagination.

He goes out and finds a road that is paved and lit.

His ownership of a piece of property is contested; he will find lawyers to defend his rights, judges to maintain them, officers of the court to carry out the judgment, all of which once again imply acquired knowledge, and consequently understanding and a certain standard of living. 910

He goes to church; it is a prodigious monument and the book he carries is a monument to human intelligence perhaps more prodigious still. He is taught morality, his mind is enlightened, his soul elevated, and in order for all this to happen, another man had to be able to go to libraries and seminaries and draw on all the sources of the human tradition; he had to have been able to live without taking direct care of his bodily needs.

If our craftsman sets out on a journey, he finds that, to save him time and increase his comfort, other men have flattened and leveled the ground, filled in the valleys, lowered the mountains, spanned the rivers, increased the smooth passage on the route, set wheeled vehicles on paving stones or iron rails, and mastered the use of horses, steam, etc.

It is impossible not to be struck by the truly immeasurable disproportion that exists between the satisfactions drawn by this man from society and those he would be able to provide for himself if he were to be limited to his own resources. I am bold enough to say that in a single day, he consumes things he would not be able to produce by himself in ten centuries.

What makes the phenomenon stranger still is that all other men are in the same situation as he. Each one of those who make up society has absorbed a million times more than he would have been able to produce; nevertheless they have not robbed each other of anything. And if we examine things more closely, we see that this carpenter has paid in services for all the services he has been rendered. If he kept his accounts with rigorous accuracy we would be convinced that he has received nothing that he has not paid for by means of his modest industry, and that whoever has been employed in his service, either at any time or in a given period, has received or will receive his remuneration.

For this reason, the social mechanism needs to be either very ingenious or very powerful since it leads to this strange result, that each man, even he whom fate has placed in the humblest of conditions, receives more satisfaction in a single day than he could produce in several centuries.

That is not all, and this social mechanism will appear still more ingenious, if the reader would just consider his own case.

Let me assume that he is a simple student. What is he doing in Paris? How is he living there? It cannot be denied that society places at his disposal food, clothes, a lodging, entertainment, books, the means of instruction, in short a multitude of things, the production of which would take a considerable amount of time just to explain and even more to be carried out. And in return for all these things, which have required so much work, sweat, fatigue, physical or intellectual effort, such feats of transportation, so many inventions and (economic) transactions, what services does this student render to society? None. He is only preparing himself to render services to it. For what reason, therefore, have these millions of men, who have devoted themselves to positive, actual, and productive work, handed over to him the fruit of their labor? Here is the explanation; the father of this student, who was a lawyer or doctor, 911 had previously rendered services to a society (perhaps in the Antipodes), 912 and had received from it, not immediate services but rights to (future) services, which he might reclaim at the time, in the place, and in the form of his choosing. It is for these far-off and past services that society is settling its debts today and, what is astonishing, if we think through the progress of the infinite number of transactions which have had to take place to achieve the result, we would see that each person has been paid for his trouble, that these rights have passed from hand to hand, sometimes being split (up) and at other times being combined together until, through the consumption of this student, the balance has been struck. Is this not a very strange phenomenon?

We would be shutting our eyes to the light if we refused to acknowledge that society cannot present such complicated combinations, in which civil and penal laws play so little a part, without obeying a prodigiously ingenious mechanism. This mechanism is the subject of study of political economy .

One more thing worthy of comment is that, in this truly incalculable number of transactions which have contributed to keeping alive one student for one day, there is perhaps not a millionth part which has been made directly. The countless things he has enjoyed today are the work of men a great number of whom have long since disappeared from the face of the earth. Nevertheless they were paid as they wished, although he who is benefiting today from the product of their work has done nothing for them. He did not know them and will never know them. He who reads this page, at the very moment at which he reads it, has the power, although he perhaps does not realize this, to set in motion men in all countries, of all races, and I might almost say, of all periods of time; white men, black men, red men, and yellow men. He causes generations that have died away and generations not yet born to contribute to his current satisfactions, and he owes this extraordinary power to the services his father rendered in the past to other men who on the face of it have nothing in common with those whose labor is being set in motion today. However, the balance is such that in time and space, each one is reimbursed and has received what he calculated he should receive.

In truth, can all this have been possible, can such extraordinary phenomena have been achieved without there having been in society a natural and wise organization 913 which acts, so to speak, without our knowledge?

There is much talk these days of of inventing a new way of organizing society. Is it really certain that any thinker, however much genius he is supposed to have or however much authority he is given, is capable of imagining and imposing (on society) an organization that is superior to the one a few of whose achievements I have just outlined?

What would happen if I also described its cogs and wheels, its springs, and its movements? 914

Its wheels are men, that is to say, beings capable of learning, reflecting, reasoning, making mistakes, rectifying them, and consequently acting 915 to improve or worsen the (operation) of the mechanism itself. I ought also to add, that these springs are capable of feeling satisfaction and pain, and this makes them not only cogs and wheels but also the springs of the mechanism. They are still more than that, they are the object of the mechanism itself, and its (very) purpose, since it is in (their) individual satisfactions and pain that everything is finally resolved. 916

However, we have noted, and unfortunately it is not difficult to notice, that in the action, the development, and even the progress (by those who admit it) of this powerful mechanism, many of the wheels are inevitably and fatally broken and that, for a large number of human beings, the sum of pain, even unmerited pain, 917 exceeds by far the sum of enjoyment.

Observing this, many sincere souls, many generous hearts have doubted the mechanism itself. They have denied it, they have refused to study it, they have attacked, often violently, those who have researched and set out its laws. They have pitted themselves against the nature of things and finally they have suggested that society be organized according to a new design, in which injustice, suffering, and error would find no place.

God forbid that I should stand against intentions that are so manifestly philanthropic and pure! But I would be abandoning my convictions, I would be giving ground in the face of the injunctions of my own conscience if I did not say that, in my view, these men are on the wrong road.

In the first place, they are reduced, by the very nature of their arguments, to the sad necessity of failing to recognize the good developed by society, of denying its progress, and attributing all harm and suffering to it, seeking these out almost avidly and exaggerating them excessively.

When people think they have discovered a social organization different from that which is the result of natural human tendencies, in order for their invention to be accepted they clearly need to describe in the blackest possible colors the results of the organization they wish to abolish. For this reason, after having enthusiastically proclaimed 918 human perfectibility, the political writers to whom I refer fall into the strange contradiction of saying that society is increasingly deteriorating. According to them, men are a thousand times more unhappy than they were in ancient times, under the feudal régime, and under the régime of slavery, 919 and the world has become a (living) hell. If it were possible to conjure up Paris as it was in the tenth century, I dare say that such a thesis would be untenable.

Next, they are led to condemn the very principle governing men's action, I mean self-interest , since it has led to such a state of affairs. We should note that man is organized in such a way that he seeks satisfaction and avoids pain; I agree that this is the cause of all social harms – war, slavery, plunder, monopoly, and privilege - but it is also from this that all good arises, since the satisfaction of needs and aversion to pain are the driving forces for men. The question is therefore to ascertain whether this driving force, which in origin is individual but becomes social, is not itself a principle of progress.

In any case, do not the inventors of new organizations realize that this principle, which is inherent in the very nature of man, will accompany them in their organizations causing many more forms of devastation there than in our natural organization, in which the unjust claims and interests of one person will at least be contained by the resistance of all? 920 These political writers always assume two inadmissible things, firstly, that society as they perceive it will be governed by infallible men totally lacking in this driving force (of self-interest), secondly that the masses will allow themselves to be governed by such men.

Lastly, the Organizers 921 do not appear to take the slightest interest in the means of implementation. How are they going to ensure that their systems gain acceptance? How will they convince everyone at the same time to abandon the force that drives them, namely the attraction of pleasure and the aversion to pain. Will we as Rousseau said, have to change the moral and physical constitution of man ?

It seems to me that there are only two ways to persuade everyone at the same time to cast aside, like an unwanted garment, the existing social order, under which humanity has lived and developed from its origin to the present day, and then (proceed to) adopt an organization of human invention and become the obedient parts of another mechanism: force or universal consent.

It is necessary, either for the organizer to have at his disposal a force capable of overcoming all forms of resistance so that humanity becomes malleable wax in his hands, to be kneaded and molded to suit his fantasy, or to obtain through persuasion agreement so total, so exclusive, and even so blind that it renders the use of force superfluous.

I challenge anyone to quote me a third means of achieving the triumph of a phalanstery 922 or any other form of artificial social organization and having it become common human practice.

However, if there are just these two means and if we prove that the one is as impracticable as the other, this would be an intrinsic proof that the organizers are wasting both their time and their trouble.

As for having at their disposal a physical force sufficient to ensure the submission of all the kings and nations on earth, this is something that dreamers, even though they are dreamers, have never contemplated. King Alphonse was proud enough to say: "If I had been privy to the counsels of God, the world on this planet would have been better organized". 923 But if he ranked his own wisdom above that of the Creator, at least he was not fool enough to wish to enter a power struggle with God and history does not relate that he attempted to adjust the movement of the stars to suit laws of his own invention. Descartes also contented himself with creating a small world (made up) of dice and strings in the full knowledge that he was not powerful enough to move the universe. 924 The only one we know of who claimed this was Xerxes who, intoxicated by his power, dared to say to the waves: "You will go no further". 925 However, the waves did not retreat before Xerxes, Xerxes retreated before the waves and, had it not been for this humiliating but wise precaution, he would have been swallowed up.

The Organizers thus lack the force to submit humanity to their experiments. Should they win over to their cause the Russian Autocrat, the Shah of Persia, the Khan of the Tartars, and all the heads of nations who exercise an absolute empire over their subjects, they would still not have at their disposal a force sufficient to divide men into groups and series 926 and abolish the general laws of property, exchange, inheritance, and family, since, even in Russia, Persia or Tartary, account still has to be taken to a greater or lesser degree of the men concerned. If the Emperor of Russia took it into his head to wish to modify the moral and physical constitution of his subjects, he would probably be promptly ousted and his successor would not be tempted to continue the experiment.

Since force is a means quite out of reach of our many Organizers, they have no other recourse than to obtain universal consent .

There are two ways of obtaining this: persuasion and deception.

Persuasion! But we have never seen two minds in perfect agreement on every point of a single discipline. How then will all men, with different languages, of different races and customs, and spread all around the world, of whom the majority are unable to read and who are destined to die without ever even hearing the name of the reformer (or their society) spoken, unanimously accept (this new) universal science? What does it involve? Changing the way people work and trade, changing their domestic, civil, and religious relationships, in other words, altering the physical and moral constitution of human beings: and they (the organisers) hope to unite the entire human race by (changing their) beliefs!

Truly, the task appears an arduous one.

If a man comes to tell his fellow-men:

"For the last five thousand years there has been a misunderstanding between God and the human race.

From Adam to the present day, the human race has been on the wrong path and, if only it will believe me, I am going to set it on the right road.

God wanted the human race to proceed differently; it did not want to do this, and this is why evil came into the world. Let all men/mankind listen to me and retrace its steps and proceed in a different direction, and universal happiness will shine on it."

If, as I say, he starts in this way, then if he is believed by five or six followers that is a great deal. From this to being believed by a billion men is an incalculable step, one that is so far off that the distance is immeasurable.

And then, consider that the number of social inventions is as unlimited as the field of imagination; that there is not one political writer who, after closeting himself in his study for a few hours, cannot come out with a plan for an artificial form of organization in his hand; that the inventions of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen, Cabet, Blanc, etc. 927 bear not the slightest resemblance to one another; that there is never a day that does not see yet others hatched; that truly the human race has good reason to reflect and hesitate before rejecting the social organization that God has given it in order to make a final and irrevocable choice from so many different social inventions. For what would happen if, once it had chosen one of these plans, a better one came along? Can the human race establish property, family, work, and trade on a different basis every day? Ought it to lay itself open to changing its organization every morning?

"Therefore", as Rousseau said, "as the legislator cannot use either force or reason, he has to resort to an authority of a different order, one that can lead people along without violence and persuade them without convincing them." 928

What is this authority? (It is) deception. Rousseau does not dare to utter the word, but, according to his invariable custom in such cases, he shrouds it in the transparent veil of an eloquent tirade:

"Here", he says, "is what forced the Fathers of nations down through time to have recourse to the intervention of heaven and to honor the gods with their own wisdom so that nations, subjected to the laws of the State as well as to those of nature and acknowledging the same power in the forming of man as in the forming of cities, obeyed freely and bore obediently the yoke of public happiness. This sublime reason, which raises them above the reach of common man, is the one by which legislators put decisions into the mouths of the immortals in order to lead by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move. But it is not in the power of every man to make the gods speak, etc." 929

And so that nobody might misunderstand him, he leaves to Machiavelli, by quoting him, the job of concluding his idea. "Mai non fu alcuno ordinatore de leggi STRAORDINARE in un populo che non ricorresse a Dio." 930

Why does Machiavelli advise us to have recourse to God and Rousseau to the gods or the immortals ? I leave the reader to provide the answer.

I certainly do not accuse the modern fathers of nations of resorting to these unworthy tricks. Nevertheless, the fact should not be hidden that, when you put yourself in their place, it is easy to be carried away by the desire to succeed. When someone who is sincere and philanthropic is firmly convinced that he holds a social secret which will enable his fellow-men to enjoy boundless happiness in this world, when he sees clearly that his idea cannot prevail either by force or reason and that trickery is his sole resource, he must be sorely tempted. It is well known that even ministers of a religion which professes the greatest horror of lies, have not hesitated to indulge in pious fraud , 931 and the example of Rousseau, an austere writer who inscribed at the head of all his writings the motto: Vitam impendere vero, 932 shows us that even proud philosophy itself can be seduced by the charm of this other, quite different maxim: The end justifies the means . Why should it be surprising that modern Organizers also think of honoring the gods with their own wisdom, putting their decisions into the mouths of the immortals, lead people without (using) violence, and persuade them without convincing them ?

We know that following the example of Moses, Fourier put a Genesis before his Deuteronomy. 933 Saint-Simon and his disciples have gone much further down this path. 934 Other, more prudent writers invoke religion in its widest terms, modifying it to suit their views under the banner of neo-Christianity , 935 and nobody will fail to be struck by the tone of mystic affectation that cloaks the preaching of almost all the modern Reformers. 936

But the efforts made in this direction serve only to prove one thing, of some importance it is true, which is that these days, not everyone who wants to can succeed in being a prophet. People can proclaim themselves to be God as much as they like; nobody believes them, whether it be the public, their colleagues, or themselves.

Since I have mentioned Rousseau, I will allow myself a few comments on this organizer , especially since they will aid an understanding as to how artificial organizations differ from a natural organization. This digression, incidentally, is not totally inopportune, since for some time the Social Contract has been hailed as the oracle of the future. 937

Rousseau was convinced that in the state of nature man lived in isolation and that consequently society was a human invention. " Social order ", he said at the beginning, " does not come from nature ; it is therefore based on convention." 938

What is more, although he had a passionate love for freedom, this philosopher had a very low opinion of men. He believed them to be wholly incapable of creating good institutions for themselves. The intervention of a founder, a legislator, a father of the nation was therefore essential.

"A nation subject to laws", he said, "must be their author. It is up to those who band together and them alone, to regulate the conditions governing society, but how will they do this? Will it be by common accord, by sudden inspiration? How can a blind multitude that often does not know what it wants, since it rarely knows what is good for it, set up on its own such a great and difficult enterprise as a legislative system? … Individuals see the good that they are rejecting, the general public wants the good that it does not see, and all have an equal need of guides. … This is what gives rise to the need for a legislator." 939

As we have already seen, as this legislator "cannot use either force or reason, he has of necessity to resort to authority of another order," that is to say in plain language, deception. 940

Nothing can give an idea of the immense distance above other men at which Rousseau places his legislator:

"Gods are needed to give laws to men. … He who dares to undertake to provide institutions for a nation has to feel himself capable of changing human nature itself, so to speak …, of altering man's constitution in order to strengthen him. He needs to remove man's own forces in order to give him others that are not natural to him …The legislator is, in all respects, an outstanding man in the State, … his task is a special and superior function which has nothing in common with human dominion …. While it is true that a prince is a rare being, how much truer is this of a great legislator? The first merely has to follow the model that the other has to offer him. The legislator is the engineer, who invents the machine while the prince is merely the laborer who assembles it and makes it work." 941

And where is the place of the human race in all this? It is the raw material out of which the machine is constructed.

Truly, is this not pride raised to the level of madness? So, men are the parts of a machine that the prince operates, and the design of which the legislator has suggested. The philosopher positions himself at an unmeasurably great distance above the common people, the prince, and the legislator, 942 (where) he floats above the human race, moves it, transforms it, kneads it, or rather teaches the Fathers of Nations how to go about doing this.

Nevertheless the founder of a nation has to set himself a goal. He has human material to set to work, and he has to organize it with an aim in mind. Since men have no initiative and everything depends on the legislator, he will decide whether a nation ought to engage in trading or farming, or live primitively and eat fish etc., but it has to be hoped that the legislator will not make a mistake and not do too much violence to the nature of things.

When men agree to associate together, or rather when they associate together through the will of the legislator , they therefore have a very specific goal. "Thus it was," says Rousseau, "that the Hebrews and recently the Arabs have had religion as their main aim, the Athenians, letters, Carthage and Tyre, trade, Rhodes, the navy, Sparta, war and Rome, virtue." 943

What will the goal be that persuades us, the French people, to break out of isolation or the state of nature in order to form a society? Or rather, (for we are not just inert matter, the material that makes up the machine), toward what objective will we be directed by our great Teacher ?

Given Rousseau's ideas, this can scarcely be literature, trade, or the navy. War is a nobler goal and virtue a nobler one still. However, there is one that is far greater than these. What ought to be the aim of any legislative system, "is freedom and equality ." 944

But you have to know what Rousseau meant by freedom. Enjoying freedom, in his view, is not to be free, it is to vote for something , even when you are being led without violence and persuaded without being convinced, because then you obey with liberty and (can) easily carry the yoke of public happiness. 945

"In Greece", he says, "all that the people had to do they did themselves. They were constantly being assembled in the public square, they lived in a temperate climate, they were not greedy, the slaves did all the work, and the main preoccupation of the people was their freedom. " 946

Elsewhere he says, "The English think that they are free, but they are greatly mistaken. It is only during the election of members of parliament that they are free; as soon as the members are elected, the people are slaves, they are nothing." 947

Therefore the people have to provide everything that is a public service themselves if they wish to be free, for this is what constitutes freedom. They have to always be having elections and be forever on the public square. Woe betide those who think of working for a living! As soon as a single citizen takes it into his head to look after his own affairs, instantly (this is an expression that Rousseau loves) all will be lost.

Certainly the problem is not a small one. What ought we to do? For in the end, even in order to practice virtue and exercise freedom we have to live.

We have just seen in what oratorical guise Rousseau hid the word deception . We will now see the type of eloquence to which he resorts to put across the conclusion of the entire book, namely, slavery .

"Your harsh climates impose needs on you. For six months of the year, the public square is not usable, your dull tongues cannot make themselves heard in the open air, and you fear slavery less than poverty."

You see clearly that you cannot be free.

"What! Is freedom kept in place only with the support of servitude? Perhaps." 948

If Rousseau had stopped at this dreadful word, the reader would have been outraged. He had to resort to impressive declamations. Rousseau does not fail to do so.

"All that is not in nature (he is speaking about society) has disadvantages, and a civil society has more than all the others. There are unfortunate positions in which personal freedom can only be preserved at the expense of that of others and in which citizens can be perfectly free only where slaves are very much enslaved. You modern peoples have no slaves but you are yourselves slaves; you are paying for their freedom with yours… It is useless for you to boast of this preference; I find in it more cowardice than humanity." 949

I ask you, does this not mean: "Modern peoples you would do better not to be slaves but to have slaves"?

I hope the reader will pardon this long digression, but I felt it to be germane. For some time, Rousseau and his disciples in the Convention 950 have been held up to us as apostles of human fraternity. Men as (raw) materials, a prince as (a) engineer, a father of the nation as an inventor, and a philosopher crowning all of this; with deception as the means, and slavery as the result. Is this then the fraternity we are being promised?

I also consider that this study of the Social Contract was useful in helping to point out the things that characterize artificial social organizations. Start with the idea that society is an unnatural condition; look for the schemes to which the human race might be subjected; ignore the fact that it (society) has with(in) itself its own driving force, think of men as raw material; aim to infuse them with movement and willpower, emotions and life; position yourself thus at an incommensurable distance above the human race, these are the characteristics common to all the inventors of social organizations. The inventions differ, but the inventors are (all) alike.

Among the new schemes urged upon weak mortals, there is one presented in terms that warrant attention. Its formula is: A progressive and voluntary association.

However, political economy is founded precisely on this assumption, that society is nothing other than an association (as these words state), 951 an association initially full of faults because man is imperfect, but which improves as he does, that is to say progressively . Do we want to talk about a closer association between labor, capital, and talent, which ought to provide the members of the human family with more goods and greater well-being that is better distributed? If these associations are voluntary , if force and coercion are absent, and if those in the association do not demand that the cost of setting up these associations be borne by those who refuse to join, how do these (associations) go against the principles of political economy? Isn't political economy required, as a science, to study the various ways in which men see fit to join (their) forces and divide (up) their occupations among themselves in order to increase (their) well-being and share it better? Doesn't commerce frequently give us the example of two, three, or four people forming associations among themselves? Isn't sharecropping a type of association, 952 informal if you like, of capital and labour? Have we not lately seen shareholding/stock companies arising that give the smallest amount of capital the opportunity of taking part in much greater enterprises? Are there not, somewhere in this country, a few factories where the attempt is made to establish profit-sharing associations for all their workers. 953 Does political economy condemn these attempts and the efforts made by men to gain greater advantage from their strengths? Has it (political economy) stated somewhere that the human race has said its last word? Quite the contrary, and I consider that no science demonstrates more clearly that society is (still) in its infancy.

But whatever hopes one conceives for the future, whatever ideas one has of the forms that man might find to improve human relationships and disseminate well-being, knowledge, and moral order, one must nevertheless recognize that society is an organization whose components are intelligent and moral actors 954 endowed with free will, and are capable of being perfectible. 955 If you take freedom away from this actor, he becomes merely a sad and sorry mechanism.

Freedom! People appear not to want it right now. In the land of France, that privileged empire of fashion, it seems that freedom is no longer fashionable. For my part, I state that whoever rejects Freedom has no faith in Humanity. Some claim that they have made the discouraging discovery that freedom inevitably leads to monopoly. 956 No, this monstrous linking, this unnatural coupling does not hold; it is the imaginary fruit of an error soon dissipated by the light of political economy. Freedom giving rise to monopoly? Oppression arising naturally from freedom? We must be on our guard. To claim this is to claim that the tendencies of the human race are radically bad, bad in themselves, bad by nature, and bad in their essence. It is to claim that the natural inclination of man is toward his degeneration and the irresistible attraction of his mind toward error. However, in this case, what is the use of our schools, our studies, our research, our discussions save to give greater force to that fatal inclination, since for the human race to learn to choose would be to learn to commit suicide? And if the tendencies of the human race are essentially perverse, where will the Organizers look for their fulcrum in order to change them? According to the premises of the thesis, this fulcrum has to be situated outside the human race. Will they look for it within themselves, in their hearts and minds? But for a start they are not gods; they are men too and consequently impelled like the rest of the human race toward the fatal abyss. Will they call for intervention by the State? But the State is made up of men, and it would have to be proved that these men form a class apart, for whom the general laws governing society are not not applicable, since they are the ones who have been made responsible for making these laws. 957 Without this proof, the problem has not been solved.

Let us not condemn the human race in this way before having examined its laws, forces, energies, and tendencies. From the time he recognized gravity, Newton no longer pronounced the name of God without taking his hat off. Just as much as "the mind is above matter," the social world is above the (physical) one admired by Newton, for celestial mechanics obey laws of which it is not aware. How much more reason (then) would we have to bow down before eternal wisdom (and also universal thought) as we contemplate the social mechanism (and see there how) "the mind moves matter" ( mens agitat molem). 958 Here is displayed the extraordinary phenomenon that each atom (in this social mechanism) is a living, thinking being, endowed with that marvelous energy, with that source of all morality, of all dignity, of all progress, an attribute which is exclusive to man, namely FREEDOM !

25. T.177 "Laziness and Trade Restrictions" (16 Jan. 1848, LE)↩

Source

T.177 (1848.01.16) "Laziness and Trade Restrictions" (Paresse et restriction), LE , 16 Jan. 1848, no. 8 (2nd year), pp. 46-47. [OC2.39, pp. 219-21.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

Bastiat returns to the theme used by many protectionists that protection is good for a nation because it makes a people work harder (in this case the lazy Spaniards) in the short term but which will ultimately make them better off in the longer term. He ridiculed this idea on many occasions, 959 most famously in his sophism on the "Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles" (October 1845, ES1.16), but also in several very witty tales about how imaginative legislators might increase the impediments to productive work, and thus increase the amount of "labour" French people would have to do: blocking up rivers to restrain trade, railroads that were forced to stop and trans-ship passengers and cargo at every town, cutting trees with blunt axes, and forcing people to only work with their left hands. His reply to all these schemes was to point out the "opportunity costs" to consumers of doing this, by spending more money or labour in acquiring a good, consumers had that much less money or labour to acquire other things.

To this, Bastiat adds another twist, namely the question whether or not it was a part of the legislator's legitimate function to make the people work harder. He rejects this idea completely and points out that it goes back to some mistaken ideas about the state held by Rousseau, who believed that only the wise legislator could give society "feelings and desires, movement and life."

Towards the end of the article Bastiat raises the issue of whether or not public servants are members of the "productive" or the "unproductive class." The classical school of political economy had been divided on the question of what economic activity was truly productive of wealth and how much each activity contributed to its formation, whether it was agriculture, manufacturing, or trade. Jean-Baptiste Say had complicated matters in his Treatise (1803) by arguing that there were also non-material sources of wealth such as the work of doctors, lawyers, judges, and even opera singers who provided important and valuable services to their customers. Whether or not politicians and bureaucrats were productive or parasitic was hotly debated. According to Bastiat's own theory of "plunder" they could be either depending on what they actually did with their power. 960 If they defended the citizens' rights to life, liberty, and property, they were considered to be productive. If they, went beyond the core functions of providing police and defence services, he regarded them as being plunderous and parasitical. It should be noted that Bastiat was a music lover and enjoyed the singing voice of the Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind, the uniqueness of which provided a considerable "service" to her listeners. Several times Bastiat used her voice as an example in discussions of his theory of value. 961

Text

16 January 1848

One of our subscribers, people of great enlightenment and experience, a person who enjoys a high social position, has sent us the following objection, to which we hasten to reply since it preoccupies a great many sincere minds.

"Since work is exhausting, many of us prefer refraining from work rather than having to rest from exhaustion. Our climate more or less encourages us in this. For example, Spaniards are lazy both in mind and body. Allow free trade in Spain. The inhabitants will be better housed, fed, and clothed, because with their products they will purchase from abroad better products at lower prices than those they are able to manufacture, but they will always buy only in proportion to what they themselves produce. Once the first improvement has been achieved, they will remain in the same situation, since they do not know how to, do not want to, and cannot produce any more. A certain amount of protection (in whatever form), limited to vital industries aims to persuade them to conquer their natural tendencies by assuring them of a reward for their efforts. Statesmen cannot say to them "If you are left to your natural instincts you will produce little, purchase little, and will remain poor. It is good for you to produce more in order to be able to purchase more one day. To reward you for your trouble, to encourage you to study, which will provide you with more knowledge, to work harder, which will provide you with better tools and to practice, which will increase your skill, we are all going to impose a sacrifice on ourselves. Produce, and we will for a time refrain from acquiring the same products from abroad; we will pay you a higher price for them , so that you recover your investment and so that you give us a new form of production, and consequently a new means of trading, and greater ability to purchase."

In this way, like us, our honorable correspondent sees in trade restrictions an impoverishment, harm, suffering, a loss, and a sacrifice inflicted on the population. The only thing is that he asks himself whether restriction cannot act as a stimulus in order to arouse the population from its natural inertia.

The laziness of a nation being taken as a fact, our correspondent will readily agree that if this nation is poor it is its laziness and not its imports that should be blamed. On the contrary, imports allow it to enjoy more forms of satisfaction from the small amount of work it undertakes.

If a Statesman intervenes and says "We are going to exclude a foreign product; you will make it yourselves, and your fellow-citizens will pay you more for it in order to induce you to work through the hope of greater gain," the result would be that, by paying more for the product, all his fellow-citizens would be the poorer by this amount and would encourage to a lesser extent industries that already exist in the country. 962 All that will have been done is to encourage one form of production by discouraging ten others, and it will not then be clear how this sacrifice will have achieved its aim, which is to eliminate laziness.

But what is more serious is this. The question may be asked whether it is the proper mission of a Statesman to decrease the means of satisfaction of a nation in the hopes of arousing it from its inertia. After establishing that restriction is a form of general sacrifice, as our correspondent does with no mental reservations , to ask whether, assuming it was practical to do so, it might not be useful as a means of forcing men to work is to ask, with the same aim in view, whether it would not be a good thing to decrease the fertility of the soil, to bury minerals deeper in the ground, to make the climate harsher, to prolong the rigors of winter, to shorten the hours of daylight 963 or to give Spain the same climate as Scotland in order to stimulate the inhabitants' energy through the sharp prick of need. This might well succeed. But is this the mission of government? Does the right of Statesmen go this far? And because one man has been propelled by the winds of circumstance to the helm of business, because he has received the commission of minister, does his legitimate omnipotence 964 over all his fellow men extend to the point of making them suffer and accumulating difficulties and obstacles around them in order to make them active and industrious?

The source of a thought like this is in a doctrine that is widespread these days to the effect that those being governed are inert matter on which those in government are entitled to carry out all sorts of experiments.

Many political writers have made the mistake of not giving sufficient importance to civil servants and considering them to be an unproductive class.Modern schools 965 appear to have fallen into the contrary exaggeration by making those in government beings set apart and placed outside and above the human race with the mission, as Rousseau says, 966 of giving it feelings and desires, movement and life .

We oppose such autocracy in lawmakers, and all the more when it is revealed in measures which, after all, only encourage some to a certain extent by discouraging others to an even greater extent, as is characteristic of the protectionist system, according to our honorable correspondent himself.

26. T.178 "Letter to M. Jobard (on intellectual property)" (22 Jan. 1848, Ec. belge )↩

Source

T.178 (1848.01.22) "Letter to M. Jobard" (À M. Jobard) written 22 Jan. 1848. Published as "La propriété des inventions. - Une lettre inédite de Bastiat" (Property in Inventions. An unpublished letter by Bastiat) in Gustave de Molinari's L'Economiste Belge , 1 Sept. 1860, pp. 344-45. [OC7.41, pp. 207-10.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

See Guido Hülsmann's Introduction to this volume (above) for a more more detailed treatment of Bastiat's views of intellectual property.

This is third of three pieces on literary and intellectual property rights Bastiat wrote. 967 The man Bastiat addresses in this letter is Marcellin Jobard (1792-1861) who was a Belgian lithographer, photographer, and inventor. From 1841 to 1861 he was the director of the Royal Belgian Museum of Industry in Brussels. He was a prolific inventor (with 75 patents) and took up the cause of defending the absolute property rights of inventors. He wrote dozens of pamphlets expressing his views in a very idiosyncratic manner. 968 Molinari was sympathetic to his position in favour of absolute property rights in literary and artistic material but objected to his critique of economic liberty in the broader sense. As Guido Hülsmann notes in the "Introduction" to this volume, Bastiat took a more "nuanced" position between the anti-propertarians like the socialist Louis Blanc, and the economists who were in favour of private property but split into two camps, with the "absolutists" like Jobard and Molinari on one side and the "utilitarians" like Charles Coquelin on the other.

Jobard's ideas probably came to Bastiat's attention via Hippolyte Castille's journal Le Travail intellectuel which published two letters by Jobard expressing support for the journal, as did Bastiat. 969

Text

Paris 22 January 1848

Mr. Jobard,

You have challenged me to express my opinion on the major problem of intellectual property. I do not have such fixed ideas on this question as to claim that these have the slightest influence on the men who, because of their position, are able to put your views into practice.

It is true that I told you that if the intellectual sphere were ever secured a place in the domain of property, this great Revolution would extend the field of political economy without changing any of its laws or any of its fundamental notions and I am still of this opinion.

I believe that if a primitive Ioway 970 man studied political economy he would reach the same views as ours on the nature of wealth, value, capital, exchange, etc., etc. I think that political economy, like science, is the same in the Department of the Landes, 971 where there is a great deal of common land, as in the Seine, where there is not, in a town in which there is a common water source and in another in which each house has a well, in Morocco and in France, although the ownership of land is laid down on different bases in these two countries.

However if, after being called upon to explain economic laws, the primitive Ioway was questioned on the effects that would result from the personal appropriation of the land, he would be obliged to indulge in conjecture, or if you prefer, deductions, since this phenomenon had never been the subject of direct observation.

This is approximately the position in which I find myself with regard to the ownership of inventions.

There are two questions I ask myself:

1. Is there any element in an invention that constitutes property?

2. If there is, is it within the power of the government to guarantee this property? In other words, is the truth of principle and the possibility of applying it on your side?

I acknowledge that the element that constitutes property appears to be evident in an invention. In my view, property is nothing other than awarding the satisfaction that follows an effort to the person who has made that effort . In this case there is labour, and there is enjoyment, and it seems natural for the enjoyment to be the reward of the person who has done the work .

But has the person who invented and built a plough an exclusive right, not only over this plough but even over the very concept of this plough, so that nobody is able to build something similar?

If this is the case, imitation is excluded from this world, and I must admit that I attach an immense and extremely beneficial importance to imitation. I cannot set out my reasons in a letter, but I have put them in writing in an article entitled "On Competition" published in Le Journal des Économistes . 972

Allow me, Sir, to subject your principle to a test, that of exaggeration . There are many people who do not accept this method, but I consider it to be excellent. When a principle is a good one, the more it acts with no obstacles, the more benefits it disperses. In a tirade against machines, Sismondi asks himself what would become of humanity if a king were able to produce everything by turning a crank handle? 973 My reply is: Everyone should have a handle like this; we would all be infinitely wealthy unless we claimed that God is the most miserable of beings since He does not even need a handle and a fiat is enough for him.

This having been said, let us suppose that there still exists a descendant of Triptolemos 974 and that the ownership of the right to make ploughs had been preserved from father to son down to him. This is the most favorable setting for your principle, if it is a good one. I allow that this family may have temporarily handed down this right to their heirs in order to obtain the greatest profit possible. But do you think that the human race would have drawn all the benefits from a plough that this tool has produced? On the other hand, would a right like this not have introduced into the world the seed of unlimited inequality?

The word invention also seems rather elastic to me. Just because I was the first person to put on clogs, 975 are all the people on the face of the earth required by law to go barefoot?

These are my doubts, Sir, and you will tell me that this is not a doubt but a solution. No, for as I said at the beginning, I am in the position of the Ioway . He might have been and he probably was struck by the disadvantages of land ownership and the power of his intellect would not have enabled him to perceive all its advantages. I also think that, in the incorporation of the intellectual domain within the realm of property, there is a revolution as imposing and perhaps as beneficial as the one which caused land held in common to yield to private ownership. What I fear is abuse. What I do not see clearly is the boundary between what genuinely constitutes an invention and the host of things that we invent every day. I fear that the most commonplace processes will be taken over. 976 Perhaps in my concentration on other work I have not studied your work in enough detail from the practical point of view. What I can say, Sir, is that your thought contains an element of grandeur, intellectual seductiveness, and logic that does not contradict, as socialist projects do, the fundamental notions of science, and I sincerely admire the concentration and perseverance which you devote to putting it into practice.

I am, Sir, etc.

The "Paris" Writings II: Bastiat the Politician, Anti-Socialist, and Economist (Feb. 1848 - Dec. 1850)↩

Section Introduction↩

[Seer separate file on this]

1. T.293 (post-1848) "On Experience and Responsibility"↩

Source

T.293 (post-1848) "On Experience and Responsibility" (no date). This previously unpublished sketch was discovered by the original French editor Paillottet among Bastiat's papers and inserted in a footnote to "The Law" (June, 1850). No date was given. Probably post-1848. [OC4, pp. 375-76] [CW2, p. 133] </titles/2450#lf1573-02_label_212>

Editor's Introduction

This short piece is one of several unpublished sketches found by Bastiat's literary executor and first editor, Prosper Paillottet, and inserted in another piece. In this case it was inserted in a footnote to the pamphlet The Law (July 1850). 977 It was written probably post-revolution, as the final paragraph points out that a State which intervenes too much in the lives of the people prevents them from learning from their mistakes and progressing. This he believes, will produce "a hotbed of revolutions" which will go nowhere. There are also similarities to views he expressed in "The State" (Sept. 1848). 978 In the original footnote Paillottet suggests he may have reconstructed some of these thoughts from other things Bastiat had written.

Text

For a people to be happy, it is essential for the individuals that make it up to be farsighted and prudent and to have the confidence in one another that is rooted in security.

However, it can acquire these things only by experience. It becomes farsighted when it has suffered from a lack of foresight, prudent when its recklessness has been frequently punished, etc., etc.

The result of this is that freedom always begins by being accompanied by the misfortunes that follow the rash use made of it.

At the sight of this, some men stand up and demand that freedom should be forbidden.

"The State," they say, "should be farsighted and prudent on behalf of everyone."

In response to which I ask the following questions:

1. Is this possible? Can an experienced State arise from an inexperienced nation?

2. In any case, is this not to stifle experience in the bud?

If government commands an individual to act (in certain ways), how can an individual learn from the consequences of his acts? Will he remain subject to (government) tutelage in perpetuity?

And the State, having ordered everything, will be responsible for everything.

This will constitute a hotbed of revolutions - dead end revolutions - since they will be carried out by a people who, having been forbidden to gain experience, have been forbidden (the opportunity) to progress.

2. T.295 (c. 1848) "Why our Finances are in a Mess"↩

Source

T.295 (Probably 1848) "Why our Finances are in a Mess" (no date). This previously unpublished sketch was discovered by the original French editor Paillottet among Bastiat's papers and inserted in a footnote to "Peace and Freedom or the Republican Budget" (Feb. 1849) and no date was given. Probably 1848. [OC5, p. 447] [CW2, p. 311-12] </titles/2450#lf1573-02_label_361>

Editor's Introduction

This short piece is one of several unpublished sketches found by Bastiat's literary executor and first editor, Prosper Paillottet, and inserted in another piece. In this case it is untitled, undated, and was inserted in a footnote to "Peace and Freedom or the Republican Budget" (Feb. 1849). 979 Given the closing sentence and its similarities to similar views expressed in "The State" this piece might be dated sometime in mid-1848.

The idea of one group of people living at the expence of another group of people was one expressed half a dozen times in Bastiat's writings. He first used it the article "Organisation and Liberty" (JDE, Jan. 1847); 980 then in "Disastrous Illusions. Citizens make the State thrive. The State cannot make the citizens thrive)," JDE March 1848; 981 twice in his pamphlet "The State" (Sept. 1848), and then in "The Physiology of Plunder" (ES2 1) 982 where it becomes one of the key factors in his theory of plunder.

The title used here is one given by us.

Text

Why are our finances in a mess?

Because, for the representatives, there is nothing easier than to vote for a new item of expenditure and nothing harder than to vote for a new tax.

Or, if you prefer, because (getting) salaries are very pleasant and paying taxes very hard.

I know another reason.

Everyone wants to live at the state's expense, and we forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone. 983

3. T.186 "A Few Words about the Title of our Journal: La République française" (26 Feb. 1848, RF)↩

Source

T.186 (1848.02.26) "A Few Words about the Title of our Journal" (Quelques mots d'abord sur le titre de nos journal), La République française , 26 February 1848, no. 1, p. 1 [CW3 & CW4]

La République française. A daily journal. Signed by the editors: F. Bastiat, Hippolyte Castille, Gustave de Molinari. It appeared from 26 February to 28 March in 30 issues. There were 2 editions of the 1st issue (one page only) and 2 editions of the second issue (of two pages).

This statement of principles is provided by Hatin in a long quote from La République française (possibly from the 1st issue of 26 February 1848), pp. 491-2. It was probably written by Bastiat with some assistance from Gustave de Molinari one of the co-founders of the journal. 984

Editor's Introduction

Bastiat was a strong believer in the Republic which emerged after the Revolution of February 1848. There are scattered remarks throughout the Economic Sophisms which suggest that he accepted the ideals of the French Revolution of 1789 - "liberté, égailité, fraternité" - but thought that they had been appropriated by the Jacobins in the 1790s and then by the socialists in his own day. He regretted the fact that one of the key ideals, that of property, had been omitted from the list.

There are indications of his republican sympathies well before the revolution broke out. In ES3 2 "Two Principles" (LE, 7 February 1847) 985 Bastiat added the following principles to the traditional trilogy of revolutionary ideals: "universal peace, well-being, savings, order, and all the progressive principles of the human race." One might therefore describe Bastiat's own liberal rallying cry updated for the 1840s as follows: "liberty, equality, fraternity, property, tranquility, prosperity, frugality, and stability." In ES3 12 "The Man who asked Embarrassing Questions" (12 December 1847) the character speaking for Bastiat states "I am in favor of democracy if what you understand by this word is: to each the ownership of his own work, freedom for all, equality for all, justice for all and peace among all."

Twice during the course of the 1848 Revolution Bastiat and some of his colleagues published magazines designed to appeal to ordinary people which they handed out on the streets of Paris and turned into posters which they plastered to the walls of buildings. The first was La République française which first appeared two days after the overthrow of King Louis Philippe in February and lasted for 30 issues between February 26 and March 28. It was written and distributed by Bastiat, Molinari, and Hippolyte Castille. 986 The second was Jacques Bonhomme which had 4 issues which appeared between June 11 and July 13. it was written and distributed by Bastiat, Molinari, Charles Coquelin, Alcide Fonteyraud, and Joseph Garnier. 987 We reproduce below the complete statement of principles which appeared in the first issue of La République française which gives a good indication of Bastiat's thinking at the time the Revolution broke out. It was called "A Few Words about the Title of our Journal The French Republic " (26 February 1848).

A couple of months later, when he was campaigning for the April election to the Constituent Assembly, he wrote in his electoral manifesto "To the Electors of the Landes" (Mugron, 22 March 1848) of his fervent republicanism. 988 He tells the prospective voters from his home district why they should vote for him:

Here is the spirit in which I will support the Republic with wholehearted devotion:

War waged against all forms of abuse: a people bound by the ties of privilege, bureaucracy, and taxes is like a tree eaten away by parasite plants.

Protection for all rights: those of conscience like those of intelligence; those of ownership like those of work; those of the family like those of the commune; those of the fatherland like those of humanity. I have no ideal other than universal justice; no motto other than that on our national flag, liberty, equality, fraternity.

Molinari provides an amusing anecdote about how he, Bastiat, and Hippolyte Castille started La République française . 989 Two days after the revolution broke out they were on the streets of Paris with a new magazine aimed at the ordinary working people. The format of the magazine was only one or two pages which could be handed out on street corners or pasted to walls so that passers by could read them. Many were written by Bastiat under the fictitious name of "Jacques Bonhomme" in an effort to appeal to ordinary working people. These posters reveal another side of Bastiat the populist writer who addresses the people in the familiar "tu" form as he makes his case for limited government, free markets, and low taxes. Here is part of a typical poster:

People, be more alert; do as the Republicans of America do: give the State only what is strictly necessary and keep the rest for yourself.

Demand the abolition of useless functions, a reduction of huge salaries, the abolition of special privileges, monopolies and deliberate obstructions, and the simplification of the wheels of bureaucracy.

With these savings, insist on the abolition of city tolls, the salt tax, the tax on cattle, and on wheat...

Then, oh people, you will have solved the problem, that of earning more sous and obtaining more things for each sou. 990

In a review of a collection of letters Bastiat wrote to the Cheuvreux family, the economist Gustave de Molinari reminisced about his revolutionary activities with Bastiat in 1848. 991 Bastiat was then forty-seven and Molinari twenty-nine. Molinari notes that the February revolution forced the young radical liberals to "replace our economic agitation (for free trade) with a politico-socialist agitation," which they did on 24 February, when they and Castille decided to start their magazine. The prime minister at the time, François Guizot, was forced to resign on 23 February, and a provisional government was formed on 26 February (thus, they started their new journal the day after the revolution broke out). Molinari asked Bastiat if he would join him as coeditor; Bastiat agreed to do so with the understanding that they would abide by the censorship laws, which at the time called for approval by the government before publication took place. Molinari wryly noted that Bastiat told them that "we may be making a revolution but revolutions do not violate the laws!"

The three of them proceeded to the Hôtel-de-Ville in order to have their hastily written screed approved by the government, but the building was in complete turmoil with armed revolutionaries milling about. The three wisely decided that the provisional government was "otherwise occupied," and Bastiat consented to publish the journal without prior approval. In Montmartre, on their way to the printer, they came across another would-be revolutionary hawking in the street a journal that had already taken the name La République , such was the competition at the time for catchy titles. The three decided on the spot to rename their journal La République française and had 5,000 copies printed and distributed. Like most periodicals at the time La République française lasted a very short while, but it did include a number of striking articles penned by Bastiat directed at the working class, who were pushing the revolution in an increasingly socialist direction. As Molinari notes, their journal "was decidedly not at the peak of the events" that were swirling about them, and it soon folded after a month.

Text

Let's begin with a few words about the title of our journal.

The provisional government wants a republic without ratification by the people. Today we have heard the people of Paris unanimously proclaim a republican government from the top of its glorious barricades, and we are of the firm conviction that the whole of France will ratify the wishes of the conquerors of February. But whatever might happen, even if this wish were to be misunderstood, we will keep the title which the voice of all the people have thrown to us. Whatever the form of government which the nation decides upon, the press ought henceforth remain free, no longer will any impediment be imposed upon the expression of thought. This sacred liberty of human thought, previously so impudently violated, will be recognised by the people, and they will know how to keep it. Thus, whatever might happen, being firmly convinced that the republican form of government is the only one which is suitable for a free people, the only one which allows the full and complete development of all kinds of liberty, we adopt and will keep our title:

THE FRENCH REPUBLIC.

Time and events are pressing, we can only devote a few lines to stating our program.

France has just got rid of a regime which it found odious, but it is not sufficient just to change men, it is necessary to also change things.

Now, what was the foundation of this regime?

(Trade) restrictions and privilege! Not only was the monarchy, which the heroic efforts of the people of Paris have just overturned, based upon an electoral monopoly, 992 but it also depended upon numerous branches of human activity from which it profited with invisible ties of privilege.

We wish that henceforth labour should be completely free, no more laws against unions, 993 no more regulations which prevent capitalists and workers from bringing either their money or their labour to whatever industry they find agreeable. The liberty of labour proclaimed by Turgot 994 and by the Constituent Assembly ought henceforth be the law of a democratic France.

Universal suffrage. 995

No more state funded religions. 996 Each person should pay for the religion which he uses.

The absolute freedom of education.

Freedom of commerce, to the degree that the needs of the treasury allow. 997 The elimination of duties on basic food as we enjoyed under the Convention. Life at low prices for the people! 998

No more conscription; voluntary recruitment for the army. 999

Institutions which allow the workers to find out where jobs are available and how to discover the going rate of wages throughout the entire country. 1000

Inviolable respect for property. All property has its origin in labour: to attack property is to attack labour.

Finally, in order to crown the work of our glorious regeneration, we demand leniency within the country and peace outside. Let us forget the past, let us launch into the future with a heart without any hatred, let us fraternize with all the people of the world, and soon the day will come when liberty, equality, and fraternity will be the law of the world!

4. T.302 "Speaks in a Discussion in the Assembly on the Formation of Committees" (13 May 1848)↩

Source

T.302 [1848.05.13] "Speaks in a Discussion on the Formation of Committees in the Assembly". Short speech in the National Constituent Assembly, 13 May 1848, CRANC, vol. 1, p. 161, 172. Not in OC. CW4

Editor's Introduction

Dean Russell in his book Frédéric Bastiat: Ideas and Influence (1965) lists five major speeches Bastiat gave in the Assembly. 1001 We have identified two more as well as eight shorter contributions he made to discussions on various bills being debated in the Chamber. For some unknown reason the Oeuvres complètes published by Paillottet in 1854-55 and 1862-62 only included two of these speeches which were given in the National Assembly, namely "The Banning of Trade Unions" (17 Nov. 1849) and "Speech on the Tax on Alcohol" (12 December, 1849), both of which are in our edition of Bastiat's Collected Works, vol. 2. 1002

We have found six speeches and contributions to four other discussions in the Constituent Assembly (4 May 1848 to 27 May 1849) and two speeches and three contributions to other discussions in the Legislative Assembly (28 May 1849 to 22 December 1851) for a combined total of eight speeches and seven other contributions which we include in this volume. Some are quite short, where he makes some brief comment or observation about matters which are under discussion, but the others are more substantial formal speeches, and one in particular, on " Amending the Electoral Law" (10 and 13 March, 1849), is very substantial (some 20 pages). His speeches and comments were originally published in the Proceedings of the National Constituent Assembly (CRANC) 1003 and the Proceedings of the National Legislative Assembly (CRANL) 1004 and are included in this volume for the first time. The complete list of speeches is the following:

"Speaks in a Discussion on the Formation of Committees in the Assembly". Short speech in the National Constituent Assembly, 13 May 1848

"Speaks in a Discussion on the Proposal of Randoing to increase export subsidies on woollen cloth". Short speech in the National Constituent Assembly, 9 June 1848

"Speaks in a Discussion on the Decree concerning the Policing of the Political Clubs". Short speech in the National Constituent Assembly, 26 July 1848

"Report from the Finance Committee concerning a loan to assist needy citizens in the Department of la Seine". Presents a Report from the Finance Committee to the National Constituent Assembly, 9 August 1848

"Additional Comments on the Report from the Finance Committee concerning a loan to assist needy citizens in the Department of la Seine". Presents further details on a Report from the Finance Committee to the National Constituent Assembly, 10 August 1848

"Speech on Postal Reform". Speech to the National Constituent Assembly, 24 August 1848

"Speaks in a Discussion on the Election of the President of the Republic". Short speech to the National Constituent Assembly, 27 Oct. 1848

"Speaks in a Discussion on a Proposal to change the tariff on imported salt". Short speech to the National Constituent Assembly, 11 Jan. 1849

"Speaks in a Discussion on Amending the Electoral Law". Short speech to the National Constituent Assembly, 26 Feb. 1849

"Speaks in a Discussion on Amending the Electoral Law (Third Reading)". Short speech to the National Constituent Assembly, 10 March 1849

"Speaks in a Discussion on changing the law on the appropriation of private property for public use". Short speech to the National Legislative Assembly, 6 Oct. 1849

"The Repression of Industrial Unions" (Coalitions industrielles). Speech given in the Legislative Assembly on 17 Nov. 1849 (CW2.17, pp. 348-61).

"Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" (Discours sur l'impôt des boissons). Speech given in the Legislative Assembly on 12 Dec. 1849 (CW2.16, pp. 328-47).

"Speaks in a Discussion on Public Education". Short speech to the National Legislative Assembly, 6 Feb. 1850

"Speaks in a Discussion on a Plan to give money to Workers Associations". Short speech to the National Legislative Assembly, 9 Feb. 1850

Bastiat spoke mainly on economic matters, as one might expect, on topics such as export subsidies for the textile industry, government grants to needy workers, postal reform, the tariff on salt, the right of workers to form trade unions, and the tax on alcohol. However, he also spoke twice on political matters which reveal some interesting "Public Choice" like thoughts on the economics of political behaviour. The first speech he gave in the Assembly was on the incentives Deputies had to join Committees (13 May, 1848) and how their vested interests might distort the advice they gave the Chamber regarding what legislation to adopt. The second one on political matters was a very substantial one he gave in March 1849 upon the Third Reading of a Bill to Reform the Electoral Law. Here we have his most extended thoughts on the economics of politics, most particularly on the formation and conduct of parties (or "coalitions" as he called them), the different incentives which face cabinet ministers who are appointed from within the Chamber (like the English parliamentary system) or by appointment from outside (like the American "spoils system"), how the jockying for power will destabilise France's political system, and how it will eventually lead to the disillusionment of the voters with party politics.

Bastiat was elected to the Constituent Assembly in the election of 23 April 1848 to represent the département of Les Landes. 1005 He was the second delegate elected out of 7 with a vote of 56,445. He served on the Comité des finances (Finance Committee) and was elected 8 times as vice-president of the committee (such was the regard of his colleagues for his economic knowledge) and he made periodic reports to the Chamber on Finance Committee matters. He was also asked to join the Committee on Labour but did stay long as he wanted to focus on financial matters. Bastiat was also elected to the Legislative Assembly in the election of 13 May 1849 to represent the département of Les Landes. 1006 He received 25,726 votes out of 49,762. Because of his deteriorating health Bastiat was less able to speak in the Chamber and his attendance fell off. However, he was able to write articles on matters before the Chamber which he distributed.

Where Bastiat's remarks are interrupted by comments by other politician we have removed the lengthier ones for reasons of space. We have kept the short interjections to give a flavour of what he had to face when he was speaking on the floor of the Chamber. Occasionally he apologises for his weak voice which made it hard for others to hear. One needs to remember he was suffering from a severe throat condition which would eventually force him to take a leave of absence and lead to his death on 24 December 1850. These remarks were recorded by an official stenographer, the accuracy of whom we cannot assess. Many of the remarks are in colloquial French and use the official terminology used in the Chamber (such as "L'honorable préopinant" (the Honourable Speaker)).

Text

Citizen Frédéric Bastiat : Citizen Representatives, I will put to you another doubt I have concerning the usefulness of the committees in the form you have proposed, especially the conditions governing the way in which they are nominated. If each of us is authorized to sign up for a committee in which we have the greatest interest the result of this will be that all those, for example, who are supporters of Algeria will sign up for the Algerian Committee; members of the Army will sign up for the War Committee, and so on. The general tendency will then be for these supporters to call for all the resources of the State, or at least as much as possible, to go to their areas of special interest. Instead of introducing an element of order into our discussion, the committees will, on the contrary, be able to present proposals there which will reflect particular interests, but which would meet with opposition in the Assembly. Instead of simplifying our work, it would be made more complicated. Because of these reasons I do not see there is sufficient reason to adopt the proposal to substitue the Committees for the work of the Government bureaux. 1007 …

Citizen Frédéric Bastiat : I only have one thing to say.

I am far from bringing myself to oppose the creation of a permanent committee to deal in a permanent way with the situation of the working classes and everything which concerns the economic aspect of this huge question. But I think that the creation of this committee is not at all incompatible with the existence of the commission which has already been formed. (There are interruptions from the floor).

It is clear that two great needs were born with the Revolution itself: a committee for legislation and a special commission for the workers. 1008

Well then, I think that it would not be politic, considering what you want to do, and what you have already begun to do in naming a committee for legislation, not to finish your work. You wanted to show the importance which you attach to this question. I think that the best means to make these views a reality is to give the commission which you have nominated the character of a commission of inquiry, all the while creating a permanent committee for the question of the workers. (Put it to a vote!) 1009 …

5. T.303 "Speaks in a Discussion of Randoing 's Proposal to increase Export Subsidies on Woollen Cloth" (9 June 1848)↩

Source

T.303 [1848.06.09] "Speaks in a Discussion of Randoing's Proposal to increase export subsidies on woollen cloth". Short speech in the National Constituent Assembly, 9 June 1848, CRANC, vol. 1, pp.749-50. Not in OC. CW4

Editor's Introduction

This is the 2nd of eight speeches and seven other shorter contributions Bastiat gave in the Chamber between May 1848 and February 1850. See the Editor's Introduction above, pp. 000 for more details.

Following the Revolution of February 1848 there was a severe economic recession in France which put many people out of work and led to a collapse in tax revenue for the Provisional Government. As the Vice-President of the Constituent Assembly's Finance Committee Bastiat spent much time trying to bring order to the government's finances which was complicated by the power of Louis Blanc who controlled the National Workshops relief program which was run out of the Luxembourg Palace, the cost of which got out of control and led to its closure in June, prompting the June Days uprising with considerable loss of life. The Provisional Government introduced a new tax, the "45 centime tax," in 16 March, 1848 as a temporary measure to cover the budget shortfall by imposing a new 45% direct tax on things like land, doors and windows, and trading licences. Is was a very unpopular tax which led to widespread protests especially in the southwest of France. The government was faced with constant demands for both tax cuts (on stamps, alcohol, salt, and tobacco) and increased government spending such as this proposal to subsidise the woollen industry by giving them export subsidies. It was Bastiat's job as Vice-President of the Fiance Committee to give periodic reports to the Assembly and to argue the case for putting limits on spending.

In this brief speech we see Bastiat using several arguments which we have seen before, that subsidies to one group are always paid for by taxes on other groups, that these taxes usually fall on the poorest workers and taxpayers who are least able to bear them, that public works such as military fortifications will produce concentrated benefits which are immediately seen (prosperity in the military town) but will cause hardships elsewhere which will not be immediately seen, and that many people suffer under "dreadful illusions" about the impact of government economic policies.

Text

Citizen Bastiat : I am obliged to repeat that I do not question the fact that there is suffering in particular industries, nor that the workers in those industries are suffering. Unfortunately, in our time there is no industry whose suffering can be questioned. I only call your attention to the illusion which is embodied in the remedy which has been proposed.

What is the issue at hand, and what is being asked for? People say: "Here is an industry which is not selling its products; if it could export them it would clear its surplus stock in the stores and this would be a great benefit either for this industry or for the workers it employs.

This fact is certainly indisputable, but what do we have to do to attain this end? To increase taxes and to increase export subsidies. This seems to me to exactly like giving taxpayers' money to foreigners, in order to allow them to buy French cloth at a discount. With a system like this, there is no industry which couldn't be assisted, for example that of wheat, wine, canvas, luxury goods, which all have goods which cannot be sold. Nearly all our industries are in the same situation, and that does not affect just the owner but agricultural workers and all kinds of work.

Well, is it possible to solve a problem by passing the burden of taxes from one group of people to another? I don't think so. If this method were effective, nothing would be so easy as this to revive all industry. It would be sufficient to slap on some new taxes and to share them out as export subsidies to all those industries which are experiencing difficulties in making sales. They would be able to lower their prices; and who would make a profit? The purchaser, the foreigner.

These subsidies are practically like money for the building of the fortifications of Langres 1010 which people have been talking about recently.

When the Government spends money in Langres it does some good for the workers of this town, and this is a good which everybody sees; but it is also necessary to see where this money comes from. 1011 It comes out of the pockets of the taxpayers; if they give it to the State they can no longer then spend it themselves, and there is as much work extinguished on one side as there is work stimulated on the other.

It is true that people say that, from the perspective of the working classes, the system is good because the tax falls on the wealthy and is spent for the benefit of the working classes; but I think that, if the working class thinks in this way, it is profoundly deluding itself; because by taking in turn all the articles in the Government's revenue budget one sees clearly that it is precisely on the working classes that the taxes fall. 1012 Unfortunately, the taxes, when they are imposed at the level where we now see them, inevitably have to be levied on the entire mass of the people, because otherwise they would not be productive; and when they are levied on the entire mass of the people, then it is especially the poor and suffering class which is hit the hardest, and that is inevitable, so to speak, because one cannot make a distinction between diverse objects hit by the tax; to do so would be never-ending and would require several colossal administrative agencies to administer.

What is the result of all this? It is that goods of inferior quality support the largest share of the tax. Wines of the lowest quality, sugar of the lowest quality, coffee of the lowest quality; all these things support very heavy taxes, which ensures that the proportion of tax paid is much greater for the people, for the people who are the poorest, than for those who are richer.

The project which has been put to you and other similar plans all have the same problems.

If the Government could pay these subsidies with the money it could get from Mexico or from some Eldorado, I would eagerly support it; but it takes the money out of the same pocket as those it is trying to help; these are the same people who see the tax on tobacco, on salt, on wine, on meat, increase from year to year; and they are under the disastrous illusion, 1013 if they don't believe that it is with this money, ultimately, that the export subsides are paid, and which have no other effect than to put our products in the hands of foreigners at a price lower than that which we ourselves pay.

Is this an effective solution?

To make sure of it, it is sufficient to present to the lips of all the industries this cup full of subsidies one after the other, and one would be forced to recognize that one had done nothing more than present an immense gift to foreigners.

I am not opposed to taking this matter into consideration, because I think that it is always useful to examine and to discuss such questions; but I wish to protect the Assembly from the illusion that one makes when one sees the good which accumulates at one point, and neglects to see the harm which is distributed on the whole, because I believe that the largesses of the State which are offered to us as a solution are precisely the cause of our suffering. (Very good! Very good! or Well said! Well said!)

6. T.216 "A Hoax" (15 June 1848, JB)↩

Source

T.216 (1848.06.15) "A Hoax" (Une mystification), Jacques Bonhomme , no. 2, 15-18 June 1848, p. 2. [OC7.61, pp. 242-44.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

There are several facets to Bastiat's brief career after he left his home in Mugron, Les Landes in early 1845 and his death at the end of 1850. During those 6 years he wrote prolifically for the Courrier français 1014 and the Journal des Économistes on both popular economic and policy related topics, he became the leader of the free trade movement in France with the founding of the French Free Trade Association in February 1846 then the editor of its journal Le Libre-Échange in November 1846 and one of their leading public speakers, he successfully stood for election in the new Second Republic in April 1848 and served as Vice-President of the Chamber's Finance Committee, he became one of the Guillaumin publishing firm's leading anti-socialist pamphleteers, and finally, he was an aspiring economic theorist who did not live long enough to see his treatise completed.

On top of this hectic schedule of speaking, writing, agitating, and publishing he also found time to engage in street politics in Paris at two key moments during the 1848 Revolution - the first was in February and March with a daily called La République française , 1015 and the second was a weekly in June 1848, called Jacques Bonhomme . 1016 On both occasions, he and Molinari, and some other economist friends started a newspaper or journal directed at ordinary French people which they handed out on the streets of Paris. Also on both occasions, Bastiat was caught in the cross-fire as troops fired on protesters, killing hundreds during the "June Days" rioting of 23-26 June, 1848. 1017 In this volume we have three articles from Jacques Bonhomme - "A Hoax," "Taking Five and Returning Four is not Giving," and "A Dreadful Escalation." 1018 Other articles from these magazines can be found elsewhere in the Collected Works . 1019

The title of the magazine Jacques Bonhomme was named after the character of the French everyman. 1020 Bastiat began using him as a foil in his journalism as a way to reach out to readers beginning in May 1846 in an article on "Salt, the Mail, and the Customs Service." 1021 The wily Frenchman Jacques Bonhomme would typically challenge the ideas of the protectionists or government officials with his free market ideas and scepticism about the efficacy of government regulations. Before the appearance of the eponymous magazine, Jacques Bonhomme appeared several times in articles written in late 1847 which would appear in Economic Sophisms. Series 2 (published in January 1848), once in his first revolutionary newspaper La République française , and then many times in Jacques Bonhomme , either by name or simply as "I". 1022 After a brief rest, Jacques Bonhomme appeared once again in Bastiat's last published work What is Seen and What is Not Seen (July 1850) most notably in the the first chapter on "The Broken Window." 1023

Bastiat begins this story speaking as "I, (Jacques Bonhomme)" and immediately challenges a "Great Minister" who had the unlikely name of "Monsieur Budget" about government tax policy. The Minister relates the history of how the government responded to demands by the public for make-work programs (like the National Workshops instituted by Louis Blanc in February 1848) 1024 to relieve unemployment. It began raising money by means of direct taxes on income (which did not exist in France at that time) with the Minister taking a cut of one third for himself and the bureaucrats who ran the program. Since the income tax was very visible, the workers began to realise that they were being duped and were in fact paying for their own unemployment relief (this was also the argument Bastiat used in his essay "The State" which also appeared in Jacques Bonhomme ). 1025 Thus they began to complain to the Minister who then decided to invent a new and less visible way of raising taxes which would deflect the workers' criticism, namely indirect taxes on food and other essential items such as salt and alcohol (this is France after all!). The indirect taxes raised over three times as much money, allowing the Minister to take a much larger cut for himself and his bureaucrats, and to fool the workers into thinking that the government was providing them with employment. This was the great "hoax" or deception.

It should be noted that, according to budget figures for 1848, the French state collected 1,350 million francs in all forms of taxation. 1026 Direct taxes on land, personal property, windows and doors, etc, raised 421 million francs. Indirect taxes on alcohol, salt, sugar, tobacco, etc raised 308 million francs. The amount spent by the French State on public works of various kinds was 111 million francs, or 8% of the total budget. Bastiat was a very strong opponent of direct taxation as his speeches in the Chamber demonstrate. 1027 He called for drastic cuts in or abolition of the taxes on salt and alcohol, the tax on letters, as well as for the closing down of the National Workshops in May, 1848. 1028 He wanted to replace indirect taxes which fell most heavily on the poor with low direct taxes and a 5% tariff rate.

One should also note two aspects of the language Bastiat uses in this article. Firstly, in an article he wrote for the JDE in January 1846, "Theft by Subsidy," 1029 Bastiat decided that the time for using circumlocutions to describe government economic policies was over and that henceforth he was going to use much more direct, even "brutal" language, such as "theft" and "plunder." He called for "an explosion of plain speaking" by free market advocates and in his own work we see many occurrences of words such as "dépouiller" (to dispossess), "spolier" (to plunder), "voler" (to steal), "piller" (to loot or pillage), "raviser" (to ravish or rape), and "filouter" (to filch). The latter is a word he uses several times in this article as part of this campaign.

Secondly, his theory of plunder which was emerging in late 1847 and early 1848 (see the first two chapters of ES2 1 "The Physiology of Plunder" and ES2 2 "Two Moral Philosophies") 1030 uses a very specific vocabulary, some of which we also see in this article. His theory can be summed up as follows:

Bastiat described taxation as nothing less than "plunder" (la spoliation) where the more powerful, the plunderers ("les spoliateurs"), use force to seize the property of others (the plundered) in order to provide benefits for themselves or favoured vested interest groups like the aristocracy or the church resulting in what he termed "aristocratic" or "theocratic plunder." He uses a number of closely linked expressions to describe this process of plunder: the plunderers (les spoliateurs) use a combination of outright coercion (la force), fraud (la ruse), and deception (la duperie) and "hoaxes" (la mystification) to acquire resources from ordinary workers and consumers. They also resort to the use of misleading and deceptive arguments (sophismes) to deceive ordinary people, the dupes (les dupes), and to convince them that these actions are taken in their own interests and not those of the ruling elites.

One can only wonder what the rioters on the streets of Paris in June 1848 thought of these arguments.

Text

As you know, I have traveled a great deal, and I have lots of tales to tell. 1031

As I was journeying through a far-off country, I was struck by the sorry situation in which the people appeared to be, in spite of their industriousness and the fertility of the land.

Desiring an explanation of this phenomenon, I turned to a Great Minister whose name was Budget . 1032 This is what he told me:

"I have had a count made of the workers. There are one million of them. They complain that they are not paid enough, and to me has fallen the task of improving their lot.

First of all, I thought of taking two sous 1033 from the daily pay of each worker. 1034 That brought 100,000 francs each morning into my coffers, or thirty million francs per year.

Out of this thirty million , I kept back ten for me and my officials.

I then told the workers: I have twenty million left, which I will use to have various projects started, and this will be of great benefit to you.

In fact, they were marvelously happy for a little while. They are decent folk, who do not have very much time for reflection. They were very upset at having two sous a day filched from them, but they were much more mesmerized by the millions apparently being spent by the State.

In spite of this, they gradually began to change their minds. The most alert of them said: 'We have to admit that we are real dupes. 1035 Minister Budget has started by taking thirty francs per year from each of us, free of charge . He then is giving us back twenty francs, not free of charge but in return for work. When all is said and done, we are losing ten francs and some working days in this arrangement.'"

"It seems to me, Lord Budget , 1036 that these workers are reasoning correctly."

"I thought the same thing, and I saw clearly that I could not continue to extract considerable sums from them in such a naïve way. With a bit more deception, I said to myself, instead of two, I will obtain four.

This was when I invented indirect taxation. Now, each time that workers buy two sous' worth of wine, one sou goes to me. I am taking something on tobacco, something on salt, something on meat and something on bread. I am taking from everything, and all the time. I am thus gathering, not thirty but one hundred million at the expense of the workers. 1037 I feast in grand hotels, I lounge about in fine carriages, I have myself served by fine servants, up to ten million franc's worth. I give twenty million francs to my officials to keep an eye on wine, salt, tobacco, meat, etc., and with what remains of their own money I set to work the workers."

"And don't they see through the hoax?"

"Not in the slightest. The way in which I empty their pockets is so subtle that it escapes them. However, the large-scale projects I arrange to be carried out dazzle them. They say to each other: 'Goodness! What a good way of eradicating poverty. Long live Citizen Budget ! 1038 What would become of us if he did not give us work?'"

"Don't they see that if this happened then you would no longer be taking big bucks from them and that if they spent this themselves they could provide employment for one another?"

"This does not occur to them. They constantly cry out to me: ' Great Statesman, make us work even more .' And this warms my heart for I interpret this to mean: Great Statesman, take even more of our sous as taxes on our wine, our salt, our tobacco and our meat ."

7. T.217 "Taking Five and Returning (giving back) Four is not Giving" (15 June 1848, JB)↩

Source

T.217 (1848.06.15) "Taking Five and Returning Four is not Giving" (Prendre cinq et rendre quatre ce n'est pas donner), Jacques Bonhomme , no. 2, 15-18 June 1848, p. 1. [OC7.60, pp. 240-42.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

This is the second of three articles which were written for Bastiat's revolutionary street magazine Jacques Bonhomme in June 1848 which we are including in this volume. For more information about the magazine, see the introduction to "A Hoax" (above).

In this essay, he returns to issues which preoccupied him throughout the Revolution of 1848, namely what is the State, and what is the relationship between those who work for the State and those who pay taxes to the State? In the first issue of Jacques Bonhomme (11 June) in the essay called "The State" Bastiat ends by announcing that:

Jacques Bonhomme is sponsoring a prize of fifty thousand francs to be given to anyone who provides a good definition of the word state, for that person will be the savior of finance, industry, trade, and work. 1039

Here, Bastiat provides his own definition of the State as "the collection of all civil servants" and contrasts them with "the workers of all sorts who make up society." The latter pay the taxes which are used to pay the salaries of the former, or as he phrases it, the workers who make up society "enable the State to live," and not vice versa.

The constant call by the socialists for the State to employ the unemployed, feed the hungry, and care for the old and sick, reached a high point during the summer of 1848 as the Constituent Assembly debated the wording of the new constitution for the Second Republic. The socialists wanted specific clauses, such as "the right to a job" (le droit au travail), inserted in the constitution which would guarantee a state funded job for anyone who wished to work and a declaration of responsibility by the state to care for the sick and old. This was opposed by the economists and liberal Deputies such as Léon Faucher, Frédéric Bastiat, Louis Wolowski, de Parieu, and Alexis de Tocqueville, and the socialists' motion was defeated by the end of the summer. 1040 This article should be seen as part of Bastiat's campaign to make the economists' objections known to the socialists' supporters who were regularly mobilised on the streets of Paris.

Bastiat often used references to classic French literature to help make his ideas better understood by his readers, especially in the Economic Sophisms . 1041 One of his favourite authors was the playwright Molière whose play Le malade imaginaire (The Hypocondriac) (1673) is quoted here. 1042 Molière's comedy was the last play he wrote and acted in as he was dying from tuberculosis and had suffered at the hands of doctors who were trying to cure him. (It should be noted that Bastiat too was suffering from an incurable disease of the throat which would later kill him and he would have seen many doctors looking for a cure or at least some relief from the pain.) In the play there is an appendix at the end which is in "Latin de cuisine" ("kitchen" or dog Latin) in which Molière mocks the practice of 17th century doctors of prescribing the same "cures" for all types of illnesses, i.e. bleeding and purging their clients for no apparent medical benefit. An apprentice doctor (Bachelierus) is being inducted into the fraternity of practising doctors and is asked by Dr. Praeses what he would do under various circumstances. His answer is always "reseignare, repurgare, et reclisterisare" (bleed him again, purge him again, and inject him again). 1043

Si maladia

Opiniatria

Non vult se guarire,

Quid illi facere?

Purgare, saignare, clysterisare,

Repurgare, resaignarer, reclysterare.

But of the illness,

in your opinion,

is not cured?

What would you do?

Purge him, then bleed him, give him an injection,

Then purge him again, bleed him again, and inject him again.

Bastiat uses this passage to accuse the socialists of prescribing over and over again the same "cure" for poverty and unemployment, namely higher spending by the government and higher taxes on the people. It was not the first time he had done this. In a witty parody of Molière's parody in the economic sophism ES2.9, "Theft by Subsidy" (January, 1846) 1044 Bastiat wrote his own fake Latin oath of induction for aspiring tax collectors who like to "Volandi, Pillandi, Derobandi, Filoutandi" (to steal, plunder, filch, and swindle) travellers as they cross the country.

Dono tibi et concedo

Virtutem et puissantiam

Volandi

Pillandi

Derobandi

Filoutandi

Et escroquandi

Impune per totam istam

Viam

I give to you and I grant

virtue and power

to steal

to plunder

to filch

to swindle

to defraud

at will, along this whole

road

Interestingly, Edmund Burke also turns to this passage from Molière in order to criticise the French Revolutionaries' habit of trying to solve all their political problems by issuing more assignats (paper money) which finally resulted in hyper-inflation and the collapse of the French currency. See the following witty passage from Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790):

Their fanatical confidence in the omnipotence of church plunder, has induced these philosophers to overlook all care of the public estate, just as the dream of the philosopher's stone induces dupes, under the more plausible delusion of the hermetic art, to neglect all rational means of improving their fortunes. With these philosophic financiers, this universal medicine made of church mummy is to cure all the evils of the state. These gentlemen perhaps do not believe a great deal in the miracles of piety; but it cannot be questioned that they have an undoubting faith in the prodigies of sacrilege. Is there a debt which pressed them? Issue assignats. Are compensations to be made, or a maintenance decreed to those whom they have robbed of their freehold in their office, or expelled from their profession? Assignats. Is a fleet to be fitted out? Assignats. If sixteen millions sterling of these assignats, forced on the people, leave the wants of the state as urgent as ever—issue, says one, thirty millions sterling of assignats—says another, issue fourscore millions more of assignats. The only difference among their financial factions is on the greater or the lesser quantity of assignats to be imposed on the publick sufferance. They are all professors of assignats. Even those, whose natural good sense and knowledge of commerce, not obliterated by philosophy, furnish decisive arguments against this delusion, conclude their arguments, by proposing the emission of assignats. I suppose they must talk of assignats, as no other language would be understood. All experience of their inefficacy does not in the least discourage them. Are the old assignats depreciated at market? What is the remedy? Issue new assignats. Mais si maladia, opiniatria, non vult se garire, quid illi facere? Assignare; postea assignare; ensuita assignare. The word is a trifle altered. The Latin of your present doctors may be better than that of your old comedy; their wisdom, and the variety of their resources, are the same. They have not more notes in their song than the cuckow; though, far from the softness of that harbinger of summer and plenty, their voice is as harsh and as ominous as that of the raven. 1045

Text

Let us get it right, what is the State? Is it not the collection of all civil servants? Therefore, there are two species of men in the world: the civil servants of all sorts who make up the State and the workers of all sorts who make up society. That said, is it the civil servants who enable workers to live or the workers who enable civil servants to live? In other words, does the State enable society to live, or does society enable the State to live?

I am not a scholar but a poor devil called Jacques Bonhomme, 1046 who is and never has been anything other than a worker.

Well, as a worker who pays tax on my bread, wine, meat, salt, my windows and door, on the iron and steel in my tools, on my tobacco, etc., 1047 I attach great importance to this question and repeat:

Do civil servants enable workers to live or do workers enable civil servants to live?

You will ask why I attach importance to this question, and this is why:

For some time, I have noticed a great tendency for everyone to ask the State for the means of existence.

Farmers ask: Give us subsidies, training, better ploughs, and finer breeds of cattle, etc.

Manufacturers say: Enable us to make a bit more on our woolen cloth, our canvas, and our iron goods.

Workers say: Give us work, pay, and tools to work with.

I find these requests perfectly natural and would like the State to be able to give whatever was asked of it.

But in order to give all this, from where does it take it? Alas, it takes a bit more tax on my bread, a bit more on my wine, a bit more on my meat, a bit more on my salt, a bit more on my tobacco, etc. etc.

To ensure that it has something to give me, it must take something away from me, and cannot avoid doing this. Wouldn't it be better for it to give me less and take less from me?

For in the end, it never gives back to me all that it takes. Even to take and give, it needs officials who keep part of what is taken.

Am I not a real dupe to make the following bargain with the State? I need work. In order to arrange some for me, you put a tax of five francs on my bread, five francs on my wine, five francs on my salt, and five francs on my tobacco. That makes twenty francs. You will keep six for your own expenses and will arrange for me to have work for fourteen. Obviously I will be somewhat poorer than before and will call upon you to put this right, and this is what you will do. You will start again. You will take another five francs on my bread, another five francs on my wine, another five francs on my salt, and another five francs on my tobacco, which will make another twenty francs. To which you will add another six francs for your pocket and will enable me to earn another fourteen francs. When this is done, I will have fallen one degree further into poverty. I will turn to you once again, etc.

Si maladia

Opiniatria

Non vult se guarire,

Quid illi facere?

Purgare, saignare, clysterisare,

Repurgare, resaignarer, reclysterare.

But of the illness,

in your opinion,

is not cured?

What would you do?

Purge him, then bleed him, give him an injection,

Then purge him again, bleed him again, and inject him again.

Jacques Bonhomme! Jacques Bonhomme! I find it hard to believe that you have been crazy enough to submit to this regime just because some scribblers baptised it with the name of Organization and Fraternity . 1048

8. T.218 "A Dreadful Escalation" (20 June 1848, JB)↩

Source

T.218 (1848.06.20) "A Dreadful Escalation" (Funeste gradation), Jacques Bonhomme , no. 3, 20-23 June 1848, p. 1. [OC7.62, pp. 244-46.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

This is the third of three articles which were written for Bastiat's revolutionary magazine Jacques Bonhomme in June 1848 which we are including in this volume. For more information about the magazine, see the introduction to "A Hoax" (above).

Here Bastiat discusses an issue which had concerned him all year, especially as Vice-President of the Chamber's Finance Committee to which he had been elected following his election to the Chamber in April 1848, namely, the worsening budget deficit which had been brought about by a decline in tax revenues and by the increased demands being placed upon the provisional government by new political groups, especially the socialists and their supporters. An economic recession immediately followed the outbreak of the Revolution which lead to a dramatic decrease in business activity and higher unemployment. In this article, Bastiat provides some economic data on this crisis which can be summarised as follows:

budgeted expenditure 1.7 billion fr.
expected revenue 1.5 billion fr.
deficit 200 million fr.
immediate debt payments of 550 million for Treasury Bonds and Savings Bank bonds

It is not clear where Bastiat gets these figures but he should know as he was appointed Vice-President of the Finance Committee of the Constituent Assembly and he is normally reliable in his use of economic data. The data we have for 1848 and 1849 show that expenditure for 1848 was estimated at 1.446 billion fr. and for 1849 at 1.572 billion fr. Taking the latter year as being closer to Bastiat's figures, income for 1849 was estimated to be 1.412 billion fr. which would leave a deficit of 160.8 million fr. Total debt held by the French government in 1848 amounted to fr. 5.2 billion. Payments to service this debt amounted to 455 million fr. in 1849 which was about 32% of total income for that year. 1049

To compound the problem, the Provisional Government under Alphonse Lamartine encouraged socialists like Louis Blanc to begin putting into practice their scheme to create experimental "social workshops," now called "national workshops," which were modeled on their ideas of labour organisation, cooperative work practises, and profit sharing. They set up the National Workshops on February 27 which they ran out of the Luxembourg Palace and which were designed to provide tax-payer funded unemployment relief for the newly unemployed workers. 1050 Workers got 2 francs a day, which was soon reduced to 1 franc because of the tremendous increase in their numbers (29,000 on March 5; 118,000 on June 15). Workshops were set up in a number of regional centres but the main Workshop was in Paris. The National Workshops were run like a separate parallel government under the control of Louis Blanc and Émile Thomas over which the fledgling Constituent Assembly had little control.

In addition, Louis-Antoine Pagès (Garnier-Pagès) (1803-1878), 1051 the Mayor of Paris and then Minister of Finance in the Provisional Government, outlined the list of options his government was considering in late February and March when the full extent of the financial crisis of the French government was becoming clear: to impose forced (i.e. compulsory) loans on the citizens, issue paper currency backed by state owned property, to create a new central state bank, to sell state assets like forests, to impose a progressive tax on property or income, to increase direct taxes, to impose a tax on capital, or to declare bankruptcy. He chose to impose a new, "temporary" 45% increase on certain direct taxes and to force the privately owned Bank of France to limit withdrawals of large amounts (over 100 fr.) and to increase the number of smaller notes in circulation. The government passed the new tax law on March 16, 1848 which increased direct taxes on things such as land, moveable goods, doors and windows, and trading licenses, by 45%. It was known as the "taxe de quarante-cinq centimes" (the 45 centimes tax) and was deeply unpopular, prompting revolts and protests in the south west of France. After the crisis had passed Garnier-Pagès wrote a book justifying his actions in an attempt to save his reputation among ordinary tax payers who called him "l'Homme aux 45 centimes" (Mr. 45 Centimes, or The 45 Centimes Taxman). 1052

Much further to the left than Garnier-Pagès was the socialist Louis Blanc who headed the National Workshops program. He outlined his hopes for a real socialist revolution in April 1848 which would see the state replace the Bank of France with a national bank, the nationalisation of the railways, the amalgamation of insurance companies, the creation of a separate government budget for workers affairs, and the creation of a Minister for Economic Progress. 1053

By May, the Constituent Assembly, partly as a result of the critical reports made to it by Bastiat as VP of the Finance Committee, decided to pull the plug on the National Workshops and they were to cease functioning in June. The socialists were able to mobilise considerable popular support to protest this decision and angry crowds took to the streets on June 23-26, the so-called "June Days," which were the bloodiest days of the Revolution. Troops under General Cavaignac, assisted by members of the National Guard, were ordered to clear the streets of protesters, resulting in the death and arrests of thousands. About 1,500 people died and 15,000 were arrested (over 4,000 of whom were sentenced to transportation). The Assembly immediately declared a state of siege (martial law) in Paris and gave Cavaignac full executive power which lasted until October.

In the same issue in which this article appeared (20-23 June) Bastiat also published a potentially provocative article calling on "Citizens Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin" to close the National Workshops immediately. 1054 Bastiat and his economist friends who worked on the magazine got caught up in the street violence which followed and had to close the magazine after only 4 issues.

Bastiat's strategy in this short essay is to personalise the problem of the French State for the workers in the streets of Paris by telling them a story about Jacques Bonhomme's advice to a profligate friend who was living beyond his means. 1055 His advice was for his friend to "sack any unnecessary staff, move to a modest house, and sell your carriages, and you will gradually restore the state of your affairs." Exactly the same as Bastiat had been advising the government to do without a great deal of success.

Text

The ordinary expenditure of the State has been set at one billion seven hundred million for the 1848 budget.

Even with a tax at 45 centimes, you cannot extort more than one billion five hundred million from the people.

There remains a net deficit of two hundred million .

In addition to this, the State owes two hundred and fifty million in Treasury bonds and three hundred million to the Savings Banks, and these sums are due right now.

What can we do? Taxation has reached its ultimate limit. What can we do? The State has an idea: to seize lucrative industries and operate them for its own benefit. It will start with the railways and the insurance industry, followed by the mines, the transport industry, paper mills, the parcel post, etc. etc.

Taxing, borrowing and usurping, what a dreadful escalation!

I very much fear that the State is following a path that ruined Old Man Mathurin. I went to see Old Man Mathurin one day and asked him "Well, then, how is business?"

"Dreadful", he answered, "I have difficulty in making ends meet. My expenditure outstrips my income."

"You have to try to earn a bit more."

That's impossible."

"In that case, you have to make your mind up to spend a little less."

"Nonsense, Jacques Bonhomme! You are fond of giving advice and as far as I am concerned, I hate receiving it."

A little later, I met Old Man Mathurin as shiny as a new penny in yellow gloves and patent leather boots. He came up to me with no hard feelings. "Things are going wonderfully well!" he cried, "I have found lenders who are very eager to oblige. Thanks to them, my budget is balanced each year with marvelous ease."

"And, apart from these loans, have you increased your income?"

"Not by a single obole (penny)." 1056

"Have you reduced your expenditure?"

"God forbid! Quite the contrary. Take a look at this suit, this waistcoat, and this top hat! Ah, if you could see my town house, my servants, and my horses!"

"That is wonderful, but let us work it out. If last year you couldn't make ends meet, how are you making them meet now that, without increasing your income, you are increasing your expenditure and have arrears on the loans to pay?"

"Jacques Bonhomme, it is not nice talking to you. I have never met anyone so gloomy."

Nevertheless, the inevitable happened. Mathurin displeased his creditors, who all disappeared. What a cruel situation!

He came to see me. "Jacques, my good friend," he said, "I am in dire straights; what can I do?"

"Rid yourself of all that is superfluous and work hard, live frugally, and at least pay the interest on your debts, and thus arouse the interest of some charitable Jew 1057 in your fate so that he lends you enough to last a year or two. In the meantime, sack any unnecessary staff, move to a modest house, and sell your carriages, and you will gradually restore the state of your affairs."

"Master Jacques, you never change. You cannot give a piece of advice that is agreeable and in line with people's inclinations. Farewell. I will take only my own counsel. I have exhausted my resources. I have exhausted my loans; now I will start to …"

"Don't say it, let me guess."

9. T.304 "Speaks in a Discussion on the Decree concerning the Regulation of the Political Clubs" (26 July 1848)↩

Source

T.304 [1848.07.26] "Speaks in a Discussion on the Decree concerning the Regulation of the Political Clubs". Short speech in the National Constituent Assembly, 26 July 1848, CRANC, vol. 2, pp. 681-82. Not in OC. CW4

Editor's Introduction

This is the 3rd of eight speeches and seven other shorter contributions Bastiat gave in the Chamber between May 1848 and February 1850. See the Editor's Introduction above, pp. 000 for more details.

It is a short speech by Bastiat during a debate in July 1848 on the regulation of political clubs by the government. The trigger for the collapse of the July Monarchy on 22-24 February was the result of the regime's attempts to prevent a political banquet from taking place on 22 February. Throughout the second half of 1847 numerous public banquets, often numbering over a 1,000 people, were organised to protest against restrictions on the freedom of association and to demand an increase in the number of people who were allowed to vote in elections. The banqueters were addressed by leading public figures and patriotic music was played. When the Prime Minister François Guizot banned a banquet scheduled to be held on 14 January it was postponed until 22 February, which not coincidently was George Washington's birthday, thus allowing the banqueters to make a political point about a much admired republican and supporter of democracy. When it was banned a second time a public protest march was organised resulting in the death of one of the protesters at the hands of the National Guard. The protest escalated resulting in demands for the resignation of Guizot (which came on the afternoon of the 23rd), the killing of dozens of protesters whose bodies were carried through the streets of Paris in further protest, the erection of barricades throughout the city, and the eventual abdication of King Louis Philippe on the 24th. Later that evening Lamartine, Louis Blanc, and 10 other politicians and activists formed a Provisional Government and the Second Republic was declared the following day (25 February).

On the very day the Republic was announced the revolutionary socialist Auguste Blanqui started his "Le club de la société républicaine centrale" (Club of the Central Republican Society, also know as Club Blanqui) which was the perhaps the first of hundreds which sprang up in Paris between February and their suppression at the end of June 1848. Every shade of political opinion was represented with its own club, every suburb and district had its meeting halls and cafés where men and women gathered to discuss politics, and every magazine and journal had an affiliated club often headed by the editor. The larger clubs were able to mobilize their members to demonstrate in the streets in order to put pressure on the government to get their favoured legislation passed. Other important socialist clubs included Étienne Cabet's "La société fraternelle centrale" (the Central Fraternal Society), "Le club des travailleurs libres" (the Club of Free Workers), Alphonse Esquiros's "Le club de la montagne" (the Club of the Mountain), and Armand Barbès's "Le club de la révolution" (the Revolution Club).

The socialists were not the only ones to set up political clubs to discuss radical ideas. The classical liberal economists also had a Club, "le club de la liberté du travail" (the Club for the Freedom of Working). I t was organised by Charles Coquelin 1058 and its first meeting was held on March 31 to discuss the question of "The Organization of Labour" with three socialists defending Louis Blanc's proposals and attacking free trade, and Coquelin, Fonteyraud, and Garnier defending the free market position of the "Liberty of Working". 1059 One of the Club's best public speakers was Alcide Fonteyraud (1822-1849) who died in the cholera epidemic which swept France in mid 1849. 1060 He was famous for his florid and witty style of speaking and his ability to mix references to the classics of French literature with the classics of political economy. Bastiat also most likely attended its meetings and may have participated in giving some of the speeches.

The political clubs reached their pinnacle of power on the eve of the 23 April elections for the Constituent Assembly. Fearful of their influence the National Guard began to disrupt their meetings and after the elections moderate republicans in the Assembly began to call for the clubs' power to be curbed. Many leaders of the most left-leaning clubs were arrested following a demonstration on 15 May in support of uprisings in Poland and following the June Days (23-26) rioting the Assembly voted to close them completely on 28 June. Under a new law restricting the right of assembly which was passed on 2 August the clubs could only operate under strict police supervision.

Bastiat is participating in a debate in the Chamber on how extensive government regulation of the clubs should be. Under discussion were Articles 13, 14, and 15 1061 which stated that:

Art. 13. Secret societies are forbidden. Those who are convicted of having participated in a secret society will punished with a fine of 100-500 francs and imprisonment of between three months and a year. These penalties will be doubled for the leaders or founders of these societies. …

Art. 14. Irrespective of any meetings which come to be regulated, citizens can found circles or private groups which do not have a political purpose, on condition that they make known to the municipal authority the location and purpose of the meeting and the names of the members who are members. Without such a declaration or in the case of a false declaration the meeting will be closed immediately and the members will be prosecuted as if they had joined a secret society.

Art. 15. (which would be the final part of the law). The conditions of the law are not applicable to, firstly, meetings held prior to an election, and secondly, anything pertaining to religious matters or public education.

Bastiat voted against the measures which were opposed 370 to 362. 1062

Text

Citizen Bastiat: I have come to demand the floor to speak against Cloture (ending the debate) because I want to ask the Chamber for the complete removal of the Article, and I have only two words to say to justify my position.

Several Members of the Chamber: Speak against Closure!

Citizen Bastiat: I speak against Closure because none of the previous speakers called the Assembly's attention to the possibility of completely removing this Article. This Article appears to me to be unnecessary and dangerous.

It is unnecessary because if a secret society reveals itself to the outside world by means of criminal acts it will be handled by the ordinary laws.

Several Members of the Chamber: Too late!

Citizen Bastiat: On the contrary, if a secret society has only made the mistake of not declaring itself to the municipal authority it will be hit by Article 14, and this Article will impose sufficient punishment on it, if there has been only a simple infraction of the law.

In all cases, the legislation is sufficiently well armed against what you call "secret societies."

I will add that the Article is dangerous. You yourselves have shown the impossibility of defining what a secret society is, and besides (in doing this) it is impossible not to place an enormous source of arbitrary power in the hands of the government.

For these reasons, and given the fact that the legislation is sufficient with Article 14, I demand the removal of the proposed Article.

10. T.203 (1848.07.28) "A Complaint made by M. Considerant and F. Bastiat's Reply."↩

Source

T.203 (1848.07.28) "A Complaint made by M. Considerant and F. Bastiat's Reply." These two letters were originally published in JDD, 28 July, 1848 and inserted by the original French editor Paillottet as an Appendix at the end of "Property and Plunder" (24 July 1848). [OC4, pp. 434-41] [CW2, pp. 177-84]

Editor's Introduction

This debate between the socialist Victor Considerant 1063 and Bastiat took place soon after the violent June Days uprising agains the closure of the National Workshops scheme. Bastiat had played an important role in persuading the Chamber that France would go bankrupt if they did not shut the Workshops down and end the socialist government work program. Hence the bitterness over a key phrase used to justify the Workshops in the eyes of socialists, the "right to work", i.e. the right to be given a government guaranteed paid job at taxpayer expense. 1064

A great deal of the argument falls down to who said what when, which is not always enlightening, but there are major points of difference in the arguments of the two theorists over the nature of rights (are they conventional or are they natural rights embedded in the very nature of man), what is the source of value, and who gets to own the valuable things that are produced.

Text: A Complaint Made by M. Considérant and F. Bastiat's Reply

Sir,

In the serious discussions to come on the social question, I am determined to prevent the public from being given, as coming from me, opinions that are not mine, or that my opinions be presented in a way that distorts and disfigures them.

I have not defended the principle of property for twenty years against the followers of Saint-Simon who denied the right of inheritance, against the disciples of Babeuf and Owen, and against all the varieties of communism, to let myself be depicted as being in the ranks of those who oppose this right of property , whose logical legitimacy I believe I have established on foundations that are difficult to undermine.

I have not fought in the Luxembourg Palace against the doctrines of M. Louis Blanc, 1065 I have not on numerous occasions been attacked by M. Proudhon as one of the fiercest defenders of property only to allow M. Bastiat to paint me in your columns as forming, with these two socialists, a sort of triumvirate against property, without my protesting .

Besides, as I do not wish to be obliged to claim your indulgence in inserting lengthy tracts of my prose in your columns, and you doubtless agree with me in this, I am asking your permission to make a few observations to M. Bastiat before he goes any further, which will cut short the replies that he may oblige me to give him and perhaps even to eliminate them completely.

1. I would not like M. Bastiat, even when he thinks he is analyzing my thought accurately, to use, in inverted commas and as though quoting textually from my pamphlet on the right of property and the right to work 1066 or any other of my writings, phrases of his own which, especially in the penultimate of the quotations he attributes to me, convey my ideas inaccurately. This is not a proper way to proceed, and it may even lead the person who uses it much further than he himself would wish. Abbreviate and analyze as you wish, that is your right, but do not give your analytical abbreviation the character of a verbatim quotation.

2. M. Bastiat says: "They (the three socialists among whom I am included) appear to think that in the battle which is about to take place, the poor have an interest in the triumph of the right to work and the rich in defending the right of property ." 1067 For my part, I do not believe and do not even believe that I appear to believe anything of the sort. On the contrary, I believe that the rich now have a more serious interest than the poor in the recognition of the right to work . This is the thought that dominates my entire article, published for the first time not today, but ten years ago, 1068 and written to give the men in government and landowners a salutary warning and at the same time defend property against the redoubtable logic of its opponents. Moreover, I believe that the right of property is just as much in the interests of the poor as of the rich, since I regard the denial of this right as a denial of the principle of individuality and would consider its elimination, in whatever stage society was in, to be the signal for a return to the primitive state which, to my knowledge, I have never shown myself to favor.

3. Lastly, M. Bastiat says:

Besides, I have no intention of examining M. Considérant's theory in detail. . . . I wish only to attack what is weighty and consequential at the basis of this theory, that is to say, the question of r ent . M. Considérant's theory can be summarized thus: An agricultural product exists through the combination of two actions: The action by a man , or labor, which generates the right of property, and the action of nature , which ought to be free and that landowners turn unjustly to their profit. This is what constitutes the usurpation of the rights of humanity. 1069

I ask a thousand pardons of M. Bastiat, but there is not one word in my pamphlet that authorizes him to attribute to me the opinions that he so freely does here. As a rule I do not hide my thought, and when I think it is midday it is not my habit to say it is two o'clock. Therefore, let M. Bastiat, if he wishes to do me the honor of disparaging my pamphlet, oppose what I have written and not what he attributes to me. I have not written one word against rent ; the question of r ent , with which I am as familiar as everyone, does not appear at all in any shape or form, and when M. Bastiat quotes me as saying, "that the action of nature ought to be free and that landowners turn it unjustly to their advantage and that is what, according to me, constitutes the usurpation of the rights of the human race," he again remains stuck in a domain of thought that I have not referred to in the slightest. He is attributing to me an opinion I consider to be absurd, and which is even diametrically opposed to the entire doctrine of my article. I am not complaining at all, in fact, that landowners enjoy the action of nature, what I am asking for, in the name of those who do not enjoy this, is the right to work that will enable them to be able, alongside landowners, to create products and to live by working, when property (whether agricultural or industrial) fails to give them the means to do so.

Besides, sir, I have no intention of indulging in a debate on my opinions with M. Bastiat in your columns. This is a favor and an honor not reserved to me. Let M. Bastiat therefore reduce my system to dust and ruin, I will think myself entitled to claim your hospitality for my comments only when, through a lack of understanding, he attributes to me doctrines for which I am not responsible. I am well aware that it is often easy to bring down people by attributing to them what you want instead of what they have said, and in particular one is more readily right when opposing socialists when one opposes them in a confused way and in general than when one takes each one to task for what he has put forward. But, whether right or wrong, I for my part insist on taking responsibility for no one other than myself.

M. Editor, the discussion that M. Bastiat has undertaken in your columns bears on subjects that are too sensitive and weighty for you not to be in agreement with me on this at least. I am confident therefore that you will agree that I am right to be upset and that you will in fairness give my complaint a clear and legible place in your columns.

V. Considérant

Representative of the people

Bastiat's Reply to Considerant

Paris, 24 July 1848

M. Considérant is complaining that I have altered or distorted his opinion on property. If I have committed this fault I have done so involuntarily, and I can do no more in reparation than to quote his words.

After having established that there are two sorts of rights, natural rights, which express the relationships resulting from the very nature of beings or things and conventional or legal rights, which exist only to regulate wrong relationships , M. Considérant continues thus:

This having been said, we will say clearly that property as it has generally been constituted in all the industrious nations up to now , is tarnished by illegitimacy and is contrary to justice. . . . The human race has been placed on earth to live and develop there. The species is thus a usufructuary of the surface of the globe. …

However, under the regime that constitutes property in all civilized nations, the common basis on which the species has right of usufruct has been invaded. It has been confiscated by the minority to the exclusion of the majority. Well then! If there were in fact one single man deprived of his right to a usufruct of the common fund by the nature of the regime of property, this deprivation on its own would constitute an infringement of Rights, and the regime of property that endorsed it would certainly be unjust and illegitimate.

Might not any man born into a civilized society with no possessions and who found the land around him confiscated say to those who preached respect for the existing regime of property by affirming the respect due to the rights of property, "My friends, let us understand one another and set things straight a little; I am much in favor of the rights of property and very ready to respect it with regard to others, on the sole condition that others respect it with regard to me. However, as a member of the human race, I am entitled to a usufruct of the fund that is the common property of the race and that nature, as far as I know, has not given to some to the detriment of others. In virtue of the regime of property which I found established on my arrival here, the common fund has been confiscated and is well guarded. Your regime of property is therefore founded on the plunder of my right to a usufruct. Do not confuse the right of property with the particular regime of property that I find is established by your artificial right.

The current regime of property is therefore illegitimate and is based upon plunder at its very root/foundation . 1070

M. Considérant finally manages to set out the fundamental principle of the right of property in these terms:

Every man possesses the thing that his work, mind , or more generally his activity has created. 1071

To show the extent of this principle, he gives the example of the first generation of men who farm an isolated island. The results of the work of this generation are divided into two categories.

The first includes the products of the land that belonged to this first generation as usufructuaries, and that were increased, refined, or manufactured by its labour and industry. These products, in their raw state or manufactured, consist either of consumer products or t ools of work. It is clear that these products belong in total and legitimate property to those who have created them through their activity. …

Not only has this generation created the products we have just designated. . . but it has also created added value to the original value of the land through cultivation, the buildings, and all the work done on the land and the property.

This added value obviously constitutes a product, a value due to the activity of the first generation. 1072

M. Considérant acknowledges that this second kind of value is also a legitimate property. Then he adds:

We can thus totally accept that, when the second generation comes onto the scene, it will find two types of capital on the earth:

A. The original or natural capital , which has not been created by the men of the first generation, that is to say, the value of the land in its natural state.

B. The capital created by the first generation, which includes 1. the products, goods, and tools that have not been consumed and worn out by the first generation, 2. the added value that the work done by the first generation has added to the value of the land in its natural state.

It is thus obvious and results clearly and essentially from the fundamental principle of the right of property established just now, that each individual of the second generation has an equal right to the original or natural capital, whereas he has no right to the other form of capital, the capital created by the first generation. Each individual of this first generation can thus dispose of his part of the created capital in favor of the particular individuals of the second generation of his choice, his children, friends, etc. 1073

Thus, in this second generation, there are two types of individuals, those who inherit created capital and those who do not. There are also two types of capital, original or natural capital and created capital. The latter legitimately belongs to the heirs but the former legitimately belongs to everyone. Each individual of the second generation has an equal right to the original capital . Well, it has happened that the heirs to created capital have also seized the capital not created; they have invaded it, usurped it, and confiscated it. This is why and how the current regime of property is illegitimate, contrary to right and based on plunder at its very foundation.

I may certainly be mistaken, but it seems to me that this doctrine exactly echoes, although in other terms, the doctrine of Buchanan, 1074 McCulloch, 1075 and Senior 1076 on rent . They too acknowledged the legitimate ownership of what has been created by labour. However they regard as illegitimate the usurpation of that which M. Considérant calls the value of the land in its natural state and what they call the productive force of the land.

Let us now see how this injustice can be put right.

Primitive men in forests and savannahs enjoy four natural rights: hunting, fishing, the gathering of fruit, and grazing. That is the initial form taken by rights.

In all civilized societies, men of the people, the proletariat who inherit nothing and who own nothing, are purely and simply deprived of these rights. We thus cannot say that the initial right has changed its form here, since it no longer exists. The form has disappeared along with the substance.

But under what form might the right be reconciled with the conditions of an industrious society? The answer is easy. In the primitive state of society, in order to make use of his rights, man is obliged to act . The work of hunting, fishing, gathering fruit, and grazing are the conditions governing the exercise of his rights. The initial right is thus only the right to these forms of work .

Well then! Let an industrious society that has taken possession of the land and removed from men their faculty of exercising their four rights at their pleasure in full liberty over the surface of the land, recognize the right to work of each individual in compensation for these rights that it has taken away from him - the RIGHT TO WORK. Then, in principle and subject to proper application, no individual would have anything to complain about. In effect, his initial right was the right to work carried out in a poor workshop, in (the workshop) of the natural wilderness. His current right would be the same right exercised in a better equipped and richer workshop in which individual activity has to be more productive.

The condition sine qua non for property to be legitimate is thus that society should recognize the right to work of the proletariat and that it should ensure that it has at least as much of the means of subsistence for the exercise of a given activity as this exercise would have procured for it in the (original state of nature). 1077

Now I leave the reader to judge whether I have changed or distorted M. Considérant's opinions.

M. Considérant considers himself to be a fierce defender of the right to property . Doubtless he is defending this right as he understands it, but he understands it in his own way and the question is to establish whether it is the right way. In any case, it is not the way of everybody.

He himself says that, although it needed only a modicum of good sense to settle the question of property, it has never been properly understood . I am fully allowed not to agree with this condemnation of human intelligence.

It is not only the theory that M. Considérant is accusing. I would abandon him to it, as thinking like him in this matter as in many others, has often been misleading.

However, he also attacks the universal practice. He says clearly:

Property, as generally constituted in all industrious nations up to the present is tarnished with illegitimacy and sins spectacularly against rights. 1078

If, therefore, M. Considérant is a fierce defender of property it is at least of a mode of property that is different from the one recognized and practiced by men since the dawn of time.

I am fully convinced that M. Louis Blanc and M. Proudhon also claim to defend property as they understand it.

I myself have no other pretension than to give an explanation of property that I believe to be true and which is perhaps false.

I believe that the ownership of land, as it is formed naturally, is always the fruit of labour, that consequently it is based on the very principle established by M. Considérant, that it does not exclude the proletariat class from enjoying the usufruct of the land in its natural state but on the contrary it multiplies ten and a hundredfold this usufruct for them and thus is not tarnished with illegitimacy, and that all that undermines it in fact and in belief is as great a calamity for those who do not possess the land as for those who do.

This is what I have tried hard to show , to the extent that this can be done in the columns of a journal.

11. T.305 "Report to the Assembly from the Finance Committee concerning a Grant to assist needy citizens in the Department of la Seine" (9 August 1848)↩

Source

T.305 [1848.08.09] "Report to the Assembly from the Finance Committee concerning a loan to assist needy citizens in the Department of la Seine". Presents a Report from the Finance Committee to the National Constituent Assembly, 9 August 1848, CRANC, vol. 3, p. 41. Not in OC. CW4

Editor's Introduction

This is the 4th of eight speeches and seven other shorter contributions Bastiat gave in the Chamber between May 1848 and February 1850. See the Editor's Introduction above, pp. 000 for more details.

Bastiat was elected to represent Les Landes in the general election of 23 April 1848 for the new Constituent Assembly of the Second Republic. Soon after he was admitted into the Chamber he was offered two responsible Committee positons, one in the Committee on Labour and the other in the Finance Committee. He turned down the Committee on Labour, perhaps sensing that he would be opposed to everything that it would do and that he could better fight the socialists who were behind the National Workshops program from within the Finance Committee. Because of his economic expertise he was voted Vice-President of the 60 member Committee a total of 8 times until his failing health in early 1850 forced him to retire.

As Vice-President of the Finance Committee he had to present reports from the Committee to the Chamber on their deliberations and findings. This one is a Report in which he warns the Chamber that what had began as a temporary measure to alleviate economic hardship in the Department of La Seine the previous month now looked as though it was turning into a permanent welfare "system" which he argues had not been the Chamber's or the Finance Committee's intention.

Those on the Finance Committee, like Bastiat, who wanted to cut government spending and balance the budget, were in a difficult position as the economic recession which had followed the February Revolution and the June Days uprising had severely reduced government income, while the demands placed on it by groups which had previously been excluded from electoral politics were making that task almost impossible. On the one hand, socialist groups wanted more money for government unemployment relief programs like the National Workshops, and on the other hand ordinary taxpayers wanted taxes on food and other essentials cut so they could make ends meet.

The taxes Bastiat personally wanted to cut the most were the taxes on salt 1079 and alcohol, 1080 the high cost of sending letters through the government monopoly postal service (which also included a tax component), 1081 and an end to the prohibition of some imports, and the high tariffs on clothing and food. He realised he would not be able to persuade the Finance Committee to cut any of these taxes unless they could find a way to drastically cut government expenditure. In Bastiat's mind the obvious place to cut was the item which absorbed the most government expenditure, namely the 30% of the budget spent on the Army and the Navy. 1082 This of course was the hardest to cut politically, especially after Louis Napoléon was elected President of the Republic in December 1848.

In the meantime, Bastiat thought that a good strategy was to make municipal government bodies like the thousands of Welfare Offices (Bureaux de bienfaisance) 1083 scattered across the country responsible for looking after the needy in their locality, rather than have a new, centralised welfare bureaucracy be created in Paris.

Bastiat's discussion in the Chamber on this matter continues in the next section.

Text

Citizen President of the Assembly: 1084 The decree is adopted. Citizen Bastiat has the floor to present his Report from the Finance Committee.

Citizen Frédéric Bastiat: It is my honour to present to the Chamber the Report of the Finance Committee on the decree concerning a grant of 2 million francs for extra-ordinary assistance to the citizens of the Department of la Seine who find themselves in need.

Here is the text of the Report:

Citizen Representatives,

A month ago you voted in favour of a grant of 3 million francs to assist the poverty-stricken inhabitants of the Department of la Seine. Today the Government asks you for 2 million francs for the same purpose.

If the task of the Finance Committee is often a thankless one, since it consists in erecting a barrier to stop the flood of diverse claims which, in all shapes and forms, and for all kinds of reasons, are hurled at the Public Treasury, today it is particularly difficult.

On the one hand, it is a question of satisfying the urgent needs and relieving the cruel suffering of these people. It is a question of ensuring the most basic subsistance to a considerable number of our fellow citizens whom political events and the economic stagnation which resulted from that, have deprived them of work.

But on the other hand, the Finance Committee cannot and ought not forget the taxpayers. It cannot lose sight of the fact that the return of business confidence and economic activity will restore the equilibrium between income and expenditure; that all ordinary income is fully accounted for and even beyond that, by the demands of the public sector; that the Minister of Finance, 1085 only a few days ago, because of the dire economic circumstances, was heard declaring that none of the taxes which weigh most heavily on the masses, such as the tax on salt and alcohol, could be changed at present. Now, Citizens, this is sad news for the Departments. Do we have to tell them again, that they will be hit with new taxes in order to relieve suffering in the capital, while they already have so many unfortunate people of their own to help?

It is also quite clear that if the towns in the provinces are forced by the burden of taxes to suspend the assistance which they distribute to their poor, while the poor in Paris are guaranteed a daily amount, even a modest one, all the unfortunate people in the Departments will flock to the capital, thus in a short time digging much deeper the financial chasm that we want to fill in, and creating the very dangers that all of you want to prevent.

So, before we propose that you vote for the grant which is requested, the Finance Committee wanted to assure you that a state of affairs which is essentially temporary should not become permanent, and that this extra-ordinary assistance should not become another plague in a new form which replaces the plague of the National Workshops. 1086 The Committee has been assured to its satisfaction, from the Minister of the Interior's own mouth, that the greatest efforts were made to reduce and gradually end the enormous cost which these circumstances have burdened the taxpayers with. Individual assistance, originally set at 1 fr. per day, have declined successively to 75, 50, and 35 centimes per day. Today they remain fixed at an average of 25 centimes per day. We have not been able to achieve results as favourable with regard to the number of people who are being assisted. This has risen to a considerable number and it is difficult to believe that many abuses have not slipped into a system of distribution conducted on such a large scale, especially as the reopening of a large number of workshops ought to have lead to a quite different result. The Administration will take all possible precautions to ensure that the greed of schemers will not be able to devour the resources destined to relieve poverty.

The re-establishment of order, the return of business confidence, the recovery of labour, gives us hope that the day is not far off when things will return to a normal state, and when Paris will have enough to care for its own poverty-stricken people through the activity of the Welfare Offices.

By these means, and in the hope that a request similar to the one which is before you today will not reappear for a long time, the Committee proposes that you adopt the proposed Decree.

The Proposed Decree.

First Article. A grant of 2 million francs is made available to the Minister of the Interior for the fiscal year 1848 for the extra-ordinary relief of the citizens in the Department of la Seine who find themselves in need.

Article 2. The Minister of the Interior and the Prefect of la Seine will plan for the immediate distribution of this amount among the 14 arrondissements, in a proportion determined by their respective needs.

Citizen President of the Assembly: The Report will be printed and distributed.

Many Voices: With some urgency.

12. T.306 "Additional Comments in the Assembly on the Report from the Finance Committee concerning a Grant to assist needy citizens in the Department of la Seine" (10 August 1848)↩

Source

T.306 [1848.08.10] "Additional Comments in the Assembly on the Report from the Finance Committee concerning a Grant to assist needy citizens in the Department of la Seine". Presents further details on a Report from the Finance Committee to the National Constituent Assembly, 10 August 1848, CRANC, vol. 3, p. 62-64. Not in OC. CW4

Editor's Introduction

This is the 5th of eight speeches and seven other shorter contributions Bastiat gave in the Chamber between May 1848 and February 1850. It was in two parts. See the Editor's Introduction above, pp. 000 for more details of this topic.

Text

Part 1 (CRANAC, vol. 3, p. 62).

Citizen Buffet: … Here are the terms of this amendment:

"First Article. — A grant of 2 million francs is made available to the Minister of the Interior 1087 for the fiscal year 1848 for the extra-ordinary relief of the citizens who find themselves in need."

I have removed from the First Article the words "of the Department of la Seine."

"Art. 2 — The Minister of the Interior will plan with the Prefects for the immediate distribution of this amount, at least a quarter of which will be distributed among Departments other than that of la Seine."

Citizen Bastiat, Reporter: Citizen Representatives, the amendment which has been submitted to you was sent back to the Finance Committee at the suggestion of the Minister of the Interior. The Minister of the Interior is not present and as a result the Finance Committee is not in a position to make a decision. However, if the Minister of Finance accepts the amendment there is no reason for the Finance Committee to adopt it as well.

The same amendment has been presented to the Finance Committee and here is the objection which it raised.

The assistance requested by the Minister of the Interior pertains to the Department of la Seine and it is calculated according to the needs of the Department of la Seine. Please note Messieurs, that if it were to be extended to the poverty stricken people of the whole of France it would be insufficient, or it would have to be renewed in a very short time. With this decree we had no intention whatsoever to create a grand system of public assistance to which we would have to revisit again later. It is assistance which is purely temporary and interim.

Is it wise to introduce into a law which is purely interim a principle which has to be debated again later?

The Assembly did not intend that the dissolution of the National Workshops would lead to the suffering of the workers; it wanted the dissolution to be immediate, and that assistance would be guaranteed to the workers who would stop receiving it via the National Workshops. That is why the Assembly voted for the 3 million francs assistance package. Now people are requesting a sum of 2 million francs to continue this system, and the administration has undertaken to continue it in such a way as to gradually result in its extinction.

It is obvious that if you now want to apply the 2 million franc assistance package to the whole of France it would be necessary to vote for several more million francs at the same time, and this would not fulfill the purpose of the law.

Consequently, in spite of the absence of the Minister of the Interior, I believe I can act on his behalf and urge the Assembly to reject the amendment in its current form, with the exception of agreeing to assistance for other poverty stricken people by means of other special decrees.

Part 2 (CRANAC, vol. 3, pp. 63-64.)

Citizen Bastiat, Reporter: What I said at the beginning (of my speech) did not take long to become reality at this rostrum. That is to say, that a law which was entirely temporary did not take long before it was transformed into an entire system of public charity, if one wished to extend the benefits of the law to all the Departments. I think we have completely lost sight of the fact that here it is not a question of creating a system of public charity, the principle of which moreover, I have never denied nor admitted, and which I consider to be completely undecided. However, I did say here that it was a question of a law which was purely temporary, and not only temporary but one which approaches its end according to the clear intent of the administration.

We began with a request for assistance of 3 million francs, and you know that in these circumstances this assistance is not enough. Today the request is for another 2 million francs in assistance, and at the same time the Administration states that it is based on the belief that it will be the last one, given that the assistance began at 1 franc per day per person, and dropped to 73 centimes, then 50, then 35, and now at last 25 centimes. In these circumstances, we can hope that this temporary system is approaching its end, and that we will not have to renew it in another form and extend it to the whole of France, at the very moment when the Minister of Finance has just announced that our finances are in such a bad condition that we cannot lower the taxes on alcohol and salt which fall on exactly those people we wish to help. I do not think that we can build an improvised new system in this way based upon a temporary law, and I stand by the conclusions reached by the Finance Committee.

(Very good! Point it to a Vote!)

13. T.307 "Speech in the Assembly on Postal Reform" (24 August 1848)↩

Source

T.307 [1848.08.24] "Speech on Postal Reform". Speech to the National Constituent Assembly, 24 August 1848, CRANC, vol. 3, pp. 442-43. Not in OC. CW4

Editor's Introduction

This is the 6th of eight speeches and seven other shorter contributions Bastiat gave in the Chamber between May 1848 and February 1850. See the Editor's Introduction above, pp. 000 for more details.

For more information about Bastiat's attitudes towards postal reform before the revolution see the Editor's Introduction to "Two Articles on Postal Reform I" (3-6 Aug. 1844), above, pp. 000.

In his economic sophism "Salt, the Mail, and the Customs Service" (May 1846) 1088 Bastiat stages a conversation between Jacques Bonhomme and John Bull about the need for postal reform in France and how such reforms have fared in England. Jacques has a clever satire of the complexity of processing mail for delivery in France and writes a letter to a government official (Deputy de Vuitry who was Chairman of the Committee looking into postal reform), a rhetorical device for which Bastiat was famous. In the letter Jacques offers to take over the government letter monopoly and run it at a profit while charging a lower price for delivery. Also in the letter, Jacques proposals a draft law to amend the postal system which is interesting to compare with the actual proposals he put forward in the Chamber in August 1848:

Article 1. From 1 st January 1847, envelopes and stamped postal wrappers to the value of five (or ten) centimes will be on sale everywhere considered to be useful by the postal services.

Article 2. Any letter placed inside one of these envelopes and which does not exceed the weight of 15 grams or any journal or printed matter placed within one of these wrappers and which does not exceed … grams, will be carried and delivered without cost to its address.

Article 3. The accounting system of the postal services will be totally abolished.

Article 4. All criminal legislation and penalties with regard to the carriage of letters will be abolished. 1089

The model for Bastiat's thinking about postal reform was the reform of the British postal system pioneered by Rowland Hill (1795-1879). It began with the Uniform Four Penny Post which was introduced in 1839, then in 1842 it was reduced to one penny (the Uniform Penny Post and the "Penny Black" stamp) which was prepaid by the sender and was the same regardless of distance carried. Up until then the price had depended on the distance carried and was paid by the recipient. This was part of a package of reforms which liberals introduced in England during the 1840s and many of them were closely interlinked. For example, another strong advocate of postal reform was Richard Cobden who believed that the existing system was another example of protection given by the government to the elite which imposed an excessive cost on business. Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League were able to take advantage of the cheap mail rates by distributing large numbers of their pamphlets and other propaganda before they were successful in 1846 in having the Corn laws repealed by the British Parliament. Bastiat no doubt had this in mind for France as well.

In France, the old system of charging by distance was abolished during the Revolution (24 August 1848). The year before in 1847 125 million letters were sent at an average cost of 43 centimes. The new fixed tax for mail in 1849 was reduced to 20 centimes. Thus, Bastiat's proposal in "The Utopian" (ES2 11) for a cut to 10 centimes in January 1847 was a radical one. According to the Budget Papers of 1848 the French state raised fr. 51.5 million from various taxes, duties, and other charges for delivering letters, parcels, and money. The tax on letters alone raised fr. 46.5 million. However the government also spent 34.5 million fr. (1848) in administering and collecting the taxes on carrying letters. Thus, the actual net amount raised by the state was about 17 million francs. 1090 Thus, the French postal system was expensive and inefficient and did not even raise much money for the government. This fact, plus Bastiat's impassioned plea for freedom of communication helped get the reforms passed in the Chamber fairly quickly.

It should be noted that in Article 4 of his amendment Bastiat calls for the radical step of eliminating the government's monopoly of carrying letters and opening the business up to private competition. He says that the criminalisation of private letter carrying creates an "artificial crime" out of what is essentially an "innocent" act.

Text

Citizen President: 1091 The budget report previously discussed will be printed and distributed. We will now take up the discussion of the tax on letters. Concerning Article 1. Frédéric Bastiat proposes an amendment which is a kind of counter-proposal. Here is the amendment:

Article 1. From January 1, 1849 the Postal Administration will only carry and deliver to the home letters which weigh 10 grams and below, and which have a post mark and stamps intended to show that franking has occurred.

Article 2. These stamps will be sold for 5 centimes by the postal administration.

Article 3. Letters and packages of papers above 10 grams and not exceeding 100 grams will be franked at the post office by a postal official who will affix a stamp, the price of which will be 1 franc.

Article 4. All laws concerning the carrying of letters by any other means other than the post office, are repealed.

M. Bastiat has the floor to speak to his amendment.

Citizen Goudchaux (the Minister of Finance): First, we need to know if the amendment has any support.

Several Members of the Assembly: The proposer of an amendment always has the right to speak to it.

Citizen Frédéric Bastiat: Citizens, I only need a very few words to speak to my amendment.

The Minister of Finance told you a little while ago that correspondence is nothing more than the communication of ideas and sentiments by the written word, and he concluded with good reason in my view, that if the Government intervenes in this communication it should be in order to facilitate rather than to hinder this communication. And from this he further concluded that the Government ought to content itself with covering the costs of this service rendered and not imposing a tax on this service (as well).

My amendment has no other purpose than to realise this program, which I believe will not be realised by the proposal of the Government and the Finance Committee.

Allow me to first say something about the principle itself.

The spread of ideas, communication between people, that is precisely, even the very essence of what society is. It is from this communication that spring wealth, business activity, civilisation itself, and even taxes. So it seems contradictory to me to impose a tax on this communication.

I appreciate the fact that the Government might impose a tax on any other thing in order to encourage that communication; but that it would impose a tax on that communication (itself) seems to me to be contradictory. Every day we vote for taxes to encourage the movement of men and things, we build roads, canals, railroads, which we provide free of charge to the public, and then we hinder the transmission of ideas with taxes! I say that the Government should not make a profit out of providing this service. This is a principle which extends throughout almost all of Europe. England has fully gone down this path. In the United States the government bears the costs, and these costs are enormous, in order to spare those who wish to correspond with each other. 1092 Finally, even in Austria, this principle has recently been adopted.

If this principle is correct, Messieurs, it is a question of only one thing, it is to find out if the extremely modest price of 5 centimes, 1093 a price which has raised a few murmurs in this Assembly, is a price which will cover the costs of the postal service. As far as I am concerned, I say yes, especially if one takes the amendment in its entirety. I will make a few calculations below to show you.

The cost of the postal system is quite close to 30 million francs. 1094 What does the postal system bring to us and what does it deliver for us? It delivers three types of things: firstly a multitude of newspapers. Please note that these newspapers are subject to the same legislation which I am proposing here today for letters, and such is the power of habit, that what appears to you to be quite extraordinary is carried out under your very noses every single day with regard to newspapers. Yet today you find it peculiar when I suggest we do the same thing with letters. The postal service delivers in this way newspapers which weigh, if I am not mistake, 900 kilograms.

Next, the postal service delivers all the dispatches of the government administration the weight of which exceeds 1,000 to 1,1000 kilograms.

Finally, it delivers letters the weight of which is not equal to either newspapers or the administrative dispatches.

As a result, if you divide this cost of 30 or 35 million francs by these three services, you will see that you cannot attribute more than 12 million francs to the cost of carrying letters.

Well then, if all letters paid a tax of 5 centimes there is no doubt that a cost of 12 or 15 million francs would be easily covered, since it would require 3 hundred million letters (to be sent) to raise 15 million francs; and it is is very possible to believe that with a tax of 5 centimes the number of letters sent, which today stands at 130 million, would very quickly reach 300 million letters. 1095

Messieurs, I agree that the price of a stamp is extremely low; but this extraordinary drop in price is a key part of the proposal that I am putting to you. Please note, that when the administration wants to make a profit, that is to say impose a tax on the transport of letters, it is obliged to do something which I personally find extraordinary, namely by doing the very thing it undertakes, it invites industries to compete with it. It is therefore forced to arm itself against them by using the law. It puts everybody who wishes to correspond with each other, and that is to say the entire nation, into the following position: it says to them, "Only I alone will deliver your correspondence, and I forbid you, under the criminal code, to correspond with each other by any other means except for what I offer you, even if this means that it will cost you 5, 6, 7, 8, or sometimes 20 times the price of the service I provide.

That seems to me to be exorbitant.

Whatever price you adopt, if it exceeds the value of the service rendered, that alone is sufficient to attract competition to the postal system and will lead you to add to the number of crimes in the legal Code, an action which is extremely moral in itself.

This is something I wished to avoid. My first desire was to be able to remove from our legal code these artificial crimes which I would like to see no longer play any part. To carry a letter for a friend is in itself a completely innocent act, and it is upsetting that the law is forced to punish it as a crime. It is by adopting a radical reform, like the one I am proposing to you, that you will be able to make this sad anomalie disappear.

With my amendment you will also be able to achieve another result, that is you will be able to require obligatory stamping, 1096 firstly because no one will object to a price of 5 centimes, and then the postal service will be acting according to the law. When the postal system prohibits the free communication of ideas by any other means other than silence, it is obvious that it cannot then say to people "You will be forced to accept my services and to pay for them in advance at a price which exceeds your ability to pay." But from the moment when it allows all the means of transmitting ideas go free it can then say "If you wish, I will charge you for the transport, but on one condition, and that condition is that there is the obligatory payment of a 5 centimes stamp."

This leads us to another result, which is that from the moment you introduce this system you will do away with with the same blow the bureaucratic accounting procedures of the entire postal system, which not a small thing.

We are always busy trying to simplify services, we content ourselves with making a small cut here or some economy there, and we don't pay attention to the fact that we cannot achieve a serious economic reform if the administration of the postal system remains what it is today.

So, if you introduce obligatory stamping at a rate of 5 centimes, from that very moment you will eliminate all the bureaucratic accounting procedures of the postal service.

The Minister of Finance provided you with the details a short time ago. But I don't think he showed you how it really is. The Minister told you that a letter might belong to one of twenty different categories. I would say that it might belong to one of 200 different categories. There are (currently) 8 categories for distance carried and 9 for weight, which makes 28 categories. The the letter might be refused by the recipient or accepted by the recipient; stamped or not stamped. This is a multiplication of categories which could go on for ever. 1097 Please note that there is not a single letter which the post-master isn't required to assign to its proper category. It is work of the most minute detail and then comes the checking of this bureaucratic procedure. It is truly a frightening masterpiece of work, a financial tour de force, to be able to manage thousands of post-masters strewn across the entire surface of the country and collecting hundreds of millions of francs in small fractions of 20 to 30 centimes. All this leads to inspections, processing, filling out forms, endless correspondence, expences of all kinds, all of which would no longer exist in the system I am proposing.

In my system it is sufficient to have single distributors of mail who would have very little to do, because it would be sufficient for them to do what they already do for newspapers, which is certainly very simple.

Indeed, look at what happens now with newspapers. Ask the administrators, the postal employees, and what they will tell you is that the newspapers cause them a quarter, a tenth, or one hundredth the trouble which delivering letters causes them. In fact, since the newspapers arrive already stamped, there is nothing more to do than deliver them.

There is the economy in my plan. I cannot better explain it to you than to say I will subject letters to the same régime which is applied today to newspapers with such benefits.

My reform is radical, I agree, but I think it is appropriate that the Republic encourage true principles, to exempt from tax those things it is not proper, to remove from the list of crimes actions which are innocent, to simplify the wheels of bureaucracy, and especially in our thinking about fiscal matters to refrain from hindering the circulation of opinions and ideas, an act which strikes at the heart of society and civilisation.

14. T.223 "Economic Harmonies: I, II, and III. The Needs of Man" (1 Sept., 1848, JDE)↩

Source

T.223 (1848.09.01) "Economic Harmonies: I., II., and III. The Needs of Man" (Harmonies économiques. I, II, III .Des besoins de l'homme), JDE , T. XXI, No. 87, 1 Sept. 1848, pp. 105-20; also in EH 1-3. [OC6] [CW5 and CW4]

Editor's Introduction

These three essays entitled "Economic Harmonies: I., II., and III." (Sept. JDE) and a 4th entitled "Economic Harmonies: IV." (Dec. JDE) reveal that Bastiat was serious about writing an economic treatise which would eventually be called Economic Harmonies . 1098 He had begun in the late summer or fall of 1847 to give some lectures to law students in Paris and even wrote an ironic "Draft Preface" for the planed book in which he expressed his hopes and fears for the project. 1099 He had already written two major essays in 1846 on Population (EH2 16) and Competition (EH1 10) which would find their way eventually into the treatise. 1100 After a very busy year (1847) working full-time for the French Free Trade Association speaking at meetings and editing the weekly journal Le Libre-Échange he managed to find time at the end of the year to write another important introductory chapter on "Artificial and Natural Organisations" which was published in the January 1848 issue of the JDE. 1101 This would become the first chapter of the treatise (unnumbered in EH1, chapter 1 in EH2).

However, whatever plans he might have had to continue working on the book evaporated when revolution broke out in late February 1848, forcing the king to abdicate, the regime to collapse, and the Second Republic to be proclaimed. Bastiat had already resigned as editor of Le Libre-Échange on 13 February because of his failing health and his leadership role in the FFTA came to an end when the executive board decided to close down the association on 15 March in order to focus all their energy and resources on influencing the policies of the Provisional Government under Lamartine (a supposed ally). They also wanted to fight the rise of the socialists under Louis Blanc who had seized control of the Luxembourg Palace from which he ran National Workshops program. Bastiat initially turned to journalism, launching with Gustave de Molinari and other friends the daily newspaper La République française (26 Feb. to 28 March), then standing successfully for election in April to represent Les Landes in the new Constituent Assembly. Politics kept him very busy over the summer writing anti-socialist pamphlets, launching another revolutionary street magazine, Jacques Bonhomme (11 June to 13 July), speaking in the Chamber, and serving as VP of the Finance Committee. So it is not until late summer that he found the time to return to work on his treatise. The result were these four pieces which would eventually become the first three numbered chapters in EH1 (I. Economic Harmonies, II. Needs, Efforts, and Satisfactions, III. The Needs of Man) which were then rearranged and renumbered for EH2 (II. Needs, Efforts, and Satisfactions, III. The Needs of Man).

The first half of 1849 found Bastiat distracted again from working on his book. He wrote several essays on money and credit, 1102 topics which he planned to have in the treatise, but the pieces he wrote were more popular or polemical in style and less suitable to be part of a work of theory. He also gave several speeches in the Chamber 1103 and had to stand for re-election in May for the new Legislative Assembly. To help him focus on his major work, some friends helped him rent Louis XIV's old hunting lodge, Butard, in some woods outside Paris so he could work on the book over the summer of 1849. 1104 He probably used this time to work on chapters IV-IX on Exchange, Value, Wealth, Capital, Property and Community, and Landed Property. He was able to get these chapters into shape ready for publication by the end of the year as EH1 appeared early in the new year (January 1850). The rest of 1849 was taken up with more speeches in the Chamber, and his participation in a big international Friends of Peace Conference held in Paris in August 1849 (at which Bastiat gave a major speech), 1105 which led to another visit to England in October to attend a Peace Conference in Bradford, and possibly to speak with Cobden secretly on behalf of the French government on the possibility of a joint disarmament agreement between France and Britain. 1106

In spite of his rapidly failing health (he had to take a leave of absence from the Chamber in February 1850), he had another flurry of activity over the summer of 1850 when he had returned to Mugron and a local spa town for rest. He did not work on his treatise but found time to write some of his best known works, The Law (June 1850) and WSWNS (July 1850). 1107 The second part of EH was reconstructed by his friends Paillottet and Fontenay out of his surviving papers and was published in July 1851 with 15 additional chapters or parts of chapters.

Since these essays appeared after the June Days riots it is not surprising that Bastiat spends some time criticising socialist ideas about reorganising society, or what he calls "utopian delusions," especially those of Rousseau and his followers. He challenges their argument that human interests are naturally in conflict and that the only way to remove this conflict is to have a "Prince," or a "Legislator," or a social "Mechanic" redesign society from the ground up.

In Section II he lays out the foundation upon which his theory of political economy rests. He sees the individual as "un être actif" (an acting being) who is capable of sensing the world about him or her. Each individual can feel both pleasure and pain, and seeks to increase the former and avoid the latter. From "sensation" the individual acquires "desires, appetites, and needs". From "action" come the ideas of "effort, fatigue, work, and production" in order to satisfy those desires and needs. From "satisfaction" arise ideas about "pleasure, enjoyment, and consumption." From these notions come the three basic principles of Bastiat's treatise, namely "Needs, Efforts, and Satisfactions."

Other important ideas which he covers in "Economic Harmonies I, II, III" include the following:

the idea of "human action" which is strikingly similar to that of the later Austrian school of economics 1108
he discusses at some length the neglected but important idea of non-material goods or "services" which will become a very important part of his theory of exchange (that "exchange is the mutual exchange of a service for another service") in EH Chap. IV "Exchange" 1109
the idea that human needs are unlimited in nature and not a fixed quantity. Instead, they form a "ladder" or hierarchy with the most urgent needs being satisfied first, followed by the others in order of urgency as one becomes more prosperous

In Section IV 1110 some of his key ideas are:

that the only way to satisfy one's own needs is to cooperate with others in satisfying their needs
his observations about human bahaviour are "truths" which should be obvious to anybody who "acts" to achieve certain goals. Again, his idea are very similar to the idea of "apriorism" of the Austrian school 1111
that utility comes from a combination of "the free gifts of nature" (material things and forces of nature) and human labor or action
the importance of accumulating capital in order to make work easier
that man is unique because he has "the ability to organize his affairs, to plan for the future, to exercise control over himself, and to economise or save for the future."
there is a brief mention of the importance of the interests of consumers

Version History

Section I was untitled in the JDE article. In EH1 it was given the title "Economic Harmonies." 1112 In EH2 it formed the first part of Chap. III "Needs, Efforts, Satisfactions". 1113

Changes to Section I in the later versions included some minor word changes (which are indicated in the footnotes) and the insertion of a footnote with a quotation from a book by Victor Considerant on the free market economy as "a social hell," and a new sentence about disturbing factors at the end of second last paragraph. The latter reflected Bastiat's growing interest in what types of government interventions disturbed the natural harmony which arose when individuals interacted voluntarily with each other in a free market. 1114

Section II, with the opening line "The Subject of Political Economy is Man," was extensively rewritten for EH1 (1850) where it appeared as Chap. II "Besoins, Efforts, Satisfactions" (Needs, Efforts, and Satisfactions), pp. 60-72. In EH2 (1851) it became the second part of Chap. III "Needs, Efforts, Satisfactions," pp. 39-47.

Section II was extensively rewritten in the later versions. In addition to several minor word changes, he inserted two new paragraphs in EH in which he replies to criticisms that political economy is too concerned with "self-interest" and ignores "poetry"; a new 800 word section on self-interest, progress, and harmony and disharmony; and a new 400 word section on utility which is gratuitous or free of charge. He also cut a large 1,200 word section from the JDE article which did not appear in the EH version. This dealt with Bastiat's differences with his intellectual forebears like Adam Smith and J.B. Say over what constituted the proper subject matter of political economy, and the importance of "non-material goods" or services provided by people such as magistrates, authors, priests, justices, and artists like the Spanish opera singer Malibran. 1115 Bastiat thought Say in his Cours was much better than Smith on this subject but his work was still incomplete in his view.

Section III, with the opening line "On the Needs of Man" was reused in EH but with the addition of several new pages. In EH1 (1850) it appeared as the first part of Chap. III "Des Besoins de l'homme" (The Needs of Man), pp. 73-87. In EH2 (1851) it appeared as Chap. III "Des Besoins de l'homme" (The Needs of Man), pp. 48-58.

Changes made to Section III in the EH versions include minor words changes or additions, but most notably the insertion of a new 700 word section in which he discusses the relationship between wealth and virtue and vice, and the appearance of "l'inégalité factice" (artificial inequality) caused by legislation

Section IV (which was published as a separate article "Economic Harmonies IV," JDE, Sept. 1848 (see below pp. 000)) was unchanged and appeared in EH1 (1850) as the second part of Chap. III, pp. 87-110; and in EH2 (1851) as the second part of Chap. III, pp. 58-73.

There were no significant changes made to Section IV in the EH versions.

Text I.

What a profoundly dreadful spectacle France offers us!

It would be hard to say whether anarchy has moved from thoughts into deeds or from deeds into thoughts, but what is certain is that it has permeated everything.

The poor are rising up against the rich, the proletariat against property (owners), the people against the bourgeoisie, labor against capital, agriculture against industry, the country against the towns, the provinces against the capital, and the native born citizens against foreigners.

And along come the theorists to turn this conflict into a theory. "It is the inevitable result of the nature of things", they say, "that is to say, of freedom. Man is self-centered , 1116 and this is the source of all evil, for because he is self-centered he tends to be concerned with his own well-being, and he can find this only in the misfortune of his fellows. Let us therefore prevent him from following his inclinations; let us stifle his freedom; let us change the human heart, and substitute a different driving force from the one that God has placed there. Let us invent and then manage an artificial form of society!" 1117

At this point a boundless prospect opens up alike for logic or the imagination. If you are endowed with the mind of a dialectician and a morose nature, you will beaver away at the explication of Evil. 1118 You can dissect it, put it in a crucible, have it spell out its definitive viewpoint, go back to its causes, and pursue its consequences. Then, since given our native imperfection it inheres in everything, there is nothing that cannot be denigrated. Property, the family, capital, industry, competition, freedom, and self-interest, will be shown from one angle only, the one that destroys or wounds; the natural history of mankind will, so to speak, be encapsulated clinically. God will be challenged to reconcile His alleged infinite bounty with the existence of evil. You sully everything, you are disgusted with everything and you deny everything, and yet you never achieve anything better than a sorry and precarious success with classes whose suffering inclines them all too readily to despair.

If, on the other hand, you bear a heart open to benevolence, and your mind revels in illusions, you rush head first in pursuit of chimeras. You dream of Oceania, 1119 of Atlantis, 1120 of Salente, 1121 Spensonia, 1122 Icaria, 1123 Utopia, 1124 and Phalansteries, 1125 you people them with docile, loving and devoted beings who are careful never to put an obstacle in the path of dreamers' fantasies. Dreamers settle themselves complacently into their role (as the agent) of Providence. They arrange, dispose, and mold men at will. Nothing stops them, and they never encounter disappointments. They are like the Roman preacher who, after abandoning his Rousseau-style views, vigorously refuted the Social Contract and triumphed at having reduced his opponent to silence. This is how our reformers dangle in front of those who are enduring suffering, seductive pictures of an ideal form of happiness perfectly fit for putting off the harsh necessities of real life.

However, it is rare for a Utopian to limit himself to these innocent delusions. As soon as he wishes to embroil the human race in them he finds that the human race does not lend itself to easy transformation. It resists bitterly. To encourage it, he does not merely talk to humanity of the happiness it is turning down, he talks mainly of the evils from which he claims to be delivering it. There could be no such thing as too striking a picture. He falls into the habit of loading his palette and sharpening up his colors. He seeks evil in the society of today with as much passion as as another might devote to discovering good in it. He sees only suffering, rags, exhaustion, starvation, pain, and oppression. He is astonished and upset because society is not sufficiently conscious of its poverty. He stops at nothing to strip society of its indifference and, after having begun with benevolence, he ends up with misanthropy as well. 1126

God forbid that I cast doubts on the sincerity of anyone. But truly, I cannot see how the political writers, who see radical conflict as the basis of the natural order of societies, can enjoy an instant of peace and calm. I consider that discouragement and despair must be their sorry lot. For in the end, if nature has made a mistake in making self-interest the mainspring of human society (and its error is manifest, as soon as it is accepted that interests are inevitably in conflict), how do these writers not see that evil is irreparable? As we can turn only to men, we who are men ourselves, where will we place our fulcrum for our lever to change the tendencies of the human race? Will we appeal to the Police, the Magistrates, the State ,or the Legislator? This, however, is to call upon men, that is to say, those who are subject to the common infirmities of man. Should we turn to Universal Suffrage? This would be to give the freest possible rein to universal tendencies.

These political writers therefore have just one resource. This is to pass themselves off as people with revealed knowledge and prophets kneaded from a different clay, who draw their inspiration from other sources than the rest of their fellow-men, and this is doubtless why we see them so often enveloping their theories and counsels in mystic phraseology. But if they are sent by God, let them provide proof of their mission. In the end, what they are asking for is sovereign power and the most absolute despotism that has ever existed. Not only do they want to govern our actions, they also aspire to change the very essence of our feelings. This is the least that their writings show us. Do they hope that the human race will take their word for it, above all when they cannot even reach agreement among themselves?

But before even examining their projects for artificial forms of society, is there not one thing that has to be ascertained, that is to say whether they are not mistaken right from the start? Is it absolutely certain that INTERESTS ARE NATURALLY IN CONFLICT, that an irremediable cause of inequality is bound to develop in the natural order of human society under the influence of self-interest and, this being so, that God has clearly made a mistake when He ordained that man could pursue his own well-being? 1127

This is what I propose to investigate.

Taking man as God was pleased to make him, with the propensity to look to the future and to gain experience, and being perfectible and self-loving, it is true, but with an affection which is tempered by the principle of kindness and in any case contained and balanced by encountering similar sentiments universally found in the environment in which it operates, I wonder what social order is bound to result from the combination and free play of these elements.

If we find that this result is none other than a gradual progress toward well-being, human improvement, and equality, a sustained approach of all classes toward the same physical, intellectual, and moral level, while at the same time this level is constantly rising, the work of God will be justified. We will be pleased to learn that there is no gap in creation and that the social order, as all the others, proves the existence of these harmonious forces 1128 before which Newton bowed and which drew from the Psalmist the cry: " Coeli enarrant gloriam Dei. " 1129

Rousseau used to say: "If I were a prince or legislator , I would not waste time saying what ought to be done; I would do it or hold my tongue." 1130

I am not a prince, but the trust of my fellow-citizens has made me a legislator . 1131 Perhaps they will tell me that now is the time for me to act and not to write.

I hope they will forgive me! Whether it is truth itself that harries me or just that I am the victim of delusion, I still feel the need to concentrate on a range of ideas for which I have not been able to gain acceptance up to now because I have presented them in dribs and drabs. I think that I discern sublime and reassuring harmonies in the play of natural laws governing society. Should I not try to show others what I see or think I see, in rallying a great many mistaken minds and embittered hearts around a way of thinking based upon concord and fraternity? If I appear to drift away from the post to which I have been called in order to gather my thoughts, at a time when the beloved ship of State is buffeted by storms, it is because my weak hands cannot help hold the tiller. Besides, am I betraying my mission when I reflect on the causes of the storm itself and endeavor to act on these causes? What is more, if I do not do this now, who knows whether I will have the opportunity to do it later? 1132

I will start by setting out a few economic notions. With the help of the work carried out by my predecessors, I will endeavor to epitomize this mode of explanation in one true, simple, and fruitful notion, one that it foresaw from the outset and to which it has constantly drawn near, with the time perhaps having come to establish its wording definitively. Then by this beacon, I will try to resolve some of the problems that still arouse controversy: competition, mechanization, foreign trade, luxury, capital, rent, etc. I will show 1133 the relationships, or rather the harmonies, of political economy with the other moral and social sciences by casting a glance on the serious matters encapsulated in the following words: Self-Interest, Property, Liberty, Responsibility, Solidarity, Equality, Fraternity, and Unity. 1134

It would be difficult to miss the double trap that lies in wait for this exercise. In the midst of the whirlwind sweeping us away, people will not read this book if it is too theoretical. If it succeeds in being read, it will be because the questions are merely touched upon. How do we reconcile the rights of science with the demands of readers? In order to satisfy all the requirements of form and substance, each word will have to be weighed and its rightful place reflected upon. This is how crystal is formed drop by drop in silence and obscurity. Silence, obscurity, time, and freedom of thought , I lack at once all of these; and I am reduced to relying upon the wisdom of the general public and craving its indulgence.

II.

The subject of political economy is Man .

However, it does not embrace man in his entirety. 1135 For example, political economy is not concerned with his relationships with his future destiny. It considers him only from one perspective.

Our first duty ought to be to study man from this point of view. This is why we cannot avoid going back to the primordial phenomena of human sensation and human action ." 1136 Readers should nevertheless be reassured. We will not be spending much time in the misty regions of metaphysics and we will be borrowing from this science only notions that are simple, clear, and if possible incontrovertible.

The soul, or to avoid going into the question of spirituality, man, is endowed with sensation . Whether sensation is in the soul or the body, it remains a fact that man as a passive being experiences painful or pleasurable sensations . As an acting being, 1137 he makes an effort to avoid the former (painful) and increase the latter (number of agreeable sensations). The result, 1138 can be termed (a) Satisfaction .

From the general notion of Sensation arises the more specific ideas of desires , appetites , and needs . 1139

From the general notion of Action arises the more specific ideas of effort , fatigue , work , and production . 1140

From the general notion of Satisfaction arise the more specific ideas of pleasure , enjoyment , and consumption . 1141

Sensation is personal; pleasure and pain affect (only) the individual. The effort which they (pleasure and pain) provoke in him (the individual) to undertake comes from the individual and is also personal. This group of phenomena constitutes self-interest , which is the great spring (ressort) (which drives) the social world. 1142

The notion of property 1143 can be inferred from these premises. Since it is the individual who experiences the sensation , 1144 since it is he who makes the e ffort , it follows of necessity that the satisfaction should come to him, without which condition, the effort would have no raison d'être.

This is also true for inheritance . No theory, no oratorical outbursts, will stop fathers and mothers 1145 loving their children. People who take delight in organizing imaginary forms of society may find this shocking, but this is how things are. A father will make as much Effort to ensure the satisfaction of his children as for his own. Indeed, perhaps he will make more for them. If, therefore, a law that goes against nature prohibited the transmission of property from father to son, 1146 at least one half of human Effort would be wasted. 1147

I will have an opportunity to return to these subjects of Self-Interest, Property, and Inheritance.

Today, I will limit myself to exploring the boundaries, so to speak, of the domaine of the science with which we are concerned. 1148

I am not one of those who think that a science has, ipso facto , natural and immutable boundaries. In the sphere of ideas, as in that of facts, everything is tied together, everything is connected, all truths are based on each other, and no science can fail to embrace them all if it is to be complete. It has been said with reason that for an infinite form of intelligence there would be only one single truth. It is thus our weakness that reduces us to studying in isolation a certain order of phenomena, and the resulting classification cannot escape a certain arbitrariness.

The real merit lies in setting out the facts, their causes, and their consequences, accurately. Another merit, a lesser and purely relative one, lies in determining in a manner, not rigorous, since that would be impossible, but rational, the order of facts one proposes to study.

I state this so that it might not be assumed that I intend to criticize my predecessors if I succeed in giving political economy limits that differ slightly from those they have assigned to it.

Recently, economists have been greatly criticised for having concentrated too much on the study of w ealth . People wanted them to include in the science all that closely or remotely contributed to the happiness or suffering of the human race, and they went so far as to assume that the economists were denying everything that they did not deal with, for example, the phenomena surrounding the principle of fellow-feeling, is something as natural in people's hearts as the principle of self-interest. It is as though mineralogists were being accused of denying the animal kingdom. What! Are wealth and the laws governing its production, distribution, or consumption not a sufficiently wide and important field to be the subject of a specific science? If economists' conclusions contradicted those of politics or morals, I would understand the accusation. They might be told: "By limiting your scope you have been led astray, for it is not possible for two truths to be in collision." Perhaps the conclusion of the work I am submitting to the public will be that the science of wealth is in perfect harmony with all the others.

Needs , efforts , and satisfactions 1149 - here is the general foundation of all the sciences which have mankind as their subject. 1150

But it may well be the case that political economy embraces a domain just as vast.

(For example,) breathing is a need . It requires an effort and leads to a (certain) satisfaction . However, nobody dreams of making the phenomenon of breathing part of the field of political economy.

A person strives to earn the estime, affection, and respect of their fellows. His success (in doing so) is his reward. Should one say that this then is a subject for the study of an economist?

It is the same for the efforts which some men make in order to win (military) glory, and others the crown of being elected to office.

(Thus) one can understand why a science might refuse to include within its area of research every feeling, every effort, and every satisfaction which exist in the physical, intellectual, and moral world.

To impose this vast area (of experience) on political economy would be to demand that it become the universal science, it would be to prohibit it from limiting the field of its investigations.

Need, effort, and satisfaction are the three elements which have to come together in order for a phenomenon to be part of political economy. But since not everything which demonstrates this triple character can be part of it, how do we recognize those (things) which we have to exclude?

I have to admit that this matter has divided the Economists.

Generally, they have located (it) in the latter term (satisfaction), and by making the general idea of satisfaction what in logic is termed " the essential difference, " which can be used to characterize and limit the science of economics.

This was quite (a) natural (thing to do). They wanted to deal with (the concept) of wealth . They could not see it in our needs , nor in our efforts . They therefore had to look for it in the place where it actually resided, in the objects suitable for satisfying our desires.

Adam Smith required two conditions for things to be considered to be wealth : that they were exchangeable and could be accumulated . 1151 These two conditions implied a third, namely that they were tangible or material since, how could one conceive of something non-material which could be accumulated?

Unfortunately, the language of political economy was based upon this fact. Also, all the expressions which have entered its vocabulary have been imprinted with (the idea of) materiality, in particular the two key terms: production and consumption .

According to this definition, Smith should have left a host of professions outside of political economy, and excluded from it all men who did not create tangible products , but provided services , such as magistrates, authors, priests, justices, military men, doctors, artists, professors, merchants, bankers, insurers, entrepreneurs in the transport industry, etc., etc. However, he was too busy and contented himself with saying that these professions are useful but unproductive , 1152 which suggests (there is) a flaw in the definition itself.

The influence of this defect has significantly obscured the notion of Value, as I will explain later. 1153

J.B. Say got much closer to the truth in his Treatise and basically one could say that he reached it in his Cours . 1154

In the first of these works he had at first adopted the perspective of Smith, but his investigative spirit soon showed him that this distinction between products and services separated things which had the same purpose, the same effects, the same origin, and the same nature. 1155

Also, in his Cours he readily included services as part of Social Economy, recognizing them as making up the foundation of wealth, namely Value. 1156 He even went much further in his Letters to Malthus when he stated that all value is non-material . 1157 This was the implicit recognition that products themselves only have value because of the services which they provide. The entire theory which I am submitting today to the public is based upon this observation.

Thus, J.B. Say is the author of the discovery which enlarged the (science of ) economics while at the same time establishing its true limits.

But did he draw out of his discovery all the consequences which it entailed? One can doubt that he did without lessening the respect which his massive works deserve. Better than anyone (else), J.B. Say knew that no human science is ever complete, and nobody knows better what still remains to be learned than he who has learned the most. No person who has studied deeply and seriously, but only a passionate poet, would be able to write that:

"We leave for all our successors nothing more to say." 1158

Besides, wouldn't it be contradictory to expect that the person who came to an unexpected conclusion, in spite of the authority of his predecessors, in spite of his own early opinions, and as a result of laborious and repeated investigation, would have made this conclusion the basis of his work? This is too much to ask of the fleeting nature of a human life. It is a great victory for a scholar to transmit a beautiful idea, a fertile seed, to his successors. How does he gather the fruit since it [elle = idée?] too is the fruit of his genius? The sciences advance in this way: what was the glorious conclusion for the master becomes the easy point of departure for the pupil. And according to M. Say, each generation sees the treasury of their knowledge increase without end.

One must not forget that J.B. Say shared Smith's idea. For a long time he had focused his attention on the product . It was only by the force of logic that he happened to recognize the value (that existed) in services . He couldn't start with the idea of the complete fusion of the two elements, let alone the complete disappearance of the former in the latter. All that he was able to do was to juxtapose them, rather than see them as identical. In his writings "the product" maintains a kind of pre-eminence, and "service" forms at the most a particular and additional class of products, under the name of non-material products , which are terms (which one is) a bit surprised to see yoked together. This is because the human mind will always refuse to see "a product" in something which is " non-material, " whether it is the song of Malibran, 1159 the decision of a judge, the advice of a doctor or lawyer, or the lesson of a teacher.

The result of this is that the man who discovered the non-materiality of Value none-the-less preserved that sacred vocabulary of political economy, all of whose terms such as production , consumption , etc., carried the mark of materiality. And certainly, it is a concern that (economic) science after such a long time still bears the burden of this flaw, because what courageous neologist would dare to rewrite the language (of economics)?

However, thanks to this gradual approximation towards a solution to the problem, the moment has come to take a decisive step. Starting from this point, that value is non-material , one of the aims of this work is to show that services are not products because they have value, but on the contrary, that products only have value because and to the extent that they are services, of the kind that the latter, by definition, alone remain within the province of (economic) science.

Whatever the case may be, it is not by focussing on satisfaction and looking within this phenomenon to find a specific distinction, namely materiality, that Smith was able to find the true subject matter and the rational limits of (economic) science. I confess that this procedure seems to me to be arbitrary and crudely empirical. Smith himself proved its inadequacy. What kind of social economy (is it) which does not take into account half of society, or if it does concern itself with it, regards it as inconsequential?

So let us look for another solution. 1160

Of the three terms that encompass human destiny – Sensation, Effort and Satisfaction - the first and last of these are, always and of necessity, combined within the same individual. It is impossible to imagine them separated. We might imagine a sensation that is not satisfied or a need unmet but never has anyone been able to conceive of a need in one man and its satisfaction in another.

If this were also true for the middle term, Effort , man would be a totally solitary being. Economic phenomena would be completely realized within an isolated individual. There might be (other) persons nearby but there would be no society. There might be a Personal Economy but there never could be a Political Economy.

But this is not so. It is very possible and it frequently happens that the Need of one person owes its Satisfaction to the Effort of another. That is a fact. If each of us reviewed all the satisfactions that we received, we would acknowledge that, for the most part, we owed them to efforts that we had not made, and in the same way, the work we do in whatever employment we have, almost always goes to satisfy desires that are not within us.

This tells us that it is neither in the needs nor the satisfactions, phenomena which are essentially personal and incapable of being transmitted, but in the nature of the middle term, Human Effort , that the social principle, the origin of political economy, must be sought.

It is, in fact, this ability given to man, and man alone of all the creatures, to work for one another , and it is this transfer of effort, this exchange of services, with all the complicated and infinite combinations to which it gives rise through time and space, that constitutes economic science, (and) reveals its origin and sets its limits.

Therefore I say:

What forms the domaine of political economy is any effort likely to satisfy the needs of a person other than the one who has made it (the effort), provided that it is reciprocated, and also consequently the needs and satisfactions relating to this category of effort.

Thus, to cite an example, as I said earlier, 1161 although the action of breathing contains the three terms that make up the economic phenomenon it does not belong to this science, and the reason for this is clear: the question here concerns an effort which is generally not transferrable. 1162 We need nobody's help to breathe; no service is either given or received. This fact is individual by nature, not social , and so cannot be included in a science based entirely on relationships, as its very name indicates.

However, should men need to help each other to breathe under specific circumstances, as when a diver descends in a diving bell, or a doctor treats someone's lungs, or when the State regulators take steps to purify the air, we have in this situation a need satisfied by the effort of another person than the one experiencing it. A service is provided, and breathing itself, at least in this respect, enters the domain of political economy as far as assistance and remuneration are concerned.

It is not necessary for the transaction to be carried out; it is enough for the transaction to be possible for the work to be economic in nature. A farmer who grows wheat for his own use accomplishes an economic fact for the sole reason that the wheat can be exchanged.

To make an effort in order to satisfy the needs of others is to provide these persons with a service . If a service is agreed upon in return, there is an exchange of services , and as this is the most common practice, political economy may be defined as being the theory of exchange .

However pressing the need for one of the contracting parties or intense the effort required of the other, if the exchange is freely made the two services are of equal value. The value therefore consists in the comparative evaluation of the reciprocal services , and (thus) it may also be said that political economy is the theory of value . 1163

I will make one comment here that will prove how closely the sciences are involved with each other and how they almost blend with each other.

I have just defined service . It is the effort made by one man while the need and satisfaction are in another. Sometimes the service is given freely, without reward or without any service being required in return. In this case, it is based on the principle of fellow-feeling rather than on that of self-interest. It constitutes a gift and not an exchange. Consequently, it would appear not to belong to political economy (which is the theory of exchange), 1164 but to moral philosophy. In effect, actions of this nature are, because of their motives, more moral than economic (in their nature). However, we will see that, because of their effects, they are of interest to the science we are considering. On the other hand, services based on effort in return for payment, while they are for this reason essentially economic, are not in terms of their effects, outside the sphere of morality.

Thus, these two branches of knowledge have an infinite number of points of contact, and since two truths cannot be in conflict, when an economist attributes disastrous consequences to a phenomenon while at the same time a moralist attributes favorable effects to it, it can be stated that one or other of them is mistaken. In this way, the sciences can be checked against each other.

III.

On the Needs of Man 1165

It is perhaps impossible, and in any case it would not be very useful, to put forward a complete and methodical catalog of man's needs. Almost all of those that are truly important are included in the following list:

Respiration (I am including this need here as being the point at which the transfer of labor or the exchange of services begin), Food, Clothing, Shelter, the Maintenance and Restoration of Health, Means of Travel, Security, Education, and Entertainment. 1166

Needs exist. That is a fact. It would be puerile to enquire whether it would not be better for them not to exist and to ask why God has subjected us to them.

It is certain that man suffers and even dies when he cannot satisfy the needs that arise from his very nature. It is certain that he suffers and may even die when he satisfies some of them to excess.

We are able to satisfy the majority of our needs only if we take the trouble to (do so), a trouble which may be considered a form of suffering . This is also true of the actions which we take to deprive ourselves (of something) when we exercise a noble control over our appetites.

Thus suffering is inevitable, such that what is left to us is scarcely more than a choice of harms. What is more, this suffering is the most intimate and personal thing in the world, from which it follows that self-interest , decried these days as mere egoism and individualism, is indestructible. Nature has placed sensation at our nerve endings, and at all the approaches to our hearts and minds, like some advanced sentry, to warn us when there is either a lack or an excess of satisfaction. Pain thus has both a purpose and a mission. The question has often been asked whether the existence of evil can be reconciled with the infinite goodness of the Creator, an awesome problem that philosophy will always continue to grapple with and probably never succeed in solving. As for political economy, it has to take man as he is, all the more so since it has not been given to imagination itself to work out, and still less to reason to conceive, a living mortal being free of pain. All our efforts to understand sensation without pain or man without sensation would be in vain.

In these times, a few sentimentalist schools reject as false any form of social science that has not devised a synthesis by means of which pain disappears from the face of this earth. Their judgment of political economy is severe, because political economy accepts what it is impossible to deny, namely suffering. They go further and make political economy responsible for it. It is as though the frailty of our organs were attributable to the physiologist examining them.

Doubtless, you can make yourself popular for a while, attract men who are suffering to your cause and inflame them against the natural order of society, by announcing that you have conceived a plan for the artificial organization of society 1167 in which pain in any form would be excluded. You might even claim to have stolen the secret from God and interpreted His presumed will by banishing evil from the face of the earth. And people unfailingly brand as impious any science that did not make this claim, accusing it of failing to recognize or of denying the foresight or the power of the author of all things.

At the same time, these schools paint a dreadful picture of present societies and do not realize that if it is impious to foresee suffering in the future, it is no less so to note it in the past or the present. For there is no limit to infinity, and if one single man in the world has suffered since the creation that would be enough to enable us to accept, with no impiety , that pain has entered into the Providential plan.

It is certainly more scientific and more manly to acknowledge the existence of major natural events that not only exist but are such that without them the human race could not even be imagined.

Thus, man is subject to suffering, and consequently so is society.

Suffering has a function in individual people, and consequently in society as well.

A study of the social laws will show us that the purpose of suffering is to destroy its own causes gradually and to draw around itself increasingly narrow limits. 1168

The list I gave above places material needs first.

We live at a time that obliges me to put the reader on guard once more at this point against a form of sentimental affectation that is highly fashionable.

There are some who give short shrift to what they disdainfully call material needs and material satisfactions . In the words of Bélise to Chrysale, they would doubtless tell me:

Is the body, this rag, of any importance?

Or worth enough to warrant even a passing thought? 1169

And, although they are in general well provided for with everything, and I congratulate them sincerely for this, they will criticize me for having pointed out food , for example, as one of our prime needs.

I certainly acknowledge that moral development is of a higher order than physical maintenance. But in the end, are we so given over to this mania for declamatory rhetoric that we cannot say that, in order to make progress, we have to be alive first? Let us avoid this childishness that obstructs science. By wanting to seem philanthropic we become untruthful, for it is contrary alike to reason and to the facts that moral development, a concern for dignity, and the cultivation of refined feeling, can precede the requirements of simply staying alive. This affected moralizing is entirely modern. Rousseau, that enthusiastic eulogist of the state of nature, refrained from such and Fénelon, a man endowed with exquisite delicacy and a sweet tenderness of heart, a spiritual being to the point of quietism and a stoic in his own regard, said: "After all, strength of mind consists in desiring to ascertain accurately the way in which the things that are fundamental to human life are constituted. Every major question turns on this." 1170

Without our claiming therefore to classify needs into a rigorously methodical order, we can say that man cannot direct his efforts to satisfying moral imperatives of the noblest and most elevated kind until he has seen to those that relate to the maintenance and sustenance of life. From this, we can already conclude that everything 1171 that makes material life more difficult undermines the moral life of nations. 1172 1173

I have one important remark to make on human needs, one that is even fundamental in political economy, and this is that needs are not a fixed and immutable quantity. They are not static by nature, but progressive.

This characteristic is notable even in our most physical needs, and becomes more apparent as we go up the scale to the intellectual desires and tastes that mark man out from the beasts.

It appears that if there is something that men ought to have in common it is the need for food since except for abnormal cases stomachs are approximately the same.

However, the foods that were rare at one period have become commonplace in another, and the diet that would be enough for a beggar would subject a Dutchman to torture. For this reason, this most pressing and bodily need, and consequently the most uniform of all, even so varies with age, sex, temperament, climate, and habit.

This is true for all the others. Scarcely has man found himself a shelter than he wants a house. Scarcely has he clothed himself than he wants adornment, and scarcely has he satisfied his bodily needs than study, science, and art open out a boundless field to his desires.

The promptness with which what was just a vague desire becomes a taste, and what was just a taste is transformed into a need, and even a pressing one, is a phenomenon worthy of note.

Take this rough and hard-working artisan. He is used to a coarse diet, humble clothes, and a mediocre lodging but thinks that he would be the happiest of men, with no further desires, if he were able to reach the rung of the ladder that he sees immediately above him. He is amazed that those who have reached this are still unsatisfied. In effect, should the modest good fortune he has dreamt of arrive, he would be happy, happy, alas, just for a few days.

For very soon he would become used to his new state, and little by little he would cease to notice his so-called good fortune. He would automatically put on the garment he had yearned for. He has made himself a new environment, he mixes with different people and, from time to time, his lips drink from a different cup, and so he aspires to climbing another rung, and if he examines his own past life he realizes that while his fortune has changed his spirit has remained the same as it was, an insatiable source of desires.

It appears that nature has given habit a peculiar power, so that it acts in us like a ratchet wheel in mechanics, and that the human race, forever impelled toward increasing higher regions, is never able to stop at any stage of civilization.

Perhaps, the sense of (one's own) worth acts with even greater force in the same direction. Stoic philosophy has often criticized men for wanting to appear rather than to be . However, taking things generally, is it certain that the business of appearing is not one of the ways of being for men?

When, through work, order, and thrift, a family rises by degrees to the social regions in which tastes become increasingly refined, relationships more polished, sentiments more purified, and the intellect more cultured, who is not aware of the poignant pain that accompanies a downturn of fortune that obliges it to descend (the social ladder)? 1174 This is when it is not the body alone that suffers. (This) descent breaks off habits that have become second nature, as we say. The sentiment of (self-)worth is undermined, and with it all the powers of the spirit. For this reason, it is common in these cases to see the victims give way to despair and slump suddenly into a degrading level of brutishness. It is as true for the social environment as for the atmosphere. Mountain dwellers who are used to pure air become rapidly less healthy in the narrow streets of our cities.

I can hear people crying out to me: "Economist, you are already stumbling. You said that your science was in harmony with with the moral code 1175 and here you are, justifying sybaritic (self-indulgent) luxury." "Philosopher," say I, in turn, "take off these clothes that were never worn by primitive man, smash your furniture, burn your books, eat the raw flesh of animals, and I will then answer your objections. It is too easy to question the power of habit, of which we are only too willing to be the living proof (of what it can achieve)."

This inclination with which nature has endowed our organs may be criticized, but criticism will not prevent it from being universal. It is seen in all nations, whether ancient or modern, savage or civilized, at the ends of the earth or in France. Without it, it is impossible to explain civilization. Well, when an inclination of the human heart is universal and indestructible, can social science take the liberty of not taking it into account?

Political writers who pride themselves on being the disciples of Rousseau will put forward this objection. But Rousseau has never denied the phenomenon of which I am speaking. He notes positively both the indefinite elasticity of need and the power of habit, and the very role I am assigning to him, which consists in preventing the human race from taking a backward step. The only thing is that what I admire he deplores, and this is to be expected. Rousseau assumes that there was a time in which men had no rights, duties, relationships, affections, or language, and that it was then, in his view, that men were happy and perfect. He must therefore have hated this wheel in the social mechanism which is taking mankind further and further from ideal perfection. Those who, on the contrary, think that perfection was not at the beginning but will be at the end of human evolution, admire the spring that impels us forward. But with regard to the existence and the play of the spring itself we are in agreement.

"When men", he said, "enjoyed a great deal of leisure and used it to procure for themselves all sorts of commodities unknown to their fathers, this was the first yoke they placed upon themselves without realizing it, and the first source of misfortune that they prepared for their descendants for, apart from the fact that these products were thus contributing to softening up men's bodies and minds, such commodities lost their attraction through habit , and when at the same time they degenerated into real needs , being deprived of them became much more cruel than the pleasure obtained from their possession, and people were much more unhappy at losing them than they were happy at enjoying them." 1176

Rousseau was convinced that God, nature, and the human race were mistaken. I know that this opinion is still anchored in many minds, but I do not share it.

After all, God forbid that I should wish to speak out against the most noble attribute, the finest virtue of man, his ability to dominate his passions, moderate his desires, and scorn sumptuous pleasures. I do not say that he should become a slave of this or that artificial need. I do say that need, considered in general terms, and seen as a result of both the physical and non-material natures of man and the force of habit and sense of worth, is indefinitely extendable, because it arises from an inexhaustible source, desire. Who will criticize a wealthy man if he is sober, restrained in the way he dresses, and eschews ostentation and indolence? Are there no more elevated desires, however, to which he is allowed to yield? Has the need for education any limit? Are efforts to render service to his country, subsidize the arts, propagate useful ideas, or assist his unfortunate brethren incompatible with the generally accepted uses of wealth?

What is more, whether philosophy thinks it is right or wrong, human need is not a fixed and immutable quantity. This is a certain fact, incontrovertible and universal. In no way were needs in the fourteenth century the same as ours with regard to food, accommodation, and education, and we can safely say that ours will not be the same as those to which our descendants are subject.

This incidentally, is an observation common to all the elements covered by political economy: wealth, work, values, services, etc., all things pertaining to the extreme variability of our principal subject, man. Political economy, unlike geometry or physics, does not have the advantage of speculating on objects that can be weighed or measured, and this is both one of its difficulties in the first place and subsequently a perpetual source of error; for when the human mind is applied to a particular order of phenomena, it is naturally inclined to seek a criterion , a common measure to which he can relate everything in order to give the branch of knowledge with which he is dealing the characteristic of an exact science . For this reason, we see most authors looking for a degree of fixity, some in value , others in money , or wheat, or work , that is to say in things which are constantly changing.

A great many economic errors arise because human needs are considered a fixed quantity, and this is why I thought it necessary to extend myself somewhat on this subject. I do not think I am getting ahead of myself by saying briefly how people reason on this subject. They take all the general satisfactions (enjoyed) at the time in which they live and assume that the human race will not agree to (any) others. This being so, if nature's bounty, the power of machines, or temperate and moderate habits manage to paralyse for a (short) time some portion of human labor, this advance causes worry, it is thought a disaster, and refuge is sought behind absurd and also erroneous mantras such as: We have overproduction, we are being killed by over-supply, production is exceeding our ability to consume, etc. It is impossible to find a proper solution to the problem of machines , foreign competition , or luxury 1177 if you consider need to be an invariable quantity, and do not realize that it is indefinitely extendible.

But if man's needs are unlimited, progressive, and able to increase according to one's desires, which are an unquenchable source which feeds them (needs) incessantly, nature must have placed in man and around him the unlimited and progressive means of satisfying them , otherwise there would be disharmony (discordance) and contradiction in the economic laws governing society, since equilibrium between the means and the end is the prime condition of any form of harmony . This is what we are going to investigate in the next article. 1178

15. T.224 Bastiat's Letter to Garnier on the Right to a Job (Oct, 1848)↩

Source

T.224 (1848.10.??) "Bastiat's Letter to Garnier on the right to a job" (Opinion de M. Frédéric Bastiat). "Opinions diverses. V. Lettre de M. Frédéric Bastiat, représentant des Landes, à M. Joseph Garnier,", Le droit au travail à l'Assemblée nationale (Guillaumin, 1848), pp. 373-75. [DMH] [CW4]??

Le Droit au travail à l'Assemblée Nationale. Recueil complet de tous les discours prononcés dans cette mémorable discussion par MM. Fresneau, Hubert Delisle, Cazalès, Gaulthier de Rumiily, Pelletier, A. de Tocqueville, Ledru-Rolin, Duvergier de Hauranne, Crémieux, M. Barthe, Gaslonde, de Luppé, Arnaud (de l'Ariège), Thiers, Considerant, Bouhier de l'Ecluse, Martin-Bernard, Billault, Dufaure, Goudchaux, et Lagrange (texts revue par les orateurs), suivis de l'opinion de MM. Marrast, Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Ed. Laboulaye et Cormenin; avec des observations inédites par MM. Léon Faucher, Wolowski, Fréd. Bastiat, de Parieu, et une introduction et des notes par M. Joseph Garnier. Paris : Guillaumin, 1848, pp. 373-76.

Editor's Introduction

During the summer and fall of 1848 the National Assembly debated the issue of the "right to work, or right to a job" (le droit au travail) and its possible inclusion in the new constitution. This is a letter to Joseph Garnier, the editor of a volume which brought together the key documents and the speeches given in the Chamber of Deputies on this matter. An extract of Bastiat's contribution appeared in CW2, p. 411. Here we include the entire letter.

The "right to work" ( le droit au travail , which one might translate in English as the "right to a job") had been a catch phrase of the socialists throughout the 1840s. 1179 What they meant by this term was that the state had the duty to provide work for all men who demanded it. In contrast to this, the classical liberal economists called for the "right of working," or the "freedom to work" ("la liberté du travail, "or "le droit de travailler"), by which they meant the right of any individual to pursue an occupation or activity without any restraints imposed upon him by the state. The latter point of view was articulated by Charles Dunoyer his De la liberté du travail (1845) 1180 and by Bastiat in many of his writings. The socialist perspective was provided by Louis Blanc in L'Organisation du travail (1840) and Le Socialisme, droit au travail (1848) 1181 and by Victor Considérant in La Théorie du droit de propriété et du droit au travail (1848) . 1182

Matters came to a head in May 1848, when a committee of the Constituent Assembly was formed to discuss the issue of "the right to work" just prior to the closing of the state-run National Workshops, which prompted widespread rioting in Paris. In a veritable "who's who" of the socialist and liberal movements of the day, a debate took place in the Assembly and was duly published by the classical liberal publishing firm of Guillaumin later in the year along with commentary by such leading liberal economists as Léon Faucher, Louis Wolowski, Joseph Garnier, and of course, Bastiat. 1183 Not being able to speak on the floor of the Chamber because of his failing voice, Bastiat wrote his "opinion" on the matter for the volume which was edited by Joseph Garnier, in which he distinguished between the right to work ("droit au travail," where "work" is used as a noun and thus might be rendered as the "right to a job") and the "right of working" (droit de travailler, where "work" is used as a verb).

We can see clearly in these passages that Bastiat has a strong view of individual rights, that they exist prior to the formation of the state, that the state exists only to protect these preexisting rights, and that if state force is used to do anything else then it steps outside of its just boundaries. It was precisely this expansion of illegitimate state power that Bastiat was battling during the revolution in 1848 and 1849.

Text

My dear Garnier,

You ask for my opinion of the right to work and you seem to be surprised that I did not present it on the floor of the National Assembly. My silence is due solely to the fact that, when I asked for the floor, thirty of my colleagues were lined up before me. 1184

If one understands by the phrase right to work (droit au travail) as the right of working (droit de travailler) (which implies the right to enjoy the fruit of one's labor), then one can have no doubt on the matter. As far as I'm concerned, I have never written two lines which did not have as their purpose the defence of this notion.

But if one means by the right to work that an individual has the right to demand of the state that it take care of him, provide him with a job and a wage by force, then under no circumstances does this bizarre thesis bear up to close inspection.

First of all, does the state have any rights and duties other than those which already exist among the citizens? I have always thought that its mission was to protect already existing rights. For example, even if we abstract the state away from consideration, I have the right of working (droit de travailler) and of disposing of the fruit of my work. My fellow citizens have the same rights, and we have in addition the right to defend them even by the use of force. This is why we have the community , the common force . The State can and ought to protect us in the exercise of these rights. It is its collective and regularized action which is substituted for individual and disordered action, and the latter is the raison d'être for the former.

But, do I have the right to demand of one of my fellow citizens that he provide me with a job and a wage by force? This right would obviously be different from his right to property. And, if I do not have this right, and if none of the (other) citizens who make up the community have it either, then how can we create it when one group of people exercises it over another group through the intermediary of the State? My goodness! Pierre does not have the right to demand by force that Paul supply him with a job and a wage; but if the two of them establish a common force paid for at common expence, (then) Pierre has the right to call upon this force, to use it against Paul, so that the latter is forced to supply him a job? By creating this common force, the right to work is born for Pierre and the right to property is dead for Paul! What confusion! What word play!

Then it becomes necessary to pervert radically the mind of the workers in order to make them believe that this so-called right will offer them some resources and some guarantees. The State has always been presented to them as the father of a family, a guardian who has inexhaustible wealth and who only lacks a little bit of generosity! 1185 Isn't it patently obvious however, that if the State, in order to give work to Pierre, takes 100 francs from Paul, Paul will have 100 francs less to give work to Jacques? Things will happen exactly as if Pierre had directly exercised this so-called right, or rather this oppression, over Paul. Intervention by the State will be handy for overcoming any resistance; it can even make the right of oppression seem plausible and quieten one's conscience; but it doesn't change the nature of things. Paul's property has not been less violated thereby, and if there is anything obvious in the world, it is that the working class, taken as a whole, will not have (a penny's worth) any more work. It is truly a sad thing that intelligent men are reduced, in the 19th century, to combatting this puerile behaviour which makes us keep our eyes always open to see the jobs which the State creates with the money of the tax-payers, and always shut so not to see the jobs which the tax-payers would have created among themselves if the State had not taken this money from them! 1186

Finally, if the workers would (only) reflect on this, they would see that the right to work would be for them the beginning of poverty. The existence of this right has as a public necessity the non-existence of the right of property. In order to convince you of this, it is sufficient to ask oneself what would happen if we (all) directly exercised this so-called right over one another: 1187 it is quite clear that even the very notion of property would be destroyed. Now, without property there is not any possibility of the formation of capital, and without capital formation there is no possibility of work for the workers. The right to work is thus, in short, universal poverty pushed to destruction. On the day when one only begins to discuss this topic, work will be reduced for the workers by an enormous degree; on the day when it is passed into law there will be no more work beyond the short space of time required by the State to complete the destruction of all capital.

16. T.273 "Comments at a Meeting of the Political Economy Society on Income Tax" (10 Oct., 1848)↩

Source

T.273 (1848.10.10) Bastiat's comments at a "Meeting of the Political Economy Society" (Séance de 10 oct. 1848) (on tax). In "Chronique," JDE, T. 21, no. 90, 15 Oct. 1848, pp. 339-40; also ASEP (1889), pp. 68-69. Not in OC. [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

This is the second record of eleven which we have of Bastiat attending one of the regular monthly meetings of the Political Economy Society 1188 where we have records of his participation in the discussion. The first was a Toast he gave on 18 August 1846 for a celebratory dinner given in Paris which was hosted by the Society to honour Richard Cobden's victory in getting the protectionist Corn Laws repealed in June 1846 and this will appear in a future volume. 1189

The Société d'économie politique (Political Economy Society) was founded in February 1842 by the Comte d'Esterno and Pellegrino Rossi with the name "Réunion des économistes." 1190 It failed to attract members because of its academic tone and folded after a few meetings. Later in the year, another attempt at forming a society was made by Adolphe Blaise, Joseph Garnier, and Guillaumin which began meeting regularly from 15 November 1842. It attracted considerably more members because of its more relaxed and open format (Garnier estimates about 60 by its second meeting) where the members would meet every month for a meal in a restaurant before beginning a more formal discussion of topics selected by the committee. Its membership was drawn from members of the Institute, ex-parliamentarians, educators, journalists, judges, and several active in commerce and industry. 1191 The meetings were held in the Maison-Dorée restaurant which was located at 20, Boulevard des Italiens in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. It opened in 1839 and had a reputation for excellent food and wine (it boasted a wine cellar of 80,000 bottles) and attracted regular customers such as Honoré de Balzac and Alexandre Dumas.

The Society's first president was Charles Dunoyer, who served from 1845 to 1862, and Joseph Garnier was made permanent secretary in 1849. Its membership in 1847 was about fifty and grew to about eighty at the end of 1849. It is not known when Bastiat joined the Society, but he was invited to one of its monthly meetings in May 1845 for a welcome dinner in his honour so he could meet the members of the Society after his break-though essay on French and English tariffs (published in the JDE October 1844) and his book on Cobden and the League (published by Guillaumin in May 1845). 1192 He is first mentioned in the minutes for August 1846, when the Society hosted a banquet in honor of Richard Cobden, and Bastiat was one of several members of the Society to make a formal toast to "the past and present defenders of free trade in the House of Lords and the House of Commons." 1193 Joseph Garnier tells us 1194 that Cobden initially refused to come to Paris as part of his victory tour of Europe following the repeal of the Corn Laws in June 1846 but agreed only on condition that his friend Bastiat be present, 1195 such was the hostility to Cobden and free trade ideas in Paris shown by many outside the free trade circle of economists at that time. Bastiat took time off from his activities with the Bordeaux regional Free Trade Association to satisfy Cobden's request and gave one of the more stirring toasts given in Cobden's honour at the Banquet hosted by the Society.

Bastiat's presence is noted in the Minutes of the meetings a total of 11 times, beginning with 18 August 1846 when he gave a toast at the celebratory banquet for Richard Cobden. The gap between his first mention in August 1846 and October 1848 is probably explained by three factors. Firstly, the demands placed on him by the French Free Trade Association which began in 1846, such as his speaking engagements across the country and the job of editing its weekly journal Le Libre-Échange . Secondly, when the French Free Trade Association was closed down in March 1848 following the February Revolution Bastiat became heavily involved in politics, getting elected to the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 and then serving as Vice-President of the Chamber's Finance Committee. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the secretary of the Society and editor of its journal the Journal des Économistes , Joseph Garnier was strongly opposed to the Society getting involved too deeply in partisan political issues, such as the free trade movement, so as not to frighten off members who were sympathetic to protection or ambivalent about complete free trade. The Society's refusal to support the political struggle for free trade would no doubt have alienated Bastiat, thus explaining his absence from its meetings. However, with the failure of the free trade movement in France and the reduced fear of socialism by the end of 1848 Bastiat may have felt more comfortable in attending meetings of the Society and they were more comfortable having him present.

We include in this volume ten of the eleven reports of meetings in which Bastiat participated. The topics covered were:

a toast he gave on 18 August 1846 to honour Richard Cobden (this will appear in CW6)

income tax (October 1848)

emancipation of the colonies (December 1848)

financial reform (February 1849)

the Friends of Peace Congress (Aug. 1849) and state support for experimental socialist communities (May 1849)

the limits to the functions of the state (Part 1) and Molinari's book Les Soirées (October 1849)

disarmament and the English peace movement (November 1849)

state support for popularising political economy, Bastiat's idea of land credit in Economic Harmonies , the tax on alcohol, and socialism (December 1849)

the limits to the functions of the state (Part 2) (January 1850)

the limits to the functions of the state (Part 3) (February 1850)

Bastiat's idea of land credit in Economic Harmonies (Part 2) (April 1850)

In this discussion Bastiat comes out strongly in favour of a low, single tax on income. 1196 He thought it would simplify the complex array of indirect taxes which fell most heavily upon the poor and commented favourable on William Ewart's proposal for such a tax in an article in Le Libre-Échange (27 June, 1847). 1197 In his "Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" delivered in the Chamber on 12 December 1849 Bastiat reiterated the claim he makes here that France could be ruled with a total government expenditure of 200 or 300 million francs. This would be a very substantial reduction as total government expenditure in 1849 was about 1,411 million, so was suggesting a cut of more than 900 million francs or 64%. In the speech he claimed:

He also expressed similar ideas about his desired size and scope of government in "The Utopian" (January 1847). 1199

Text

The last meeting of the Society was extended well into the evening. The participants were numerous and two topics drew the attention of the members for a considerable time. M. Horace Say 1200 presided and first called the meeting's attention to the difficulties to be faced in implementing the most recent decree which limited the working day to twelve hours. 1201 At that very moment, the Minister of the Interior, M. Sénard 1202 (who was a great supporter of the regulation), had been consulting with the Chambers of Commerce about exceptions which would be made, exceptions which had been envisaged in the legislation itself. Now, it appears that the majority of industries are demanding to be exempted! M. Hippolyte Dussard, 1203 Prefect of (the Department) of la Seine-Inférieure, 1204 whose inhabitants have been very preoccupied with this question, gave some interesting details about the situation of the cotton industry in Normandy and the present general condition of the spinners and weavers. M. Léon Faucher 1205 gave a lively critique of the new regulation which had, among many problems, that of creating a privilege which would benefit the better paid cotton spinners (in the factories) to the detriment of the poorly paid spinners who were scattered throughout the countryside and worked in their homes at an exhausting job which paid miserable wages. Messrs. Hovyn de Tranchère 1206 and Louis Wolowski, 1207 elected Representatives of the People, and Messrs. Emile Pereire 1208 and de Colmont, 1209 were the next members to take up most of the remaining part of this interesting discussion.

M. David (du Gers), a member of the Finance Committee of the National Assembly, 1210 presented to the meeting some of the reasons he had assembled to fight the proposals being put forward in the Committee to impose an income tax. M. Parieu, 1211 the Secretary of the Committee, presented with great lucidity the principle arguments which he had given in his Report (to the National Assembly). Messrs. Horace Say, de Colmont, Bastiat, as well as others, also took part in this debate, particularly on the subject of the fundamental questions of the nature and the basis of the tax. M. de Colmont thinks that the new tax, if it is passed by the Assembly, would only be a temporary tax, or rather more like a compulsory loan. M. Bastiat returned to the idea of a single tax on income, but he justly remarked that one could only dream of realising this utopia on the day the government could administer France with (a budget) of (only) 200 million francs, i.e. when its sole job was the maintenance of security among its citizens. Then the tax would be minimal and each tax-payer would freely declare their (own) income.

17. T.308 "Speaks in a Discussion in the Assembly on the Election of the President of the Republic" (27 Oct. 1848)↩

Source

T.308 [1848.10.27] "Speaks in a Discussion on the Election of the President of the Republic". Short speech to the National Constituent Assembly, 27 Oct. 1848, CRANC, vol. 5, p. 134. Not in OC. CW4

Editor's Introduction

This is the 7th of eight speeches and seven other shorter contributions Bastiat gave in the Chamber between May 1848 and February 1850. See the Editor's Introduction above, pp. 000 for more details.

The issue under discussion here is how to ensure the integrity of the vote in remote rural cantons now that universal male suffrage was in place. Elections to the Chamber of Deputies between 1815 and 1848 were by limited manhood suffrage. Voters were drawn from a small number of people who were at least 30 years old and who paid at least fr. 300 in direct taxes such as the land tax, the door and window tax, and taxes on businesses. (These requirements were lowered in 1830 to 25 years and fr. 200.) Men could not stand for election unless they were at least 40 years old and paid at least fr. 1,000 in direct taxes. (These requirements were lowered in 1830 to 30 years and fr. 500.) These property and tax requirements limited the electorate to a small group of wealthy individuals which numbered only 89,000 in the Restoration, 180,000 in 1831, and a maximum of about 240,000 on the eve of the 1848 Revolution. In addition, the 1820 Law of the Double Vote gave the top 25% of the wealthiest voters the right to vote for an additional 2 deputies per département. Bastiat referred to this small group as the "classe électorale" (the electoral or voting class). 1212 Deputies were elected to a term of 5 years, one fifth of whom would be elected each year, and were not paid a salary, which meant that only government civil servants (who could sit in the Chamber concurrently with their government job) 1213 or the wealthy were able to afford to run for office. Deputies could not initiate legislation which was a prerogative of the King. The Chamber consisted of 258 Deputies in 1816, 430 in 1820, 459 in 1831, and 460 in 1839. General elections were held in July 1831, June 1834, November 1837, March 1839, July 1842, and August 1846.

The February Revolution of 1848 introduced universal manhood suffrage (21 years or older), the Constituent Assembly (April 1848) had 900 members (minimum age of 25). Over 9 million men were eligible to vote and 7.8 million men voted (84% of registered voters) in an election held on 23 and 24 April 1848. Bastiat was elected to represent the département of Les Landes in the Constituent Assembly of the Second Republic. He was the second candidate elected out of 7 with a vote of 56,445. The largest block of Deputies in the Chamber were monarchists (290), followed by moderate republicans such as Bastiat (230), and extreme republicans and socialists (55). The remainder were unaligned.

Text

Citizen President: 1214 I will put the Amendment to a vote.

Citizen Frédéric Bastiat: I demand the floor.

The arguments which are being evaluated, I have to say, do not concern me much. On the matter of elections the preferences and the convenience of the citizens are only a secondary consideration. (Laughter from the Assembly)

Citizens, please note that those who are laughing are completely contradicting themselves. Because, if it (convenience) were the prime consideration then you would want to collect the votes at (the voters') homes. Why have you ridiculed, in principle, that voting should take place in the main town of the canton? Isn't it because you know that it would inconvenience the citizens? But what you are above all looking for is the integrity of the votes. Well then, I think I am correct to say that that is the principle consideration, and that one can leave aside considerations of time and place, and personal convenience to the degree that they do not compromise the integrity of the vote. Now, you yourselves have recognised that in an election in a commune, especially a rural commune, the integrity of the vote cannot be guaranteed. As a result, you cannot now go back on a decision you have already made. Well, I say that the principle can be found in (how) voting (is carried out) in the cantons. Now, only in special circumstances, in certain cantons, is it permitted (that there be) two voting places.

A Member of the Assembly: Why two rather than three?

Another Member: That depends on the location. Allow a bit of latitude.

Citizen Bastiat: Citizens, for which communes and for which Departments are you making an exception? It is for the Departments and for the communes where the population is the least concentrated, consequently it is for those where there is the least guarantee for the integrity of the vote, for those (communes) where, one can truly say in agreement with us, that the municipal authorities have an enormous influence. Well then, it is precisely in this case where there is danger (of a dishonest vote).

Therefore I say you ought to uphold the (established) principle of voting in the cantons and only in exceptional circumstances allow (voting to take place) in two locations. That is my proposal.

18. T.274 "Comments at a Meeting of the Political Economy Society on the Emancipation of the Colonies" (10 Dec. 1848)↩

Source

T.274 (1848.12.10) Bastiat's comments at a "Meeting of the Political Economy Society" (Séance de 10 dec. 1848) (on the economic emancipation of the colonies). In "Chronique," JDE, T. 22, no. 93, 15 Dec. 1848, pp. 116-17; also ASEP (1889), pp. 70-72. Not in OC. [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

This is the third record we have of Bastiat attending one of the regular monthly meetings of the Political Economy Society. See the Editor's Introduction to the first one, above pp. 000, for more details.

The highlights of this meeting of the Society are firstly, the discussion about the struggle the Society had throughout 1848 to restore the sacked Michel Chevalier to his Chair of Political Economy after the socialists had him removed in March 1848. And secondly, Bastiat's reading of a newspaper report about the gradual abolition of the British Navigation Act which was underway as early as March 1848, but had been overlooked in the commotion of the Revolution, and which would be finally achieved on 29 June 1849. The latter particularly interested Bastiat as he believed it showed that the English free traders realised that free trade would lower food prices and thus put an end to the activities of the Chartists, or what he called "a variety of English communism," as well as leading them on to the next step in their reform program, namely dismantling their colonial trade barriers. Bastiat would return to this topic in a discussion of "England's New Colonial Policy" in April 1850 (below, pp. 000).

Text

At the last meeting of the Society, which was again attended by more people than usual, it was decided, following a proposal put forward by M. Louis Leclerc, 1215 that a letter of condolence should be sent by the President of the Society (Dunoyer) to the widow Madame Rossi 1216 to convey to her the high estime which many members of the Society held of the character and eminent qualities of her illustrious husband, as well as for the profound sadness that they felt at hearing the news of the terrible events which have struck her.

M. Michel Chevalier 1217 then reported to the meeting about the, in all respects, remarkable, lecture given by M. (Richard) Whately, the Bishop of Dublin, 1218 at a meeting of the Statistical Society which was founded in this city a year ago. (In this lecture) he said that elementary ideas of political economy and the (economic) impact of charity are taught in Ireland in 4,000 schools! Our readers will find in this lecture (which we reproduce in its entirety (in the JDE)) 1219 many thoughts full of valuable and just insights, which shows that a single person can be a worthy bishop, an orthodox political economist, and a sound philanthropist (at the same time).

Doctor Lardner, 1220 who also attended the lecture, recalled the high esteem the wise Bishop of Dublin was held in England.

While acknowledging this interesting speech, M. Michel Chevalier (also) naturally took the opportunity to thank in the name of (economic) science the work done by those present at the meeting (tonight), Messrs. Léon Faucher, 1221 Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, 1222 and Wolowski, 1223 in their efforts in the National Assembly to restore the Chair of Political Economy at the Collège de France. 1224 The Society actively supports these views of M. Michel Chevalier and it also made it known to M. Barthélémy Saint-Hilaire how happy it was to be able to address these thanks to a scholar who promotes philosophy, and whom no one could object if he demanded (it back) ( pro domo sua ) (himself). 1225

Furthermore, M. Michel Chevalier well remarked that political economy was one of the most beautiful branches of the great tree of philosophy. Before he wrote on the Wealth of Nations , Smith had published The Theory of Moral Sentiments ; Tracy made his Treatise on Political Economy part of his Course on Ideology ; Turgot is highly regarded by some philosophers; and who would dare deny that J.B. Say, Rossi, and many others are not (also) eminently philosophical minds. 1226

The conversation then returned to a topic which had already been discussed at the last meeting: the economic emancipation of the colonies. Bastiat read an Act of the English Parliament, dated March 4, 1227 which had gone unnoticed in France because of the political turmoil, in which it was stated that henceforth there would be complete equality between English and foreign ships engaged in the trade with India. M. Bastiat then made some remarks on this matter and said that the commercial reform being introduced by our neighbours has produced two unexpected consequences. First of all, the relief brought about by the economic measures prompted by the "free traders" (the English phrase was used) have slowed down the activities of the Chartists, a variety of English communism. Secondly, logic has led the Leaguers from tariff reform to colonial liberty, and the latter pushes them, as one can already see, to the political abandonment of those institutions which cost far more than they bring in.

The discussion which Bastiat provoked continued between Messrs. Rodet, 1228 Dunoyer, Wolowsky, de Colmont, 1229 Léon Faucher and Fonteyraud. 1230 Messrs. de Colmont and Rodet strongly argued that England had never acted out of philanthropy but only out of self-interest. To which Dunoyer responded that the English practised a wonderfully true kind of egoism which well serves their self-interest only because it also benefits the interests of others. M. Fonteyraud reminded (us) of the incredible efforts of the Manchester Leaguers, the deep division within England over the subject of free trade, and the difficulty Cobden and his friends had had in winning over the majority by the force and excellence of (their) reason. He also responded to the scepticism of M. Rodet and the questions raised by M. de Colmont in a manner which to us appears conclusive.

19. T.225 "Economic Harmonies IV" (JDE, 15 Dec. 1848)↩

Source

T.225 (1848.12.15) "Economic Harmonies IV" (Harmonies économiques. IV) JDE , T. XXII, No. 93, 15 Dec. 1848, pp. 7-18; also in EH 4 ; OC6; CW4

Editor's Introduction

See the Editor's Introduction to "Economic Harmonies I., II., III." (above, pp. 000) for more details.

In "Economic Harmonies IV" some of Bastiat's key ideas are:

that the only way to satisfy one's own needs is to cooperate with others in satisfying their needs
his observations that human bahaviour are "truths" which should be obvious to anybody who "acts" to achieve certain goals. Again, his idea are very similar to the idea of "apriorism" of the Austrian school 1231
that utility comes from a combination of "the free gifts of nature" (material things and forces of nature) and human labor or action
the importance of accumulating capital in order to make work easier
that man is unique because he has "the ability to organize his affairs, to plan for the future, to exercise control over himself, and to economise or save for the future."
there is a brief mention of the importance of the interests of consumers

Version History

There were no significant changes made to Section IV in the EH versions.

Text

At the beginning of this work, I said that the object of political economy is man , considered from the point of view of his needs and the means by which it is given to him to meet them.

It is therefore natural to start by examining man and his nature.

But we have also seen that he is not a solitary being; while his needs and his satisfactions , given the nature of his sensations, are inseparable from his being, this is not true of his efforts , which arise from the principle of action. 1232 Efforts can be transferred. In a word, men work for each other's benefit.

Well, something very odd happens.

When you consider man, his needs, efforts, satisfactions, constitution, leanings or tendencies in general and in an abstract fashion, so to speak, you arrive at a series of observations that appear to be free of any doubt and which are seen to be blindingly obvious, with each carrying its own proof within it. 1233 This is so true that the writer is at a loss as to how to present such palpable and widely known truths to the general public, for fear of arousing a scornful smile. It seems to him quite rightly that the annoyed reader will toss aside the book saying, "I will not waste my time being told such trivialities."

And yet these truths, held so incontrovertible when presented generally that we scarcely allow ourselves to be reminded of them, now appear to be just ridiculous errors and absurd theories when man is observed in a social setting. When considering man in isolation, who would be tempted to say: " We have overproduction, our ability to consume cannot keep up with our ability to produce; luxury and artificial tastes are the source of wealth; the invention of machines is wiping out work " and other pithy sayings of the same order which, when applied to humans collectively, nevertheless appear so well established that they are made the basis of our industrial and commercial laws? Exchange in this context produces an illusion to which the best honed intellects cannot avoid giving way, and I would propose that political economy will have achieved its goal and fulfilled its mission when it has finally demonstrated the following: What is true for the individual is true for society. Man in isolation is simultaneously a producer and consumer, inventor and entrepreneur, capitalist and worker. All economic phenomena are fulfilled in him, and he is so to speak society in the abstract. In the same way, the human race, taken as a whole, is a (like a) huge, collective, and multiple man to whom the truths observed in even a single individual can be applied.

I needed to make this remark, which I hope will be better justified by what follows, before continuing this study of man which began in the previous article. Without this, I feared that the reader would reject as unnecessary the inferences and obvious truisms that follow.

In the previous article I spoke of man's needs , and after putting forward a rough and ready list, I noted that they were not static by nature but progressive. This is true whether you consider each of them in itself or, above all when you take them as a whole from the physical, intellectual, and moral points of view. How could this be otherwise? Some needs must be satisfied under pain of death given the way our bodies are constituted, and up to a certain point it might be claimed that these latter are of fixed magnitude, even though this may not of course be strictly true, for if you are keen not to overlook an essential element, the force of habit , and prepared to do some self-examination with a degree of good faith, you will be obliged to agree that even the most basic needs, such as eating, undergo incontrovertible transformation by force of habit, and anyone who speaks out here against this comment, calling it materialistic and epicurean, would be most unhappy if he were taken at his word and reduced to the pittance of an anchorite. 1234 But in any case, when the needs of this order are met satisfactorily and constantly, there are others that arise from the most expandable of our faculties, namely desire. Can one imagine a single moment in which man is unable to formulate desires, even reasonable ones? Let us not forget that a desire that is unreasonable at one stage of civilization, at a time when all human powers are concentrated on satisfying lesser needs, ceases to be so when the advancement of these powers opens out a wider horizon. Thus, it would have been unreasonable two centuries ago to hope to travel at ten leagues an hour, 1235 which is no longer the case today. To claim that man's needs and desires are fixed and static quantities is to fail to understand the nature of the soul, to deny the facts and make civilization inexplicable.

It would also be inexplicable if, alongside the indefinite development of needs, the possibility of the indefinite development of the means of satisfying them did not materialize. What would be the effect on the expandable nature of needs in the achievement of progress if, at a certain stage, our capacities were no longer able to develop and were to run up against an unmovable barrier?

Thus, unless nature, Providence, or whatever the power that presides over our destinies, has become a victim to the most shocking and cruel ambiguity, since our desires are indefinite, it must be presumed that our means of satisfying them are equally so.

I have used the word indefinite, and not infinite, for nothing relating to man is infinite. It is precisely because our desires and capacities develop towards infinity that they have no specifiable limits, although they may have absolute ones. We can cite a host of points higher than the human race to which it will never rise, without at the same time being able to say that a time will come at which it will cease to draw closer to them. 1236

Nor do I mean to say that desire and the means of satisfying it walk side by side at an equal pace. Desire runs, and the means limp along behind it.

The swift and adventurous nature of desire, compared to the slowness of our capacities, warns us that, at all stages of civilization and all levels of progress, a certain degree of suffering is and always will be the lot of man. However, it teaches us also that this suffering has a purpose, since it would be impossible to understand desire as the stimulus of our capacities if it followed instead of preceding them. Nevertheless, let us not accuse nature of having installed cruelty in this (social) mechanism, since it has to be noted that desire is not transformed into a genuine need, that is to say into a painful desire , until it has been made so by the habit of permanent satisfaction, in other words, when the means have been found and put irrevocably within our reach. 1237

Today, our task is to examine the following question: What means do we possess to satisfy our needs?

It seems obvious to me that there are two: Nature and Labor, the gifts of God and the fruits of our efforts, or if you prefer, the application of our capacities to the things that nature has placed at our service.

As far as I know, no school has attributed the satisfaction of our needs to nature alone . A statement like this has been too frequently belied by experience, and we do not need to study political economy to see that some input from our capacities is necessary.

But there are some schools that have attributed this privilege to labor alone. Their maxim is: " All wealth stems from labor; labor is wealth ."

I cannot stop myself from pointing out here that these formulae, taken literally, have led to huge errors of doctrine, and consequently to deplorable legislative measures. I will deal with this elsewhere. 1238

Here I will limit myself to establishing as fact that nature and labor cooperate to satisfy our needs and desires.

Let us examine the facts.

The need that we have placed on top of our list is that of breathing . In this respect, we have already noted that, in general, nature does all the work and that human labor has only to intervene in certain exceptional cases as, for example, when it is necessary to purify the air.

The need to quench our thirst is more or less satisfied by Nature, depending on whether it provides us with a source of water that is more or less close, clear, and abundant, and the contribution of Labor is linked to the distance it has to be carried, whether it has to be purified, and whether its scarcity has to be supplemented by wells and tanks.

Nature is no more uniformly liberal to us with regard to food , for who will say that the work left to us is always the same whether the soil is fertile or difficult, the forest teeming with game, the river with fish or not?

With regard to lighting , human labor certainly has less to do in places where (the) nights are short than in places where the sun has chosen to make them long.

I will not dare at this point to set this out as an absolute rule, but it seems to me that, as we ascend the scale of (our) needs, the input of nature becomes less and gives more scope to our capacities. Painters, sculptors of statues, and even writers are obliged to obtain help from materials and tools that nature alone supplies, but it has to be admitted that they draw from their own genius the element that provides the attractiveness, the merit, the usefulness, and value of their works. To learn is a need that is almost exclusively satisfied by the properly directed exercise of our intellectual faculties. Nevertheless, might it not be said that here again nature assists by offering us, in varying degrees, objects to be observed and compared? For an equal amount of work, can botany, geology, and natural history make equal progress everywhere?

It would be superfluous to give other examples. We can already ascertain that Nature gives us the means of satisfaction with a greater or lesser degree of utility (this word is taken in its etymological meaning, the property of serving) . 1239 In many cases, in almost every case, there is something left for labor to do to make this utility complete, and we understand that this action of work is capable of achieving more or less in a given situation depending on how far nature itself has advanced the operation.

The following two formulae may therefore be advanced:

1. Utility is transmitted, sometimes by Nature alone, sometimes by Labor alone but almost always by the cooperation of Nature and Labor ;

2. To bring something to its perfect state of UTILITY, the action of Labor is in an inverse ratio to that of Nature.

From the combination of these two propositions and what we have said about the indefinite expandability of needs, may I be allowed to draw a deduction whose importance will be demonstrated subsequently? If two men who are assumed to have no links with one another are placed in unequal situations so that nature is liberal toward one and miserly toward the other, the first will obviously have less work to do for any given satisfaction. Does it follow that the portion of his strength that has been, so to speak, left available will of necessity be afflicted with inertia, and that this man, because of the liberality of nature, will be reduced to forced idleness? No, what results is that, should he so wish, he will be able to use this strength to widen the circle of his satisfactions, and for the same amount of work achieve two satisfactions instead of one. In a word, progress will be easier for him.

I do not know whether I am deceiving myself, but it seems to me that no discipline, not even geometry, offers more unassailable truths at its point of departure. However, if someone were able to prove to me that all these truths were just so many errors, he would have destroyed not only the confidence that these truths inspire in me but also the very foundation of all certainty and faith in the evidence itself, for what line of reasoning could we use that would better deserve the acceptance of reason than the one we would have overthrown? The day when an axiom is found to contradict the one which holds that a straight line is the shortest path between two points, will be the day on which the human mind will have no other refuge than absolute skepticism, if this is indeed a refuge.

So I feel very confused at having to stress elemental truths so clear that they seem puerile. Nevertheless, it has to be said that through the complications of human transactions, these simple truths have been overlooked, and in order to justify to the reader my dwelling on what the English call truisms for so long, I will point out at this juncture the strange way that excellent minds have allowed themselves to be led astray. Setting aside and taking no account of the cooperation of nature with regard to the satisfaction of our needs, they laid down this absolute principle: All wealth stems from labor . On this premise, they have built the following syllogism:

"All wealth stems from labor;

Therefore wealth is proportional to labor.

But, labor is in inverse proportion to the bounty of nature;

Therefore wealth is in inverse proportion to the bounty of nature!"

And like it or not, many of our economic laws have been inspired by this strange line of reasoning. These laws cannot help but be disastrous to the development and distribution of wealth. This is what justifies my preparing in advance, through the setting out of apparently very trivial truths, the refutation of the deplorable errors and preconceived ideas under which current society is thrashing about.

Let us now break down into its parts the contribution of nature.

It places two things at our disposal: material things and forces (of nature).

Most of the material objects used to satisfy our needs and desires are transformed into a state of utility suitable for us only through work, through the application of human faculties. However, in every instance, the elements, the atoms if you like, of which these objects are made are the gifts, and I add, the free gifts, of nature. This comment is of the greatest importance and, I believe, will cast fresh light on the theory of wealth.

I would like the reader to remember clearly that I am examining here in a general fashion the physical and moral constitution of man, his needs, his capacities, and his relationships with nature, setting aside exchange, which I will be dealing with in a following article. 1240 We will then see how and why social transactions modify phenomena.

It is very clear that if a man living in isolation 1241 has, so to speak, to buy the majority of his satisfactions through work or effort; it is strictly accurate to say that, before any work or effort from him has taken place, the materials that are within his reach are the free gifts of nature. Following an initial effort, however slight, they cease to be free , and if the language used by political economy had always been accurate, it is when material objects are in this situation, before any human action, 1242 that the term raw materials ought to be used.

I repeat here that this gratuitousness of the gifts of nature, before work has intervened, is of the greatest importance. Indeed, in the first article, 1243 I stated that political economy was the theory of value . I now add in advance that things start having value only when work has given them some. I claim that I will later 1244 be demonstrating that all that is free to man in isolation remains free for man in society and that the free gifts of nature, whatever their UTILITY , have no Value. I contend that a man who receives a benefit of nature directly and with no effort cannot be considered to have rendered himself a costly service, and that consequently he cannot render as services to others things which are common to all. Well, where there has been no services rendered or received, there is no value .

All that I am saying here with regard to material things can also be applied to the forces supplied to us by nature. Gravity, the compressibility and expansibility of gas, the power of the wind, the laws of equilibrium, animal and vegetable life, are so many forces that we learn to turn to our advantage. The effort and intelligence that we devote to this are always subject to payment, for we cannot be made to devote our efforts for the benefit of others free of charge. However, these natural forces, when taken on their own and setting aside all intellectual or muscular work, are the free gifts of Providence, and for this reason they remain without value through all the complications of human transactions. This is the dominant theme of this work.

This observation would have little importance, I admit, if the cooperation of nature was constantly uniform, if each man, at all times, places, and circumstances received from nature assistance that was always the same and invariable. In this case, science might be excused for not taking account of an element that, because it remains the same always and everywhere, has an effect that is proportionally the same in every way on the services being exchanged. Just as you eliminate the parts of the lines in geometry that are common to the two figures being compared, it would be able to set aside this cooperation that is immutably present and content itself with saying, as it has done up to now: "Natural riches exist; political economy notes this once and for all, and will take no further notice of them."

But things do not happen like this. The irresistible tendency of human intelligence, stimulated in this by self-interest and aided by a succession of discoveries, is to replace the costly and human contribution with the natural and gratuitous contribution, so that for a given utility, although it remains the same with regard to its result and the satisfaction it provides, nevertheless represents an increasingly reduced level of work. Certainly, it is impossible not to perceive the immense influence of this marvelous phenomenon on the notion of Value. For what is its result? It is that in every product the part that is free tends to replace the part which is costly. It is that, since utility is the result of two forms of collaboration, one that is paid for and one that is not, the Value, which is linked only to the first of these forms of collaboration, decreases for an identical utility as nature is forced to provide (a) more effective contribution. So that it can be said that the human race has as many more forms of satisfactions or wealth as it has fewer things of value . Well, as the majority of writers have established a sort of synonymous meaning between the three expressions: utility , wealth , and values , what results is a theory that is not only wrong but the opposite of the truth. I sincerely believe that a more accurate description of this combination of natural and human forces in production, in other words, a more accurate definition of Value, would stop inextricable theoretical confusion and reconcile schools that are currently divergent, and if I am now anticipating the result of this exposition, it is in order to justify myself to the reader for having lingered over notions whose importance he would have difficulty explaining without this.

Following this digression, I will go back to my study of man based solely on the economic point of view.

Another observation that I owe to J. B. Say, 1245 and whose obviousness leaps to the eye in spite of being all too often overlooked by a number of writers, is that man does not create either the materials or the forces of nature, if the word create is used in its strict sense. These materials and forces exist in their own right. Man merely combines them and moves them for his own benefit or that of others. If he does so for his benefit, he is rendering himself a service . If it is for the benefit of others, he is rendering (a) service to his fellow-man [fellows] and is entitled to demand an equivalent service from him, from which it also follows that the value is in proportion to the service rendered, and not at all to the absolute utility of the action. For this utility may, for the most part, be the result of the gratuitous act of nature, in which case the human (element of the) service, the costly part which should be paid for, has little Value. This arises from the axiom established above: To bring something to its fullest state of utility, the action of human beings 1246 is in inverse proportion to that of nature.

This observation overturns the doctrine about which I spoke in the first article that situates value in the materiality of things. The contrary is true. Materiality is a quality supplied by nature and consequently free of charge , with no value , although its utility is undeniable. Human action, which can never create matter, is the sole constituent of the service that a man in isolation can render (to) himself or that men living in society can render (to) each other, and it is the freely (given) appraisal of these services that is the basis of value . Far from the premise, favored by Smith, that Value can be conceived only when incorporated in Matter, the truth is that between matter and value there is no possible relationship.

The mistaken doctrine to which I refer had inexorably resulted from the idea that only the classes that work on material things were productive . Smith had thus paved the way for the error of modern socialists , who constantly represent those they call the middlemen 1247 between producers and consumers, such as traders, merchants, etc. as being unproductive parasites. Do they provide services? Do they spare us pain by taking pains on our behalf? In this case, they create value , although they do not make material things, and it is even true that, since nobody creates matter itself and we all are limited to providing each other with reciprocal services, 1248 it is strictly accurate to say that all of us, including farmers and manufacturers, are middlemen with regard to each other.

This, for the moment, is what I had to say about the contribution of nature. It places at our disposal, to a very varying extent depending on the climate, the seasons, and the state of advancement of our knowledge, but in all instances gratuitously , both material things and forces (of nature) . These materials and forces therefore have no value , and it would be very strange if they had. According to what rule would we assess it? How would we comprehend nature having itself paid, reimbursed, or remunerated? We will see later that exchange is necessary in determining value. 1249 We do not buy the produce of nature, we gather it, and if, in order to gather it, we have to produce a certain effort, it is in this effort , and not in the gift of nature, that the principle of value lies.

Let us move on to that human activity 1250 generally referred to as labor .

The word labor , like nearly all the terms used in political economy, is very vague, with each writer giving it a meaning that is more or less wide. Unlike the majority of sciences, chemistry for example, political economy has not had the advantage of inventing its own vocabulary. As it deals with subjects that have concerned man from the dawn of time and are customary subjects of conversation, it has found terminology that is ready-made and been obliged to use it.

Very often the meaning of work is limited to the almost exclusively muscular action of man on things. For this reason, those who carry out the mechanical part of production are referred to as the working classes .

The reader will understand that I am giving this word a wider meaning. What I mean by the word work is the application of our capacities to the satisfaction of our needs. Need , effort , satisfaction , this is the realm of political economy. The effort may be physical, intellectual, or even moral, as we will see.

It is not necessary to show here that all of our organs and all or nearly all of our capacities may and do contribute to production. Concentration, wisdom, intelligence, and imagination certainly play a part.

In his fine book on the Freedom of Working , Mr. Dunoyer 1251 has, with full scientific rigor, included our moral capacities among the attributes to which we owe our wealth. This is an idea that is as new and fertile as it is true , and is intended to enlarge and ennoble the field of political economy.

I will dwell on this idea here only to the extent that it gives me the opportunity of casting an initial beam of light on the origin of a powerful agent of production which I have not mentioned so far: CAPITAL.

If we examine in turn the material objects that contribute to satisfying our needs, we will recognize without difficulty that the production of all or nearly all of them requires more time and a greater portion of our life than man can give without restoring his strength, that is to say, without satisfying his (physical) needs. This presupposes, then, that those who have produced these things will have previously reserved, or set aside and accumulated, the provisions needed to maintain life during the period of the work.

The same applies to satisfactions that have no material element. A priest could not devote himself to preaching, a teacher to teaching, a magistrate to the maintenance of order if, by their own means or those of others, they did not have ready access to some means of existence which had previously been created.

Let us go back and imagine a man living in isolation and reduced to living by hunting. It is easy to see that if, each evening, he had eaten all the game taken during the day, he would never be able to undertake any other task, building a hut, or repairing his weapons. All forms of progress would forever be denied to him.

This is not the place to define the nature and functions of Capital; 1252 my only aim is to get you to see that certain moral virtues contribute directly to improving our condition, even from the sole point of view of wealth, and (these are) among others, order, foresight, self-control, and thrift. 1253

Foresight is one of the wonderful privileges of man, and it is scarcely necessary to say that, in almost all of the situations in life, the man who best appreciates the consequences of his decisions and actions will have the most favorable opportunities.

To restrain one's appetites, the ability to govern one's passions, to sacrifice the present to the future, to subject oneself to present privation with a view to greater advantage in the future, 1254 these are essential conditions for capital formation and, as we have glimpsed, capital is itself the essential condition for all forms of work at all complicated or prolonged. It is perfectly clear that if two men were placed in perfectly identical situations and if, in addition, they were assumed to have the same degree of intelligence and industriousness, the one who saved up provisions to enable him to undertake tasks of long duration, improve his tools, and enlist the forces of nature in achieving his plans, would make more progress.

I will not dwell on this; you have only to glance around you to be convinced that all our forces, capacities, and virtues contribute to achieving progress for man and society.

For the same reason, there is no vice of ours which is not a direct or indirect cause of poverty. Laziness paralyses effort, the very sinew of production. Ignorance and error lead it down the wrong path; lack of foresight lays up disappointments for us; giving way to our passing appetites prevents the accumulation or formation of capital; vanity induces us to devote our efforts to artificial satisfactions at the expense of genuine ones, while violence and fraud force us to take expensive precautions in view of the reprisals they provoke, thus entailing a great depletion of our energy.

I will end this preliminary study of man with an observation I have already made with regard to needs. It is that the elements highlighted in this article that are included in and make up economic science are essentially variable and various. Needs, desires, material things and powers supplied by nature, muscular strength, organs, intellectual faculties, and moral qualities – all vary depending on the individual, the time, and the place. No two men resemble each other in each one of these aspects nor, for very good reason, in all of them. What is more, no man is perfectly consistent from one hour to the next; what one man knows, another does not, what this man appreciates, that man scorns. In one instance, nature has been prodigal, in another, miserly. A virtue that is difficult to practice at a certain temperature becomes easy in another climate. Economic science, therefore, unlike the so-called exact sciences, does not (have) the advantage of a yardstick, an absolute standard to which it can refer everything, a graduated measure that it can use to calibrate the intensity of desires, efforts, and satisfactions. If we were doomed to work alone, like certain animals, we would all be placed in situations that differed in certain ways, and if these external ways were alike and the environment in which we acted were identical for everyone, we would still differ in our desires, needs, ideas, wisdom, energy, our way of assessing and appreciating things, our ability to plan for the future, and our actions, so that great and inevitable inequality would be seen between men. Of course, total isolation and the absence of any form of relationship between men is just an illusionary vision born in Rousseau's imagination. But supposing that this anti-social situation known as a state of nature has ever existed, I wonder through what sequence of ideas Rousseau and his followers have managed to locate Equality in it? We will see later that, like Wealth, like Freedom, like Fraternity, and like Unity, Equality is an end and not a starting point. It arises from the natural and regular development of societies. The human race does not move away from it (Equality) but moves towards it. This is both more reassuring and truer.

After discussing our needs and the means we have of achieving them, I must say something about our satisfactions . They are the result of the entire (social) mechanism. It is through the greater or lesser number of physical, intellectual, or moral satisfactions enjoyed by the human race that we see whether the machine is working well or badly. This is why the word consumption , adopted by economists, would have a profound meaning if, while retaining its etymological meaning, it was made a synonym of end or achievement . Unfortunately, in common parlance and even in scientific language it is perceived to have a materialist and unsubtle meaning, which is doubtless accurate with regard to physical needs but which ceases to be so with regard to needs of a higher order. The cultivation of wheat or the weaving of wool result in consumption . Is this also true for an artist's works, a poet's verses, the thoughts of a legal consultant, the teachings of a professor, or the sermons of a priest? Here again we come up against the disadvantages of this fundamental error that made Adam Smith circumscribe political economy within a circle of materiality, and the reader will forgive me for often making use of the word satisfaction as applicable to all our needs and desires and as being the one best suited to the expanded framework that I believed I could give the science.

Economists have often been crticised for concentrating exclusively on the interests of consumers . "You forget the producer", the critics add. But since satisfaction is the goal and the end of all (our) efforts, like some final consumption of (all) economic phenomena, is it not obvious that the touchstone of progress is to be found in it? Man's well-being is not measured by his efforts but by his satisfactions , and this is also true for men collectively. This is another one of those truths that nobody questions when the issue is man in isolation, though they are contested constantly as soon as the reference is to society. The phrase so much denounced has no other meaning than this: any economic measure is to be assessed not by the work it generates but by the useful effect that results from it, this effect producing either an increase or a decrease in general well-being.

With regard to needs and desires, we have said that no two men are alike. This is also true of our satisfactions . They are not assessed equally by all, and this boils down to the trite saying: tastes differ. Well, it is the acuteness of desires and the variety of tastes that determine the direction of (our) efforts. Here, the influence of the moral code on industry is obvious. You can imagine a man in isolation who is a slave to artificial tastes that are childish and immoral. In this case, it is blindingly clear that his limited forces will satisfy depraved desires only at the expense of those that are more intelligent and better understood. Should a comparable allegation refer to society, however, then this obvious axiom is considered to be an error. We are led to believe that artificial tastes and illusory satisfactions, acknowledged sources of individual poverty, are nevertheless a source of national wealth, because they open up markets to a host of industries. If this were true, we would come to a very sorry conclusion, which is that the social state situates man between poverty and immorality. Once again, political economy resolves these apparent contradictions in the most satisfactory and rigorous manner.

20. T.294 "On the Value of Services" (c.1849-50)↩

Source

T.294 (1849-50) "On the Value of Services" (no date). This previously unpublished sketch was discovered by the original French editor Paillottet among Bastiat's papers and inserted in a footnote to "Property and Plunder" and no date was given. Probably written 1849-50. [OC4, p. 406] [CW2, p. 156] </titles/2450#lf1573-02_label_228>

Editor's Introduction

This short undated piece shows Bastiat musing about his evolving theory of exchange as the mutual exchange of services, or "service pour service" (service for service). 1255 This is continued in the next short piece (below, p. 000) His theory would emerge more fully developed in EH Chap. IV "Exchange."

Text

It is not enough (to say) that value is not to be found in material things or in the forces of nature. It is not enough (to say) that it be found exclusively in services . It is also necessary (to say) that the services themselves may not have an excessively high value. What does it matter to the unfortunate worker whether he pays for expensive wheat because the landowner has to pay for the productive powers of the soil, or even has to pay an excessive amount for his own involvement?

It is the job of Competition to equalize the services on the basis of justice. It does this constantly.

21. T.316 "Money and the Mutuality of Services" (c. 1849)↩

Source

T.316 [1849.??] "Money and the Mutuality of Services" (Mutualité des services) This previously unpublished note was discovered by the original French editor Paillottet among Bastiat's papers and inserted in a footnote to "Damn Money!" and no date was given. Probably written 1849. [OC5, p. 81] [CW4]

Introduction

Again in this short sketch we see Bastiat musing about what he means by the "mutuality of services" or the reciprocal nature of exchanging one service for another. 1256

An interesting addition is the idea of society being "un vaste bazar" (a huge bazaar), or that the process of trading is like a "bazar d'échange" (a trading bazaar). He first used this metaphor in the second speech he gave for the Free Trade Association in September 1846 in Paris:

The world may be considered, from the economic point of view, as a huge bazaar to which each of us brings his services and receives in return … what? Some écus, that is to say, vouchers that give him the right to withdraw from the collection of services (an amount) equivalent to those he has paid in. 1257

Instead of physically taking our goods to a bazaar and swapping or bartering them for other goods, the use of money simplifies the process by turning everybody's home into their own "trading post."

It is possible that this undated sketch might have been written in February 1849 when Bastiat wrote "Capital and Rent" (see below, pp. 000).

Text

The mutuality of services. After all that has gone before, society may be thought of as a huge bazaar to which everyone initially brings their products, and has their value acknowledged and set. Following this, he is authorized to take from the collection of stores some goods of his own choosing of an equal value. Now, how is this value assessed? By the service which is received and rendered. We thus have exactly what Mr. Proudhon was asking for. 1258 We have this trading bazaar, which has been so laughed at, and society, which is more ingenious than Mr. Proudhon, gives us this bazaar while sparing us the inconvenience of having to physically take our goods to it. To achieve this, it has invented money, by means of which it creates an entrepôt (trading post) in (one's own) home.

22. "The Consequences of the Reduction in the Salt Tax" (JDD, 1 Jan. 1849)↩

Source

T.232 (1849.01.01) "Consequences of the Reduction in the Salt Tax, (JDD, 1 Jan. 1849). This article was originally published in JDD, 1 Jan., 1849 and inserted by the original French editor Paillottet as an Appendix at the end of "Peace and Freedom or the Republican Budget". [OC5, pp. 464-67] [CW2, pp. 324-7] </titles/2450#lf1573-02_head_053>

Introduction

On the nature of the salt tax (or "gabelle") see the Editor's Introduction to "The Salt Tax" (20 June, 1847), above, pp. 000.

This article for the Journal des Débats was published just as the reduction in the tax on letters was due to take effect and when debates were underway about abolishing the tax on alcohol (which the Chamber voted for in May 1849). As Vice-President of the Finance Committee Bastiat would have heard all the arguments why expenditure could not be cut and why tax cuts should not be permitted or rescinded if they had already been granted. The tax on salt (abolished in April 1848 and then reinstated at a reduced level of 10c. per kilo) and the tax on letters (cut in August 1848 to 20c. to take effect on 1 January 1849) are good examples of this oscillation in tax policy as the Provisional Government struggled to balance its budget. For some time Bastiat had been arguing that since military expenditure was the single biggest item of government expenditure (30%), followed by debt repayments (29%) which were also militarily related, it had to be drastically cut in order to both cut indirect taxes on the poor (like salt and alcohol) and balance the budget. He argued this in"The Utopian" (ES2 11, 17 Jan. 1847), his "Speech on the Tax on Wine and Spirits" (12, Dec. 1849), in his speech to the Friends of Peace Congress (22 August, 1849), and in a more informal way in one of his popular articles in the street magazine Jacques Bonhomme in June 1848, "A Dreadful Escalation". He reiterates those arguments here.

The article is another example of Bastiat inventing a speech or a petition in order to express his views. This was a literary device he often used in his writings, a total of 12 times, especially in the Economic Sophisms . 1259 They include he following:

"Three Pieces of Advice" (c.1850), CW1, pp. 471-76;

ES1 7 "Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles" (Oct. 1845), CW3, pp. 49-53

ES2 3 "A Petition from Jacques Bonhomme, Carpenter, to M. Cunin-Gridaine, Minister of Trade", in "The Two Axes" (c. 1847), CW3, pp. 138-42

ES2 12 "Jacques Bonhomme to Mr. de Vuitry, Deputy, Reporting Chairman of the Committee Responsible for Examining the Draft Law on Postal Taxes", in "Salt, the Mail, the Customs" (May 1846), CW3, pp. 207-13

ES2 16 "A Report to the King" in "The Right Hand and the Left Hand" (Dec. 1846), CW3, pp. 240-48

ES3 1 "A Letter to the Council of Ministers" in "Recipes for Protectionists" (Dec. 1846), CW3, pp. 257-61

ES3 7 "Letter to M. Arago, of the Academy of Sciences" in "Two Losses versus One Profit" (May 1847), CW3, pp. 287-93 1260

ES3 9 "A Protest" (Sept. 1847), CW3, pp. 296-99

ES3 19 "An Interesting Historical Document" in "Antediluvian Sugar" (Feb. 1848), CW3, pp. 366-67

ES3 20 "The Secret Book of Instructions" in "Monita Secreta" (Feb. 1848), CW3, pp. 371-77

ES3 23 "Three Circulars from Ministers" in "Circulars from a Government that is nowhere to be found" (March 1848), CW3, pp. 380-83

The one most similar to this one is a speech he wanted the President of the Republic (namely, President Louis Napoléon) to give in the National Assembly (thus is was probably written in 1849 or 1850) which was included in an article entitled "Three Pieces of Advice". 1261 In it he states "I would like the president of the Republic to go before the National Assembly and make the following solemn speech" about how he would help remove the political uncertainty in which France found itself. His three pieces of advice, or "resolutions", were:

Citizen representatives, … I will not accept the presidency in whatever form or in whatever manner it happens to me.

Through the will of the people I must carry out executive power for two years more. I understand the meaning of the words executive power and I am resolved to restrict myself to it absolutely.

I sincerely believe that the legislative and executive powers mix up and confuse their roles too much. I am resolved to limit myself to mine, which is to see that the laws you have voted are executed. … I will choose my ministers outside the Assembly. In this way there will be a logical separation between the two powers. In this way, I will put an end to the alliances and portfolio wars within the Chamber which are so disastrous to the country. 1262

This fictional attempt to warn the French people about the dangers posed by the rising power of Louis Napoléon who by-passed the constitution in order to have another term in office in a coup d'état in December 1851, had about as much success as this speech about balancing the budget, cutting taxes, and disarmament. The Crimean War broke out in March 1854 with France, Britain, Austria, and Prussia fighting Russia.

Text

The immediate reduction of the salt tax 1263 has disoriented the cabinet in one respect, with good reason. It is being said that we are seeking new taxes to fill the gap. 1264 Is this really what the Assembly wanted? Removing a tax in order to reimpose a tax would be only a game and one of these unfortunate games in which everyone loses. What is the meaning of their vote, then? It is this: expenditure is constantly rising; there is just one means of forcing the State to reduce it and that is to make it absolutely impossible for it to do otherwise. 1265

The means it has adopted is heroic, we must agree. What is still more serious is that the reform of the salt tax was preceded by the reform of the postal services 1266 and will probably be followed by the reform of the tax on alcohol. 1267

The government is disorientated. Well then! For my part, I say that the Assembly could not put it in a better position. This is a wonderful, and one might say providential opportunity to go down a new path, to put an end to false philanthropy 1268 and warlike passions and, converting its failure into triumph, to deliver security, confidence, credit, and prosperity from a vote that appeared to compromise it and at last to found a republican politics on these two great principles, Peace and Freedom. 1269

Following the resolution from the Assembly, I was expecting, I must admit, the president of the Council to ascend the rostrum and make a speech along these lines:

Citizen Representatives,

Your vote yesterday has shown us a new path; more than this, it forces us to go down it.

You know how much the February revolution aroused illusory hopes and dangerous theorizing. These hopes and systems, clad in the false colors of philanthropy and entering this chamber in the form of legal schemes, were directed at nothing less than destroying freedom and swallowing up the public wealth. We did not know which way to turn. Rejecting all these projects was to upset public opinion in a temporary state of exaltation; accepting them was to compromise the future, violate all rights, and distort the functions of the state. What were we to do? Procrastinate, compromise, accommodate error, give partial satisfaction to the utopians, enlighten the people through the hard lesson of experience, and create administrative departments with the ulterior purpose of abolishing them later, which is not easy to do. Now, thanks to the Assembly, we are at ease. Do not come any longer to ask us to monopolize education or credit, finance agriculture, favor certain industries, and turn charitable giving into a state run system. We have dealt with the poisonous tail of socialism. Your vote has delivered the death blow to its dreaming. We no longer even have to discuss it, for where would discussion lead, since you have removed from us the means to carry out these dangerous experiments? If someone knows the secret of carrying out state-run philanthropy 1270 with no money, let him come forward; here are our ministerial portfolios, we will hand them over to him with joy. As long as they remain in our hands, in the new situation that has been established for us, it remains for us only to proclaim Liberty as the basis of our domestic policy, freedom for the arts, sciences, agriculture, industry, work, trade, the press, and teaching, for freedom is the only system compatible with a reduced budget. The state needs money to regulate and oppress. (If there is) no money, (there can be) no regulation. Our role, with very little expenditure, will henceforward be limited to repressing abuses, that is to say, preventing one citizen's freedom from being exercised at the expense of another's.

Our foreign policy is no less clearly marked and based upon force . We were making compromises and we were still fumbling; now we are irrevocably directed, not only by choice but also by necessity. Happy, a thousand times happy that this necessity imposes on us exactly the policy that we would have adopted by choice! We are determined to reduce our military capability. 1271 You should clearly note that there is nothing to discuss in this regard, we have to act, for we have the choice of disarmament or bankruptcy. It is said that one should choose the lesser of two evils. Here, according to us, the only choice is between an immense good and a terrible evil and, in spite of this, even yesterday the choice was not an easy one for us. False philanthropy and warlike passions stood in our way, and we had to take them into consideration. Today they have surely been reduced to silence, for whatever people say about passion failing to reason, it nevertheless cannot lack reason to the point of demanding that we wage war with no money.

We have therefore come to this rostrum to proclaim disarmament as a fact, and consequently that non-intervention is (now) the principle of our foreign policy. Let nobody speak to us any longer of supremacy and dominance; let nobody point to Hungary, Italy, and Poland as fields of glory and carnage. 1272 We know what can be said for or against military propaganda when we have the choice. But you will not disagree that when you no longer have it, controversy is superfluous. The army will be reduced to what is necessary to guarantee the independence of the country, and at the same time all nations may henceforward count on their independence as far as we are concerned. Let them carry out their reforms as they will, let them undertake only that which they can accomplish. We will let them know loudly and clearly that none of the parties that divide them can count on the support of our bayonets. What am I saying? They do not even need our protests, since these bayonets will be returned to their sheaths or rather, for added security, they will be converted into ploughshares.

I can hear objections coming from the opposition benches; you are saying: "This is the policy of everyone withdrawing to their own homes, everyone fending for themselves." Even yesterday we might have discussed the value of this policy, since we were free to adopt another. Yesterday, I would have quoted reasons. I would have said "Yes, everyone withdrawing to their own homes, everyone fending for themselves," as long as it is a matter of naked force. This is not to say that the links between peoples will be broken. Let us have philosophical, scientific, artistic, literary, and trade relations with everyone. Through this, humanity will become enlightened and make progress. However, I do not want relations at the point of a sword and a gun. To say that the fact that perfectly united families do not go to each other's houses armed , implies that they are acting on the axiom everyone withdrawing to their own homes is a strange misuse of words. Besides, what would we say if, to end our differences, Lord Palmerston 1273 sent us English regiments? Would not our cheeks flush with indignation? How is it therefore that we refuse to believe that other peoples also cherish their dignity and independence?

This is what I would have said yesterday, for when there is a choice between two policies, the one that is preferred has to be justified by the giving of reasons. Today, I am merely invoking necessity, since we no longer have any option. The majority, who have refused to give us the revenue in order to force us to reduce expenditure, would not be so inconsistent as to impose a ruinous policy on us. If anyone, knowing that the taxes on the post, salt, and alcohol are going to be reduced considerably, knowing that we are facing a deficit of 500 million, 1274 still has the temerity to proclaim the clear need for pro-military propaganda, or he who, by threatening Europe, forces us even in peace time to undertake ruinous efforts, let him stand up and take this ministerial portfolio. As for us, we will not assume the shame of such childishness. Therefore, from today onward, the policy of nonintervention is proclaimed. From today onward, measures will be taken to dismiss part of the army. From today onward, orders will go out to abolish useless foreign embassies.

Peace and freedom! This is the policy that we would have adopted by conviction. We would thank the Assembly for having made it an absolute and clear necessity for us. It will ensure the salvation, glory, and prosperity of the republic and will ensure that history will retain our names."

Here, it seems to me, is what the current cabinet ought to have said. Its words would have received the unanimous approval of the Assembly, of France, and of Europe.

23. T.309 "Speaks in a Discussion in the Assembly on a Proposal to change the Tariff on imported Salt" (11 Jan. 1849)↩

Source

T.309 [1849.01.11] "Speaks in a Discussion on a Proposal to change the tariff on imported salt." Short speech to the National Constituent Assembly, 11 Jan. 1849, CRANC, vol. 7, pp. 169-70. Not in OC. CW4

Editor's Introduction

This is the 8th of eight speeches and seven other shorter contributions Bastiat gave in the Chamber between May 1848 and February 1850. See the Editor's Introduction above, pp. 000 for more details.

The motion before the Chamber was a proposal to impose a tariff of 2 fr. per kilo on salt imported in French ships and a tariff of 2 fr. 50c. on foreign ships, which was eventually defeated 385 to 344. 1275 He had written about the tax on salt 10 days previously in an article published in the Journal des Débats , 1 Jan. 1849 (see above, pp. 000) where he talked about its impact on the government's budget and the difficult position it put the government in. In this speech he talks about the internal impact restrictions on importing salt from abroad has on the formation of monopolies within France and the distortions this creates in prices and capital investment.

On a more personal note, we see in the speech an admission of his deteriorating health and the impact this was having on his ability speak in the Chamber and to write his books and essays. He admits at the start that "it is not possible for me to make myself heard in this Assembly" and his speech is later interrupted by an interjector who complains he cannot hear him and that he should speak up. Bastiat says he cannot and offers to give up the floor and present his paper in printed form to the Chair. He did this on several occasions and would print his speeches for circulation to the Deputies so he wouldn't have to speak, most notably with his major speech on "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" (March 1850) 1276 and possibly also "Baccalaureate and Socialism" (early 1850). 1277

Most historians have thought Bastiat died of tuberculosis (which killed his parents when he was a young boy) but some comments in his letters suggest something like throat cancer. In a letter of 14 September 1850 he complains of a "small lump growing in my larynx" 1278 and as the end drew near he complains in a letter of 11 Nov. 1850 "I would ask for one thing only, and that is to be relieved of this piercing pain in the larynx; this constant suffering distresses me. Meals are genuine torture for me. Speaking, drinking, eating, swallowing saliva, and coughing are all painful operations. A stroll on foot tires me and an outing in a carriage irritates my throat; I cannot work nor even read seriously." 1279 His throat condition, whatever it was, would eventually kill him on Christmas Eve 1850 at the age of 49.

Text

Citizen Frédéric Bastiat: Citizen Representatives, I am forced by my health to limit my observations to two or three which will be extremely short, because it is not possible for me to make myself heard in this Assembly.

I have asked for the floor solely to say that I reject (the measure) and as a result I will limit myself to making this observation, the only one I am able to do at this moment. I believe, as the Honourable Monsieur Passy 1280 said a moment ago, that the statistical documents that we have before us are extremely erroneous and have been made under the influence of the more or less explicit desire to see (this amendment) be successful. So for example, we see that they have set the price of salt in the West at 3 francs and a few centimes in order to compare it with prices in Liverpool and Portugal, and for that (price) they have taken an average of the past 10 years. But when one examines the average of the past ten years one finds that the price of salt was considerably less. Now I ask you how it could be that, during this period of 20 years, the price of salt in the salt works of the West was always increasing. I believe that one can attribute that (increase) precisely to the lack of foreign competition. It is a general and unchanging effect of all monopolies that (their monopoly) becomes manifested in falsely (invested) capital and in an artificially (high) value given to salt, 1281 the interest on which the public however is obliged to pay. It is the result of not having to be subject to competition, that the privately owned property in the saltwater marshes is increased in value. In the report which was submitted last time we debated this matter, a figure of 4 to 5 thousands francs per hectare for land in the salt marshes was given. Now I ask you, if is it is in the nature of things that simple marsh land is worth 4 to 5,000 francs per hectare?

Several voices: And industrial labour!

Citizen Frédéric Bastiat: I know that there is a lot of work to do, but I will note that in the same report I spoke about that labour was taken into account, given that it (salt works) requires considerable labour to maintain.

Earlier I voted for an adjournment precisely because I dared to argue, even though I was not completely certain, I dared to argue that if the value of this land had not increased, it would have been subjected to all the laws which we know about, to all the laws of nature. There is no monopoly which does not end up increasing the market value of the land. If you give a man the right to be a broker it will soon become a thing of value which can be passed on, which can be sold, and on which the public has to pay interest.

I say that it is not necessary to take the average of the current price as they have done here only in the case of salt. It could very well happen that the importation of foreign salt (would) not make domestic production fall; but it could perhaps lower the price of land; the price of wages would reduce the profits of the land owner and not those of the worker.

Citizen Luneau: But aren't they partners in the business?

Citizen President: 1282 Don't interrupt.

Citizen Frédéric Bastiat: Messieurs, we are not the first to have made this reform.

Several Members: Speak up! Speak up!

Citizen Frédéric Bastiat: I cannot.

A Member: Then don't speak in the Assembly. We can't hear anything.

Citizen Frédéric Bastiat: I am going to give up the floor. (Speak! Speak!) But I will present my proposal to the Chair. I will limit myself to citing it. The law voted by the Assembly has been attacked in all sorts of ways. For example, it is said that we are going to put 100, 200, or 300 thousand workers to work building roads.

I have consulted the documents supplied by the mining engineers and by the Administration and I am certain that the number of workers employed in the production of salt in the 8 departments in the West is no more than 7,000. (There is unrest and noise by some Members). Is this (figure) contested?

One Voice: Yes, of course. And (what about) the transport (industry)?

Citizen Frédéric Bastiat: These 7,000 workers, according to the same documents, earn nearly 1 million francs per year. Well, I say that I would much rather give a million francs a year to these workers taken from a foreign surtax than to see import duties increase, because if you increase import duties you destroy precisely all the good you want to do by adopting the First Article of the law which you have (already) voted on.

The First Article has been attacked on financial grounds. Some thought that the reduction in the salt tax was not timely, but everybody wanted it. The Minister of Finance 1283 himself said it was unjust. But Article 3 has also been attacked without any attention to the fact that Article 3 was the logical and necessary complement to the First Article.

Without Article 3 all the benefits of the law would pass to the producers.

The whole world knows how to trade in salt; the whole world knows that all goods hit with high customs duties need, by that fact alone, a great deal of capital, and as a result, (will) need the assistance of middlemen, bankers, and that it is very easy to form coalitions (of vested interests).

In the South the coalition of salt producers is blatant. In the West is does not exist to the same degree.

Le citoyen Luneau: It doesn't exist at all.

Citizen Frédéric Bastiat: If there is not serious foreign competition we will deprive the treasury of very large amounts of money without there being any profit, without any benefit for the consumer.

24. T.234 Capital and Rent (Feb. 1849)↩

Source

T.234 (1849.02) Capital and Rent (Capitale et rente) Published as pamphlet, Capitale et rente (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849). [OC5.3, pp. 23-63.] [CW4]

Previously translated by David A. Wells in 1877: Frédéric Bastiat, Essays on political economy. English translation Revised, with Notes by David A. Wells (G.P. Putnam Sons, 1880). First ed. 1877. Contains "Capital and Interest," pp. 1-69; "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen," pp. 70-153; "Government" (The State), pp. 154-73; "What is Money?" (Damned Money), pp. 174-220; "The Law," pp. 221-91.

Editor's Introduction

This is one of Bastiat's 12 Anti-Socialist Pamphlets which were published between late 1848 and July 1850 by the Guillaumin publishing firm and promoted as the "Petits Pamphlets" (Short or Little Pamphlets). 1284 It was part of a concerted campaign by the publishing firm to counter socialist ideas during the the Revolution and the Second Republic by appealing directly to the workers and to socialist intellectuals. In many of them, as with this essay here, Bastiat speaks directly to "les travailleurs" (the labourers), "les ouvriers" (the workers), and "les prolétaires" (the proletarians). A special four page Catalog entitled "Publications nouvelles sur les questions économiques du jour" (New Publications on the Economic Questions of the Day) listed 40 of the firm's books on the right to work (or the "right to a job"), socialism, the condition of the working class, and other similar topics. The catalog was included with the first of Bastiat's Petits Pamphlets Propriété et loi. Justice et fraternité (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848) which was published in late 1848.

By February 1849 when this essay was written Bastiat and his younger friend and colleague Gustave de Molinari had come to the realisation that the classical economists had opened themselves up to socialist criticism because of their hitherto poor defence of private property, interest, and rent. In their view the economists had either assumed the legitimacy of private property or had admitted that the rent from land was in effect "unearned" by the land owner as it was the product of the sun, soil, and rain and not of their own labour and exertions. Bastiat intended to rectify this oversight in his Anti-Socialist Pamphlets and his treatise on economic theory, the Economic Harmonies (1850, 1851), while Molinari would do the same in his articles and book reviews in the JDE , his book Les Soirées , 1285 and in his treatise on economics, which began as a series of lectures at the Athenée royale in Paris in late 1847. The latter were continued at the Musée royal de l'industrie belge when he moved to Brussels in 1852 and were eventually published as the Cours d'économie politique , which appeared in 1855. 1286

The title of this of essay should have been "Capital, Interest, and Rent" in order to better explain the content of the piece. He would return to these topics in more detail later in chapters on Exchange, Capital, and Rent which he was writing for his treatise Economic Harmonies . 1287 What is missing from the treatise is any extended treatment of money. He touches on it in this essay and also in some other writings such as "Damn Money!" written a couple of months after this (April 1849), the pamphlet "Capital" (mid 1849), and his long debate with Proudhon later in the year on "Free Credit." 1288

Traditionally the classical economists defined "rent" as the return which came from agricultural land; "profits" came from business activity, commerce, and manufacturing; and "interest" came from lending capital. Socialists like Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and Victor Considerant criticised interest, rent, and profit as unjust impositions on the labour of ordinary workers because they were "unearned" by the owners of capital, land, and business enterprises respectively. This criticism was responded to by free market economists such as Bastiat and Molinari, as well as Charles Dunoyer, Adolphe Thiers, Léon Faucher, Michel Chevalier, Louis Wolowski, and Joseph Garnier, in multiple works throughout the 1840s which reached a peak in 1848. It should also be noted that a small group of economists also founded a political club, the "Club de la liberté du travail", in March 1848 to confront the socialists head on on the streets of Paris to publicly debate these very questions. They were Charles Coquelin, Alcide Fonteyraud, Joseph Garnier, and Gustave de Molinari . 1289

Bastiat added another twist as this debate was taking place as he was radically rethinking the classical theories of rent and value not always with the agreement of his economist colleagues. 1290 The gist of his new idea was that he could generalise the theory of exchange by redefining exchange to cover any "mutual exchange of services," 1291 and to include under the rubric of "services" all physical goods, non-material goods (or services proper), as well as all returns on investments (whether from capital, land, or a business enterprise) which were more commonly known as interest, rent, and profit respectively. It was the latter aspect of his theory that his colleagues in the Political Economy Society rejected. For example, at the April 10, 1850 meeting of the Society the consensus view was that there was something unique about land rent and that it couldn't be folded into the more general group of "services" as Bastiat wanted to do, 1292 and Molinari thought that by replacing Say's classic formulation of trade as "goods being exchanged for other goods" with "services being exchanged for other services" was Bastiat just playing with words. 1293 In spite of this opposition, Bastiat continued to develop his theory of exchange during 1849 and 1850, using a variety of expressions such as "services pour services" (services are exchanged for other services), "la réciprocité des services" (the reciprocal exchange of services), and "la mutualité des services" (the mutuality of services, or the mutual exchange of services) which is the one he preferred to use here.

In the context of this pamphlet (written in February 1849) Bastiat is appealing to workers who had been influenced by socialists like Proudhon, and so he takes a phrase used by Proudhon, 1294 "la mutualité des services" (the mutual sharing of services), and adapts it for his own purposes (meaning here "the mutual exchange of services"). Proudhon, unlike his other socialist colleagues such as Considerant and Louis Blanc, approved of some transactions on the free market between equal parties where there was some mutual benefit to the exchange. However, he did did not think this was possible in the case of interest paid on loans. Thus, here Bastiat was trying to turn Proudhon's own argument back on himself in a rhetorical turn of phrase which he was much skilled at, as his Economic Sophisms demonstrate, to show that profit, interest, and rent provide mutual benefits to both sides involved in the transaction.

As Bastiat was still working on these new theories at the time this essay was written his use of the terms "interest," "rent," and "value" is sometimes a little confusing. In this translation we have retained Bastiat's use of these words and explain in the footnotes any issues which may arise. Bastiat believed that capital was productive, referring to "la productivité du capital" (the productivity of capital) which produced a return of some kind. Sometimes he referred to this return on capital as "interest" in the traditional sense, "intérêt des capitaux" (interest (earned) on capital), and sometimes as "rente" as in the phrase "le capital produise une Rente" (capital generates a rent). It could be that he just means by rent any annual income or return from an investment, whether capital or land. However, we have chosen to use Bastiat's preferred terminology throughout this essay as we explained above

Another innovative idea which Bastiat develops in this essay is that an exchange is a result of a comparative evaluation of two services by the two parties involved in a transaction. The "value" which is exchanged when services are given and received is determined by the individuals involved in the transaction rather than resides in the products themselves. This is one of Bastiat's most original and profound economic insights which went to the heart of the Smithian and Ricardian tradition of economic thought, which asserted that there was something inherent within the objects being exchanged (such as labour or utility) and that this thing could be objectively assessed, measured, and valued. Bastiat's insight was to reject the objectivity of this "value" and to see that it was the subjective valuations, the "appréciation comparée" (comparative evaluation or judgement), of the two parties to the exchange which made exchange both possible and worth while for both parties.

Although Bastiat rejects the idea that things of equal utility are exchanged he persists in thinking that "equivalent" services are exchanged. The difference between "equal" and "equivalent" is not always clear. However, Bastiat does argue that each individual "evaluates" the utility or value of the goods and services which they sell or purchase and does so based upon their particular place and circumstances. However, in Economic Harmonies he explicitly rejects Condillac's 1295 and Storch's 1296 idea that when exchanges occur because individuals place a different (and thus "unequal") value on things a "double profit" arises - one for each party. Bastiat believed that there was only "one profit" and not two. 1297 He is thus only half way towards a fully thought out theory of subjective value theory along the lines of the marginalist and Austrian schools which emerged in the 1870s.

As part of his critique of socialism, Bastiat criticised the idea of state imposed fraternity and defended the idea of voluntary fraternity which emerged in a free market. He refers to this briefly in "Capital and Rent" but discusses it in more detail in the essay "Justice et fraternité" (Justice and Fraternity) (June, 1848). 1298 Here Bastiat distinguishes between "la fraternité légale" (state imposed fraternity) and "la fraternité libre, spontanée, volontaire" (free, spontaneous, and voluntary fraternity) as he did between "la charité légale ou forcée" (state or coerced charity) and "la charité volontaire ou privée" (voluntary or private charity). Concerning fraternity, he argues that: 1299

La fraternité, en définitive, consiste à faire un sacrifice pour autrui, à travailler pour autrui. Quand elle est libre, spontanée, volontaire, je la conçois, et j'y applaudis. J'admire d'autant plus le sacrifice qu'il est plus entier. Mais quand on pose au sein d'une société ce principe, que la Fraternité sera imposée par la loi, c'est-à-dire, en bon français, que la répartition des fruits du travail sera faite législativement, sans égard pour les droits du travail lui-même ; qui peut dire dans quelle mesure ce principe agira, de quelle forme un caprice du législateur peut le revêtir, dans quelles institutions un décret peut du soir au lendemain l'incarner ? Or, je demande si, à ces conditions, une société peut exister ?

Fraternity, in sum, consists in making a sacrifice for another, working for another. When it is free, spontaneous, and voluntary I can understand it and I applaud it. My admiration for sacrifice is all the greater where it is total. But when this principle, that fraternity will be imposed by law, is propounded within society, that is to say in good French, that the distribution of the fruits of work will be made through legislation, with no regard for the rights of the work itself, who knows to what extent this principle will operate, what form a caprice of the legislator will give it, and in what institutions a decree will bring it into existence from one day to the next? Well, I ask whether society can continue to exist in these conditions.

Finally, throughout this essay Bastiat uses three different words for the "workers" to whom he was appealing, depending on the context: "ouvriers", "travailleurs", and "prolétaires" which we have translated as "workers", "labourers," and "proletarians" respectively, in order to preserve Bastiat's intention. Bastiat only uses the word "prolétaires" in the last part of the essay when he appeals directly to those workers who had been inspired by socialist ideas in an effort to win them back to a free market position.

The structure of the essay is a little unusual for Bastiat. It is based around three "economic tales" about "The Sack of Wheat," "The House," and "The Plane" which was standard practice in his Economic Sophisms. After an introduction where he sets out his theoretical arguments Bastiat turns to a series of stories or economic tales using stock characters to illustrate these concepts for the general reader. In this he is following the standard practice he established in the Economic Sophisms. In this essay the stories are "The Sack of Wheat" (Mathurin and Jérôme), "The House" (Mondor and Valère), and "The Plane" (Jacques and Guillaume). What was very different is that he wraps around these three stories an explanatory and somewhat theoretical analysis which makes it much longer and heavier going for the reader than his previous efforts at economic story telling.

Text: Introduction

In this article, I am trying to penetrate the inner workings of what is known as the i nterest on capital in order to prove its legitimacy and explain its perpetuity.

This may seem strange, but the fact is that what I fear is not to be obscure but rather to be too clear. I fear that readers will be put off by a series of genuine Truisms . How do I avoid pitfalls like this when my sole aim is to deal with facts that are familiar to all through personal, familiar and daily experience?

"This being so," people will tell me, "what is the use of this article? What good does it do to explain something that everyone knows?" 1300

Let us make a distinction, please. Once an explanation has been given, the clearer and simpler it is, the more superfluous it appears. Everyone is driven to exclaiming "I did not need anyone to solve the problem for me." This is the egg of Columbus. 1301

However, this very simple problem would seem much less so if we limited ourselves to setting it out. Let me put it in these words: "Today, Mondor lends out a tool that will be worn out in a few days' time. In spite of this, the capital will produce interest for Mondor or his heirs for all eternity." 1302 Reader, with your hand on your heart, does the answer to this question immediately spring to mind?

I have no time to turn to the economists. As far as I know, they have scarcely been concerned at all with probing Interest in terms of its raison d'être. We cannot blame them for this. At the time they were writing, Interest had not been called into question. 1303

This is no longer the case. The people who say and believe they are ahead of their century have organized active propaganda against Capital and Rent. They attack the Productivity of capital, not in a few abusive cases, but in principle .

A journal has been founded as a vehicle for this propaganda. It is directed by Mr. Proudhon and is said to enjoy huge publicity. 1304 The first issue of this sheet included the electoral Manifesto of Le Peuple. 1305 It says: "The Productivity 1306 of capital is what Christianity condemned under the epithet "Usury", 1307 and they are the true cause of poverty, constituting both the real principle of the proletariat and the eternal obstacle to the establishment of the Republic."

After saying excellent things about work, another journal, La Ruche Populaire 1308 , added: "But above all, work has to be carried out freely, that is to say, that work must be organized in such a way that it is not necessary to pay bankers, 1309 employers or masters for this freedom to work, this right to work that exploiters of men place at such a high price."

The only thought that I will raise here is the one expressed in the words in italics, implying opposition to the paying of Interest. Besides, this thought will be commented on later in the article.

Here is what Thoré, 1310 the famous social democrat, has to say:

The Revolution will always have to be started again for as long as consequences alone are being dealt with, absent the logic and courage needed to abolish the principle itself.

This principle is capital, the counterfeit kind of property, revenue, rent, and usury with which the old regime burdened work.

Since the day, a long time ago, when aristocrats invented this incredible fiction — that capital had the virtue of reproducing itself all by itself , workers have been at the mercy of the idle.

At the end of the year will you find one écu of one hundred sous more in a bag of one hundred francs? 1311

At the end of fourteen years, will your écus in the bag have doubled?

Will one work of art or industry have produced another once fourteen years have passed? 1312

Let us therefore start with the elimination of this disastrous fiction. 1313

At this point, I am neither discussing nor refuting; I am merely quoting, in order to establish that the productivity of capital is considered by a great many people to be a principle that is false, disastrous, and inequitable. But do I need quotations? Is it not a well-known fact that the people ascribe their sufferings to the exploitation of man by man and has not the phrase the Tyranny of Capital become proverbial? 1314

There can be nobody in the world, I think, who does not understand the full seriousness of the following question:

"Is interest on capital natural, fair, and legitimate and is it as useful to the person who pays it as to the one who receives it?"

People say " No " but I say " Yes. " We differ radically on the solution but there is one thing on which we cannot differ and that is the danger of persuading public opinion to accept the wrong solution, whatever it is.

Again, if the error is on my side, the harm is not very great. From this it has to be concluded that I understand nothing of the true interests of the masses, the progress of the human race, and that all my reasoning resembles so many grains of sand which will certainly not stop the juggernaut of the Revolution.

If Messrs. Proudhon and Thoré are mistaken, however, it follows that they are misleading the people and pointing out harm where none exists, that they are giving a wrong direction to the people's ideas, to their dislikes, the objects of their hatred and their political upheavals; it then follows that those who have been misled may rush into a dreadful and absurd conflict in which victory will be more disastrous than defeat since, according to this theory, what they are pursuing is the achievement of universal harm, the destruction of all their means of emancipation, and the bringing to pass of their own destitution.

This is what Mr. Proudhon acknowledged in total good faith. "The foundation stone of my theorizing", he told me, "is free credit ." 1315 If I am mistaken in this, socialism is nothing but a dream." I would add "It is a dream in which, while it lasts, the people will tear themselves apart; should we be surprised if they are bloody and bruised when they awake?"

This is enough to justify me if, during the discussion, I have let myself be carried away in a few trivialities and have written at some length.

Capital and Rent

I am addressing this article to the workers of Paris and in particular to those who have rallied to the banner of socialist democracy .

In it, I will be dealing with two questions:

1. Is it in the nature of things and in accordance with justice that capital generates Rent? 1316

2. Is it in the nature of things and in accordance with justice that the Rent from capital should be perpetual?

The workers of Paris will readily recognize that there is no more important subject that one could debate.

From the dawn of time it has been acknowledged, at least in practice, that capital had to produce Interest. 1317

In recent times it has been claimed that this is precisely the social error that has caused poverty and inequality.

It is therefore essential to know what to believe.

For if the payment of Interest to the profit of Capital is iniquitous, workers are within their rights to rise up against the current social order, and there is no point saying to them that they should have recourse only to legal and peaceful means, for that would be hypocritical advice. When on the one hand you have a man who is strong, poor, and a victim of theft and on the other hand one who is weak, rich and a thief, it would be quite odd to say to the first in the hope of persuading him: "Wait until your oppressor voluntarily renounces his oppression or until it ends of its own accord." That cannot be, and those who teach that Capital is unproductive by nature must be aware that they are provoking a terrible and immediate conflict.

If, on the contrary, the payment of Interest on Capital is natural, legitimate and consistent with the public good, favorable to borrower and lender alike, the political writers who deny this and the public speakers who exploit this alleged social scourge are inciting workers to a senseless and unjust conflict whose only outcome will be the misfortune of all.

In a word, they are arming Labor against Capital. This would be all to the good if these two forces were in opposition! Let the conflict soon be over! But if they are in harmony, the conflict is the greatest harm that can be inflicted on society.

Therefore, Workers, you can clearly see that there is no question more important than this: Is the rent from capital legitimate or not? If the first is true, you ought immediately to repudiate the conflict toward which you are being propelled; in the second case, you ought to pursue it energetically to the bitter end.

The Productivity of capital; the Perpetuity of rent. These questions are difficult to deal with. I will try to be clear. To do this I will use examples rather than demonstrations, or rather I will clothe the demonstration in an example.

I will begin by agreeing that, at first sight, it must seem strange to you for capital to claim payment, especially payment that is perpetual.

You must be saying to yourselves: Here are two men. One works from morning to night, from one end of the year to the next and, if he has consumed everything he has earned, perhaps out of absolute necessity, he will remain poor. On New Year's Eve, he will be no further forward than he was on the previous New Year's Day, and his only prospect is to start all over again. The other man does not use either his hands or his brain, at least, if he does so it is for pleasure; he has the option to do nothing because he receives rent . He does not work, and yet he lives well, having everything in abundance -- fine food, sumptuous furniture, and elegant clothes. This means that every day he uses up things that workers have had to produce by the sweat of their brow, for these things are not made by themselves and, as for him, he has not turned his hands to them. It is we, the workers, who have caused this wheat to germinate, varnished this furniture, and woven these carpets; it is our wives and daughters who have woven, cut out, sewn, and embroidered these fabrics. We therefore work both for him and for us; for him in the first instance and for ourselves if anything is left over. But here is something more striking: if the first of these two men, the worker, consumes all that has been left to him by way of profit during the year, he is therefore always at the starting point and his fate condemns him to turning endlessly in an eternal, monotonous circle of fatigue. Work is thus paid for just once. However, if the second man, the man of independent means, 1318 consumes his annual rent during the year, the following year, and the years following that for all eternity, he will have a revenue that is always the same, always inexhaustible, and perpetual . Capital is thus remunerated not once or twice, but an innumerable number of times! This means that, a hundred years later, the family that has invested 20,000 francs at 5 percent will have received 100,000 francs and this will not stop it receiving another 100,000 in the succeeding century. In other words, for 20,000 francs' worth of its own work, in two centuries the family will deduct ten times that sum from other people's work. Is there not a monstrous vice that needs to be reformed in this type of social order? This is still not all. If this family is willing to restrict its expenditure a little and, for example, spend only 900 francs instead of 1,000, with no work or trouble other than that of investing 100 francs per year, it can increase its Capital and its Rent to an extent that is so rapid that it will soon be in a position to consume as much as one hundred hard-working families of the toiling workers. Does this not show that current society carries a hideous cancer within it, which has to be cut out even if this risks a little temporary suffering?

These, I think, are the sad and irritating reflections that an active and too facile propaganda campaign against capital and rent must be arousing in your minds.

On the other hand, I am perfectly convinced that there are times at which your mind entertains doubts and your conscience scruples. You must be saying to yourselves, "But proclaiming that capital should not produce interest is to proclaim that loans should be free of charge, and that means that the person who has created Tools of production or Materials or Provisions of any sort has to hand them over for nothing. Is this just? And if this is how things are, who would want to lend these tools, materials, or provisions? Who would want to keep them in stock or even produce them? Each person would consume them as they went along, and the human race would never take a step forward. Capital would no longer be accumulated because there would no longer be any interest in doing so. 1319 It would become extremely scarce. This would be a strange kind of progress toward free loans; a strange way of improving the lot of borrowers by making it impossible for them to borrow at any price! What would become of production itself? For there would be no more loans in society and not a single branch of production can be named, not even hunting, that can be carried on without loans. And what would become of all of us? What! Would we no longer be allowed to borrow in order to work in our most productive years and to lend in our old age in order to be able to take some rest? Would the law snatch from us the prospect of accumulating a little property by forbidding us to draw any returns from it? Will it destroy in us both the incentive to save at present and the hope of rest in the future? No matter how much we wear ourselves out with fatigue, we will have to abandon the prospect of handing on a little nest-egg to our sons and daughters, since modern science has castigated it as unproductive and since we will become exploiters of men 1320 if we lend it for interest! Ah! This world that is opening up before us as an ideal is even more mournful and arid than the one being condemned, for at least in this one, hope has not been banished!

Thus, in all respects and from all points of view, the question is a serious one. We must hurry to find a solution.

The Civil Code has a section entitled "On the manner in which property is transmitted". 1321 I do not believe that this is a complete listing. When a man, by dint of his own work, has made something useful, in other words, when he has created something possessing value , it can pass into the hands of another man only by one of five routes: by gift, inheritance, exchange, loan, or theft . I'll only say a few words about each of them except the last, although it plays a larger role in the world that one would think. 1322

Gifts have no need to be defined. They are essentially voluntary and spontaneous. They depend exclusively on the giver, and it cannot be said that the person receiving them has any right to them. Doubtless the morality and religion have often made it a duty for men, especially wealthy ones, to hand over things they own freely to their more unfortunate brethren. But this is a wholly moral obligation. If it were to be proclaimed as a principle and accepted in practice, if it were enshrined in law that everyone had the right to the property of others, gifts would no longer be meritorious and charity and gratitude no longer virtues. What is more, a doctrine like this would abruptly and universally stop both work and production just as a sharp cold snap freezes water and puts life into suspended animation, for who would work if there were no correlation between our work and the satisfaction of our needs? Political economy has not dealt with gifts . From this it has been concluded that it rejected gifts and that it was a heartless science. This is a ridiculous accusation. This science, which examines the laws that result from the mutual exchange of services , 1323 had no need to research the consequences of generosity on the person receiving it, nor its effects perhaps even more precious, on the donor; as these consequences are obviously a question for moral philosophy. The various branches of science have to be allowed to limit their scope and above all, they must not be accused of denying or belittling those matters they deem to be outside their domain.

Inheritance , against which there has been a recent outcry, 1324 is one of the forms of a Gift, and certainly the most natural. What man has produced he is free to consume, exchange, or give away, and what is more natural than for him to give it to his children? It is this ability, more than any other, which inspires in him the courage to work and to save. Do you know why the principle of Inheritance is being contested? Because people think that property handed down in this way is being taken away from the masses. This is a disastrous error; political economy demonstrates in the starkest fashion that all value produced is a creation that does no wrong to anyone at all. This is why it can be consumed and above all why it can be handed down without harming anyone. However, I will not dwell on these considerations, which are not germane to my subject.

Exchange is the principal domain of political economy because it is by far the most frequent method of transferring property in accordance with agreements that are freely and voluntarily entered into and whose laws and effects this science studies.

Strictly speaking, Exchange is the mutual exchange of services. The parties say to one another: "Give me this and I will give you that" or "Do this for me and I will do that for you". It should be noted (as this will shed new light on the notion of value ) that the second formula is always implicit in the first. When people say "Do this for me and I will do that for you," they are offering to exchange one service for another. Similarly, when they say: "Give me this and I will give you that" it is as if they were saying "I will hand over to you this item that I have made; hand over to me one that you have made." The work is in the past instead of being in the present, but the Exchange is no less governed by a comparative evaluation of the two services, so that it is very true to say that the principle of value is inherent in the services given and received when products are exchanged rather than in the products themselves.

In fact, services are almost never exchanged directly. There is an intermediary involved, known as money. 1325 Paul has made a suit in exchange for which he wants to obtain a little bread, a little wine, a little oil, a visit to the doctor's, a seat at the theatre, etc. The Exchange cannot be made in kind, so what does Paul do? He first of all exchanges his suit for money, a procedure known as a sale . He then exchanges this money for the things he wants, a procedure known as a purchase and it is only at this point that the mutual exchange of services completes its evolution, that work and satisfaction are in balance for the same person and he is able to say "I have done this for society and it has done this for me". In short, it is only at this point that the Exchange has been fully accomplished . Nothing is more accurate then than this comment by J. B. Say: "Since the introduction of money, each exchange is broken down into two factors, sale and purchase. " It is the combination of these two factors that makes the exchange complete. 1326

It should also be said that the constant appearance of money in each exchange has overwhelmed and misled all previous ideas; people have ended by believing that money was the true wealth and that to increase it was to increase the number of services and products. This has led to the protectionist regime, 1327 paper money, and the famous aphorism: "What one person gains, another loses," 1328 and other errors that have ruined and bloodied the earth.

After a lengthy search, it was found that, in order for two services exchanged to have an equivalent value and for the exchange to be just, the best method was for it to be free. 1329 However attractive State intervention appears to be at first sight, it is soon apparent that it is always oppressive for one or other of the contracting parties. When you examine these questions closely, you are obliged always to reason from the given fact that equivalence is the result of freedom. Indeed, we have no other way of knowing whether, at any given time, two services are worth the same , than to see whether they are readily and freely exchanged for one another. Introduce the intervention of the State, which is based upon force, on one side or the other, and immediately any means of evaluation becomes complicated and confused instead of becoming clearer. The role of the State should be to forestall and above all to repress misrepresentation and fraud, that is to say, to guarantee freedom and not to violate it.

I have gone into some detail on Exchange , although my principal duty is to deal with Lending . My excuse for this is that, in my opinion, a real exchange occurs in lending, a genuine service is provided by the lender which makes the borrower responsible for returning an equivalent service; two services whose comparative value, like the value of all possible types of service, can be assessed only in the light of freedom.

Well, if this is so, the total legitimacy of what are known as rents for houses or land, as well as the paying of interest on capital, is explained and justified. 1330

Let us therefore consider Lending .

Let us assume that two men exchange two services or two items whose equivalence is beyond dispute. For example, let us assume that Pierre says to Paul "Give me ten ten-sou coins in exchange for one five franc coin". 1331 It is impossible to imagine a more manifest equivalence. When this barter has been completed, neither of the parties has anything he can claim from the other. The services exchanged are equal [se valent] 1332 The result of this is that if one of the parties wishes to bring into the bargain an additional clause that is favorable to him and disadvantageous to the other, the second party would have to agree to a second clause that restores the equilibrium and reinstates the law of justice. To see injustice in this second compensating clause would certainly be absurd. Let us suppose that this is the case. Now, if Pierre, after saying to Paul "Give me ten ten-sou coins and I will give you one five franc coin," now adds, "You must give me the ten ten-sou coins immediately and I, for my part, will give you the one hundred sou coin only in a year's time, " then it is quite clear that this new proposition alters the costs and benefits of the transaction and the relative magnitude of the two services. Does it not in effect leap to the eye that Pierre is asking Paul for a new service that is additional and of a different type? 1333 Is it not as though he were saying "Provide me with the service of being able to use your five francs for my own benefit for one year, a sum which you could be using for yourself?" And what good reason can be put forward to maintain that Paul is bound to provide this special service free of charge and ask for nothing further for this requirement and that the State should intervene to force him to do so? How then can the political writer 1334 who preaches a doctrine like this to the people reconcile it with his principle of the mutual exchange of services ?

I have brought money into the debate here. I have been led to do so by a wish to put before us two objects for exchange that are totally and indubitably equal in value. 1335 I wanted to deal with the objections but, from another point of view, my argument would have been even more striking if I had made the agreement bear on the services or products themselves.

For example, let us take a House and a Ship, whose values are so totally equal that their owners wish to exchange them by swapping one for the other, 1336 with no additional payment or discount involved. In fact the trade takes place before a notary. Just as they are each about to take possession, the shipowner says to the town dweller "Very well, the transaction is complete and nothing is better proof of its total equity than our free and voluntary agreement. Now that the conditions have been settled in this way, I now propose a small, practical modification to you. It is that you hand your House over to me today, but that I will only hand over my Ship to you in a year's time, and the reason I am asking you this is so that for this term of one year I can make use of the Ship." To avoid becoming involved in the considerations relating to the deterioration of the object lent, I will assume that the shipowner adds: "I will make sure that in a year's time, I will hand over the ship in the same condition as it is right now." I ask any person of good faith and even Mr. Proudhon himself, would the town dweller not be within his rights in replying "The new clause you are proposing changes the relative magnitude or the equivalence of the services exchanged. Through it, I will be deprived for one year both of my house and your ship. Through it, you will have the use of both. If, in the absence of this clause, the exchange of swapping one thing for another was fair, this is the very reason why it is an imposition on me. It stipulates a disadvantage for me and an advantage for you. It is a new service that you are requesting from me; I therefore have the right to refuse it or to ask you for an equivalent service in compensation."

If the parties agree on this compensation, the principle of which is incontestable, two transactions may be readily seen in the same transaction, two exchanges of services in one exchange. First of all, there is the exchange of the house for the ship, and then the delay granted by one party and the compensation corresponding to this period accepted by the other. These two new services are known generically and in the abstract as Credit and Interest, but names do not change the nature of things and I challenge anyone to be bold enough to say that basically there is not in this encounter one service exchanged for another or mutual exchange of services . To say that one of these services does not give rise to the other, or that the first has to be provided free of charge (surely an injustice), is to say that injustice consists in the reciprocity of services 1337 and that justice consists in one of the parties giving something and not receiving anything in return, which is a contradiction in terms.

To give an idea of interest and its mechanism, may I have recourse to two or three tales? But before doing so, I have to say something about capital.

There are some people who consider that capital is money, and this is precisely why its productivity is denied, since, as Mr. Thoré says, écus lack the ability to reproduce themselves. However, it is not true that Capital is synonymous with money. Before the discovery of precious metals there were capitalists in the world, and I will be so bold to say that then, as now, everyone was a capitalist to some degree.

What is capital, then? It is made up of three things:

1. Materials , on which people work, when these materials already have a value bestowed upon them by human effort of one kind or another, which has endowed them with the possibility of being bought and sold: wool, linen, leather, silk, wood, etc.

2. I mplements people use in order to work: tools, machines, ships, vehicles, etc., etc.

3. Provisions that they consume while they are working: foodstuffs, fabrics, houses, etc.

Without these things the work of man would be thankless and almost meaningless, and yet these things themselves have required lengthy periods of work, especially at the outset. This is why a high price is placed on possessing them, and it is also the reason why it is perfectly legitimate to exchange and sell them, and to gain a profit from using them and a payment for lending them.

Here, now, are my tales.

The Sack of Wheat.

Mathurin, 1338 who was incidentally as poor as Job, and reduced to earning his living from day to day, was nevertheless the owner, through some inheritance or another, of a fine plot of land that was lying fallow. His burning wish was to clear it. "Alas!" he said to himself, "digging ditches, putting up fences, breaking up the soil, removing brambles and stones, fertilizing and sowing it, all this may well provide me with food in a year or two, but certainly not today or tomorrow. It is impossible for me to devote myself to farming until I have accumulated a few provisions to keep me going until the harvest, and I know through experience that prior work is essential for making current work truly productive." The honest Mathurin did not stop at reflections like these. He also resolved to work on a daily basis and save part of his earnings in order to buy a spade and a sack of wheat, things without which the finest farming dreams come to naught. He did this so well and was so busy and sober that at last he found himself the owner of the much desired sack of wheat . "I will take it to the mill," he said, "and this will provide me with the wherewithal to live until my field is covered with a rich harvest." When he was about to set out, Jérôme came to borrow his treasure. "If you are willing to lend me this sack of wheat," said Jérôme, "you would be doing me a great service , for I have in mind a highly lucrative job which I cannot undertake as I have no Provisions on which to live until it is finished." "I was in the same position", replied Mathurin, "and if I now have enough bread assured for a few months, I have earned it at the expense of my hands and stomach. On what principle of justice should it now be devoted to achieving your enterprise and not mine?"

You can well imagine that the negotiations were lengthy. However, they were concluded, on the following terms:

First of all, Jérôme promised to return in one year's time a sack of wheat of the same quality and the same weight, with not a grain missing. "This initial clause is only fair," he said; "without it Mathurin would not be lending it, he would be giving it away."

Next, he undertook to hand over five liters of wheat over and above the hectoliter . 1339 "This clause is no less fair than the other," he thought; "without it Mathurin would be providing me with a service for no reward. He would be depriving himself, abandoning the enterprise so dear to him, and would be enabling me to achieve mine. For a year he would be allowing me to enjoy the fruit of his savings, and all this for no charge. Since he is postponing his land clearance, since he is enabling me to carry out a lucrative task, it is only natural for me to allow him to participate to a certain extent in the profits that I will owe solely to his sacrifice."

For his part, Mathurin, who was something of an expert in such things, reasoned as follows. "Since, in accordance with the first clause, the sack of wheat will be returned to me at the end of one year," he said to himself, "I will be able to lend it again. It will be returned to me the second year; I will lend it again and so on for eternity. However, I cannot deny that it will have been eaten a long time ago. It is very odd that I will eternally be the owner of a sack of wheat in spite of the fact that the one I lent will have been totally used up. But this can be explained: it will be used up in providing a service to Jérôme. It will enable Jérôme to produce something of greater value and consequently Jérôme will be able to return a sack of wheat or its value without experiencing any hardship in the slightest. As for me, this value will unquestionably be my property for as long as I do not use it up for my own purposes; if I had used it to clear my land, I would have recovered it in the form of a fine harvest. Instead of this, I am lending it and will recover it in the form of repayment.

I learn another lesson from the second clause. At the end of the year, I will receive five liters of wheat over and above the hundred I lent him. If, therefore, I continued to work on a daily basis, and save some of my earnings as I have been doing, after a while I would be able to lend two sacks of wheat, then three and four, and once I had invested a sufficient number to enable me to live on the sum total of the five liters of payment from each one of them, I would be able to rest a bit in my old age. But then, wouldn't I be living at the expense of others? Certainly not, since it has just been acknowledged that by lending I am providing a service and advancing the work of my borrowers, for which I am paid just a small part of the additional production that is due to my loan and savings. It is marvelous that man is able to achieve leisure that harms no one and cannot be envied without injustice."

The House

Mondor 1340 had a house. In building it, he had never extorted anything from anyone at all. He owed it to his personal work or, which amounts to the same thing, to work that was fairly paid for. His first care was to conclude an agreement with an architect by which, for a set fee of one hundred écus per year, the architect would undertake to keep the house in good condition. Mondor was already congratulating himself for the happy days he was about to spend in this sanctuary that our Constitution has declared to be sacred. However, Valère 1341 claimed the right to make it his home. "What are you thinking?" asked Mondor, "It was I who built it, it has cost me ten years of arduous work and you are the one who will benefit from it!" They agreed to take the matter to the courts. They did not seek out learned economists; there were none in the locality. But they chose just men with common sense, which amounted to the same thing: political economy, justice, and common sense are one and the same. Well, this is what the judges decided. If Valère wished to occupy Mondor's house for one year, he would have to observe three conditions. The first was the obligation to leave at the end of the year and hand back the house in good condition apart from normal wear and tear. The second was the obligation to repay Mondor the 300 francs that Mondor paid the architect each year to repair the ravages of time since this damage would be occurring while the house was in Valère's hands and in all fairness he should bear the consequences of it. The third obligation was that he would have to provide Mondor with a service equivalent to the one he was receiving. This equivalence of service would have to be freely negotiated between Mondor and Valère.

The Plane

A very long time ago, there lived in a poor village a carpenter who was something of a philosopher, as are all my characters to some extent. Jacques 1342 worked morning and night with his strong hands, but his mind was not idle for all that. He liked to understand his own actions, both as to their causes and their effects. From time to time he said to himself "With my axe, my saw and my hammer I can make only rough furniture and I am paid accordingly for this. If I had a plane I would please my customers more, and they would please me more as well. This is only fair; all I can expect is to receive services that are proportional to the ones I myself supply. Yes, I have made up my mind; I will make myself a plane ."

However, just as he was about to begin, Jacques thought to himself "I work 300 days a year for my customers. If I take 10 of them to make my plane and assuming it lasts me one year, I will have only 290 days to make my furniture. In order, therefore, that I don't end up being duped in this affair , I will have, with the help of the plane, to earn as much from 290 days' work in the future as I do now from 300. Actually, I need to earn more than that, for unless I do, it will not be worth the trouble to venture into making innovations." Jacques therefore began to do his sums. He made sure that he would be selling his improved furniture for a price that would reward him amply for the ten days devoted to making the plane. And when he was quite certain of this, he started work.

I ask the reader to note that the power inherent in the tool to increase the productivity of labor is at the root of the solution that follows.

At the end of ten days, Jacques had a wonderful plane in his possession that was all the more precious since he had made it himself. He was overcome with joy for, like Perrette, 1343 he counted up all the profit he was going to make from this ingenious instrument; unlike her, he was fortunate enough not to be reduced to saying "Farewell cow, calf, pig and brood!"

He was in the middle of building his castles in Spain 1344 when he was interrupted by his colleague, Guillaume, a carpenter in the neighboring village. Once he had admired the plane, Guillaume was struck by the advantages he might obtain from it. He said to Jacques:

"You must do me a service ."

"What service?"

"Lend me this plane for one year."

As you can imagine, this proposition led to an inevitable outcry from Jacques:

"Are you out of your mind, Guillaume? And if I do you this service , what service will you do me in turn?"

"None. Do you not know that loans ought to be free of charge? Do you not know that capital is naturally unproductive? Do you not know that Fraternity has been proclaimed? 1345 If you do me a service only in order to receive one from me, what merit will it gain for you?"

"Guillaume, my friend, fraternity does not mean that all sacrifices have to be one-sided; and if they do, I do not see why they should not be made by you. I do not know whether loans ought to be free of charge, but I do know that if I lent you my plane free of charge for one year, it would be like giving it to you. To tell you the truth, I did not make it for that purpose."

"Well then, let us dispense with the modern axioms on fraternity that the socialists have discovered. I am asking you for a service; what service do you want from me in exchange?"

"First of all, in a year's time the plane would have to be scrapped 1346 for it would be useless. It would therefore be fair for you to give me back one exactly like it or enough money to have it repaired or compensate me for the ten days I will have to devote to making a new one. In one way or another, the plane has got to be returned to me in the same good condition as when I gave it to you."

"That is only fair and I accept this condition. I undertake to return to you either a similar plane or its value . I think you will be satisfied and have nothing further to ask of me."

"Quite the contrary, I think. I have made this plane for me and not for you. I was expecting an advantage from it, an improved level of work that was better paid and an improved standard of living. I cannot hand all that over free of charge. How could it be justified that I have made the plane while you gain the benefit? I might just as well ask you for your saw and axe. What a muddle! Is it not more natural for each to keep what he has made with his own hands just as he keeps his hands themselves? Making use of the hands of others for no reward, that is slavery ; can making use of others' planes for no reward, be called fraternity?"

"But we have agreed that in a year's time I will give it back to you as bright and shiny as it is today!"

"It is no longer a question of next year; it is a question of this one. I have made this plane to improve my work and my standard of living; if you limit yourself to giving it back to me in a year's time, you are the one that will have the benefit of it for a whole year. I am not bound to provide you with a service like this without any service from you; if therefore you want my plane, apart from the total restitution we have already stipulated, you have to provide me with a service which we will discuss; you have to compensate me."

And this was done. Guillaume gave Jacques a payment calculated to give Jacques back a brand new plane at the end of the year together with compensation consisting of a plank for the economic benefits he had gone without and had handed over to his colleague.

And if anyone heard of this transaction, he would have found it impossible to find any trace of oppression or injustice in it.

The striking thing is that, at the end of the year, the plane was returned to Jacques, who lent it again immediately, received it back, and lent it a third and fourth time. It passed into the hands of his son who rents it out still. Poor plane! How many times has its blade or handle been changed! It is no longer the same plane, but it still retains the same v alue , at least for Jacques' descendants.

Workers, let us now discuss the meaning of these tales.

First of all, I state that the Sack of Wheat and the Plane are in this instance the type, model, faithful representation, and symbol of all forms of capital, just as the five liters of wheat and the plank are the type, model, representation, and symbol of all forms of Interest. This having been said, the following is a series of consequences whose fairness cannot be contested:

1. If the handing over of one plank by the borrower to the lender is a payment that is natural, equitable, legitimate, and the fair price for a genuine service, we may conclude that, in general, it is in the nature of capital to generate interest. When this capital, as in the examples above, takes the form of w ork tools , it is very clear that it has to produce a return for its owner, the man who made it and who has devoted his time, intelligence and strength to it, otherwise why would he have made it? Tools of production do not satisfy any immediate need; we do not eat planes and drink saws, unless we are talking about Fagotin. 1347 In order for a man to decide to take time off for producing things of this sort, he will most certainly have had to come to this decision through a consideration of the power that such tools will add to his own, the time they will save him, and the improvement and speed they will give his work, in short, of the gains they provide. Well, are we obliged to hand over to someone else, free of charge, the gains we prepared for ourselves through our work and the sacrifice of time which might have been used for some more immediate purpose, just when we are about to enjoy them? Would it be an advance in the social order for the law to decide in this way, and for citizens to pay civil servants to ensure the execution by force of a law like this? I am bold enough to say that there is not a single one of you who would support this. This would be to legalize, organize, and systematize injustice itself, for it would be to proclaim that there are some men born to provide services free of charge and others to receive them. Let us affirm, therefore, that in fact interest is just, natural, and legitimate.

2. A second consequence, no less remarkable than the first and, if such were possible, even more satisfying, to which I draw your attention, is this: Interest does not harm the borrower . By this I mean that the obligation of the borrower to pay compensation for having the use of a certain capital cannot make his situation worse. 1348

Note that, in fact, Jacques and Guillaume are perfectly free with regard to the transaction to which the p lane may give rise. This transaction can take place only if it suits both parties. The worst that can happen is that Jacques will be too demanding and in this case, Guillaume will refuse the loan and his position will remain as it was before. By taking on the loan, Guillaume is making clear that he considers it advantageous; he is making clear that, having done his calculations and taking account of the compensation, whatever it is, for which he is responsible, he finds it more beneficial to borrow than not to borrow. He takes his decision only after comparing the gains and disadvantages. He has calculated that, on the day he hands back the plane together with the agreed compensation, he will have still produced more for the same work, thanks to this tool. He will retain some profit; if this were not so, he would not borrow.

The two services we are discussing here are exchanged in accordance with the law governing all exchanges: the law of supply and demand. Jacques' demands have a natural and impassable limit. This is the point at which the payment he demands would come to equal all the benefit that Guillaume would obtain from using the plane. In this case, the loan would not be made. Guillaume would have either to make a plane for himself or do without it, which would leave him in his original situation. He borrows, and therefore he benefits from borrowing.

I know full well what people will say to me. They will say "Guillaume may be making a mistake, or else he may be driven by necessity and have to comply with a hard law."

I agree, but my answer is "With regard to mistakes in calculation, these result from weaknesses in our nature, and using these as an argument against the transaction under discussion is to object to all possible transactions and all human actions. 1349 Error is an accident that is constantly being put right by experience. In the end, it is up to each person to be careful. As for hard necessity, which obliges people to take out burdensome loans, it is clear that these situations existed before the loan. If Guillaume is in a situation such that he absolutely cannot do without a plane and this obliges him to borrow one at any price, does this situation arise because Jacques has taken the trouble to manufacture this tool? Is it not independent of this circumstance? However hard and brutal Jacques is, he would never be able to make the current position of Guillaume worse. Certainly, from the moral point of view, the lender can be blamed, but from the economic point of view the loan itself could never be considered responsible for previous necessities that it had not created and which, to some extent it relieves.

But this proves one thing to which I will be returning and that is that Guillaume's obvious interest, the personification here of all borrowers, is that there should be a great many Jacques and planes, in other words, of lenders and capital. It is very clear that if Guillaume can say to Jacques "Your demands are exorbitant, I will go elsewhere; there is not a shortage of planes in the world," he would be in a better situation than if Jacques' plane was the only one available for lending. Clearly, there is no truer aphorism than this: A service in return for a service. However, we should never forget that no service has a fixed and absolute value compared with others. The parties entering into an agreement are free. Each of them makes his demands as high as possible and the circumstance that favors these demands most is the absence of competition. From this it follows that if there is a class of people more interested than others in the creation, increase, and abundance of capital, it is above all the class of borrowers. Well, since capital is created and accumulated only when stimulated by the prospect of a just return, that class should therefore understand the damage it does itself by denying the legitimacy of interest, proclaiming free credit, declaiming against the alleged tyranny of capital, discouraging saving, and thus encouraging the scarcity of capital and consequently a high level of rent.

3. The tale I have told you also sets you on the path to explaining the apparently strange phenomenon that is known as the longevity or perpetuity of interest. Since, when lending this plane, Jacques was very legitimately able to stipulate the condition that at the end of the year the plane would be returned to him in the same condition as it was when lent, is it not obvious that he is able, when this period is over, either to use it for his own purposes or lend it again on the same conditions? If he takes the latter option, the plane will be returned to him at intervals of one year indefinitely. Jacques will thus also be able to lend it indefinitely, that is to say, draw from it a perpetual rent. People will say that the plane will wear out. That is true, but it is worn out by the hand of and for the benefit of the borrower. The borrower has included this gradual deterioration in his accounts and has taken responsibility for the consequences, as he should. He has calculated that he will draw from this tool sufficient benefit to be able to agree to hand it back in its original condition after having made a profit as well. For as long as Jacques does not use up this capital buying things for himself for his own personal benefit, for as long as he forgoes these advantages, this will enable him to restore the plane to its original condition, and he will have an indisputable right to its return over and above the interest payments.

Please note as well that if, as I think I have demonstrated, Jacques, far from doing Guillaume wrong, has done him a service by lending him his plane for a year, for the same reason he will not do harm but on the contrary do a service to the second, third, and fourth borrower in successive periods. From this you will understand that interest on capital is as natural, legitimate, and useful in the thousandth year as in the first.

Let us go further still. It may be that Jacques will lend just one plane. It is possible that, by dint of work, saving, doing without, organization, and activity, he manages to lend a host of planes and saws, that is to say, to provide a host of services . I stress the point that if the first loan is a social good this will be true for all the others, for they are all of a kind and based on the same principle. It may then happen that the total of all the payments received by our honest artisan in exchange for the services he provides is enough to provide him in turn with a living. In this case, there will be one man in the world with the right to live without working. I do not say that he will do well by devoting himself to rest; I say that he will have the right to do so, and if he does take up this right it will not be at the expense of anyone at all, quite the contrary. If society understands the nature of things a little, it will acknowledge that this man is living from the services he doubtless receives (as we all do) but that he receives these quite legitimately in return for the other services he himself has provided, that he continues to provide, and which are perfectly genuine, since they are freely and voluntarily accepted.

And here we can glimpse one of the finest harmonies in the social world. I am referring to Leisure , 1350 not that leisure that the warlike and dominating castes organized for themselves through the plundering of the workers, but the leisure that is the legitimate and innocent fruit of past activity and saving. By expressing myself in this way, I know that I am upsetting a great many preconceived ideas, but look, is not leisure an essential spring in the social mechanism? 1351 Without it there would never have been any Newtons, Pascals, or Fénélons in the world; 1352 the human race would have no knowledge of art, the sciences, nor any of the marvelous inventions originally made by investigation out of pure curiosity. Thought would be inert, and man would not have the ability to advance. On the other hand, if leisure could be explained only as a function of plunder and oppression, if it were a benefit that could be enjoyed only unjustly and at the expense of others, there would be no middle way between two evils: either the human race would be reduced to squatting in a vegetative and immobile life, in eternal ignorance because one of the cog wheels in its mechanism was missing, or it would have to conquer this cog wheel at the price of inevitable injustice and be obliged to offer the world the sorry sight in one form or another of the division of human beings into masters and slaves as in classical times. I challenge anyone to suggest an alternative outcome within the terms of this analysis. We would be reduced to contemplating the providential plan that orders society with the regretful thought that something is very sadly missing. The driving force of progress would either have been forgotten, or what is worse, this driving force would constitute nothing other than injustice itself. But no, God has not left out an element like this from his creation. Let us be careful to acknowledge fully his wisdom and power. Let those whose imperfect thinking fails to explain the legitimacy of leisure at least echo that astronomer who said: "At a certain point in the heavens there has to be a planet which we will one day discover, for without it the celestial world is not harmony but disharmony." 1353

Well then! I say that, once it is understood properly, the tale of my humble plane, although very modest, is enough to elevate us to the contemplation of one of the most comforting and unacknowledged of the social harmonies. 1354

It is not true that we must choose between a denial of leisure or regarding it as illegitimate. Thanks to rent and its natural longevity, leisure may arise from work and saving. This is a pleasant prospect everyone can keep in mind and a noble reward to which each individual may aspire. It has appeared in the world and is spreading, distributed in proportion to the exercise of certain virtues. It opens all the avenues to intelligence and renders the souls of the human race more noble, more moral and spiritual, not only without putting any weight on those of our brethren who are condemned by circumstances to heavy labor, but also gradually relieving them as well of all the most heavy and distasteful tasks that this labor involves. All that is needed is for capital to be created, accumulated, increased, and lent at rates that are increasingly less onerous and for this capital to reach down and to penetrate all social strata and there will result the most admirable social progress, first serving to emancipate the lenders, and then hastening the emancipation of the borrowers themselves. For this to happen, all laws and customs have to be in favor of saving, which is the source of capital. All that needs to be said is that the most important condition for this is to avoid scaring off, attacking, combating, and negating what is the stimulus of saving and its raison d'être: rent.

As long as we see passing from hand to hand in the way of loans merely provisions, materials, and tools , things that are essential for the productivity of work itself, the ideas set out up to now will not encounter many opponents. Who knows whether I will not even be criticised for making a great effort to preach to the converted, as they say. But as soon as money is involved as the means of the transaction (and it is almost always money), objections rise up again in droves. Money, it is said, does not reproduce itself as your sack of wheat does; it does not assist work as your plane does. It does not provide direct satisfaction as your house does. It is, therefore, of its very nature incapable of producing interest or increasing in size, and the payment it exacts is real extortion.

Who does not see the sophism in this? Who does not see that money is just a transitory form that people assign temporarily to other values , to things that are genuinely useful, with the sole aim of facilitating their affairs? At the very heart of society's complications, is the fact that the person who is in a position to lend almost never has the actual thing a borrower needs. Jacques has a plane all right, but perhaps Guillaume wants a saw. They would not be able to agree, a transaction favorable to both would not ensue, and what would happen then? What would happen is that Jacques would first exchange his plane for money, then lend the money to Guillaume who would exchange the money for a saw. The transaction has become complicated and broken down into two factors, as I have explained above with reference to exchange. 1355 However, it has not changed its nature for all that. It does not embody any fewer of the elements of a direct loan. Jacques has no less deprived himself of a tool that was useful to him, Guillaume has no less received an tool that improves his work and increases his profits; there is no less of a service provided by the lender that gives him the right to receive an equivalent service from the borrower, and this just equivalence is no less established by free and open negotiation between the two parties. 1356 The very natural obligation to hand back the entire value at the due date is no less the basis of the longevity of interest.

"At the end of one year", says Mr. Thoré, "will you find one additional écu in a bag of one hundred francs?" 1357

Certainly not, if the borrower tosses the bag into a corner. If this happens, neither the plane nor the sack of wheat will reproduce by themselves. However, it is not to leave money in a bag or the plane on a hook that people borrow them. They borrow the plane in order to use it or the money in order to acquire a plane. And if it has been clearly demonstrated that this tool enables the borrower to make a profit that he could not have made without it, if it has been demonstrated that the lender has given up the opportunity to make this additional profit for himself, people will understand that the requirement of a share in this additional profit by the lender is fair and legitimate.

Ignorance of the true role of money in human transactions is the source of the most disastrous errors. I have set myself the task of devoting an entire pamphlet to it. 1358

From what we can infer from Mr. Proudhon's writings, what has led him to think that free credit was a logical and definitive consequence of social progress is the observation of the phenomenon that shows us interest decreasing almost directly with the progress of civilization. In barbaric times it can be seen in effect to be 100 percent or more. Later it goes down to 80, then 60, 50, 40, 20, 10, 8, 5, 4 and finally 3 percent. In Holland, it has even been seen to be 2 percent. The following conclusion is then drawn: "If interest becomes close to zero as society progresses, it will achieve zero when society is perfect. In other words, what characterizes social perfection is free credit. Let us therefore abolish interest and we will have achieved the final rung of progress." 1359

This is just a specious argument, and since this erroneous line of reasoning may contribute to popularizing the unfair, dangerous, and subversive dogma of free credit by representing it as coinciding with social perfection, the reader will forgive me for examining this new point of view in slightly more detail.

What is interest ? After a process of free negotiation, it is the service provided to the lender by the borrower who pays for the service he has received as a result of the loan.

What law governs the rate for these repayment services on the loans? The general law that governs the equivalence of all services, that is to say, the law of supply and demand. The easier it is to acquire an item, the less of a service is provided in selling or lending it. A man who gives me a glass of water in the Pyrenees is not providing me with as great a service as one who lets me have a glass of water in the Sahara desert. 1360 If there are a great many planes or sacks of wheat or houses in a region, you can obtain the use of them ( ceteris paribus ) 1361 on more favorable conditions than if they are scarce, for the simple reason that the lender is providing less of a service relatively speaking .

It is therefore not surprising that the greater the supply of capital, the lower interest rates become.

Is this to say that they will ever reach zero? No, because, I repeat, the justification for the repayment of loans lies irrefutably in the loan itself. To say that interest will be eliminated is to say that there will no longer be any incentive to save, to deprive yourself, or to build up new capital, nor even to maintain the capital that already exists. If this happens, the dissipation of capital will immediately create a vacuum and interest will immediately reappear. 1362

In this respect, the type of services with which we are dealing is the same as any other. Through the progress made by industry, a pair of stockings that used to be worth 6 francs has seen its value decrease to 4, 3, and 2 francs successively. Nobody can see how low this value will drop, but what you can be sure of is that it will never reach zero, unless stockings finally make themselves spontaneously. Why? Because the principle of remuneration is inherent in labor /production, and because the person who works for someone else is providing a service and has to receive a service in return. If stockings were no longer being paid for, they would stop being made, and with the return of scarcity, a price for them would inevitably reappear.

The sophism that I am combating here is rooted in the possibility of dividing something infinitely, which applies to value as well as to materials.

At first sight, it appears paradoxical but it is well known to mathematicians that it is possible to remove fractions from a weight from minute to minute throughout eternity without ever succeeding in eliminating the weight itself. It is enough for each successive fraction to be less than the previous one in a determined and regular proportion.

There are countries in which people concentrate on increasing the size of horses or reducing the volume of the head of a sheep. It is impossible to say just how far these efforts will reach. Nobody can say that he has seen the largest horse or the smallest sheep's head that will ever appear on the earth. However, it can be stated that the size of a horse will never attain infinity any more than the heads of sheep will attain nothingness.

In the same way, nobody can say just how far the price of stockings or the interest on capital will decrease, but it can be affirmed, given a knowledge of the nature of things, that neither will ever reach zero, since work and capital can no more exist without payment than a sheep without a head.

Mr. Proudhon's argument is thus reduced to this: Since the most skilled farmers are those who have reduced the size of the heads of sheep the most, we will have achieved farming perfection when sheep have no heads. In this case, in order to reach this level of perfection ourselves, let us cut off their heads.

I have reached the end of this boring dissertation. Why is it that the flood of bad doctrine makes it necessary to go so far into the inner nature of rent? I will not end without drawing attention to a fine moral lesson that we can draw from this law: "Interest decreases in proportion to the abundance of capital." Given this law, if there is one class of people more closely interested than any other in creating, accumulating, and increasing capital and ensuring that it is abundant and plentiful, it is without doubt the class that borrows it, whether directly or indirectly, it is the people who use materials , who are assisted by tools, and whose livelihood is ensured by provisions that have been produced and saved by other people.

Imagine a nation of a thousand inhabitants in a vast and fertile country who are without any form of capital as we have defined it. It will perish for certain in the tortures of hunger. Let us move to a set of arrangements scarcely less cruel. Imagine that ten of these primitive people are equipped with tools and provisions in sufficient quantity to work and keep themselves alive until harvest as well to pay for the services of ninety workers. The inevitable result will be the death of nine hundred human beings. It is also clear that since 990 people driven by need will rush to get food which can maintain only 100, the 10 capitalists will be masters of the marketplace. They will obtain labor on the most arduous conditions, for they will put it out to auction. And you should note this: If these capitalists have any shred of human feeling that leads them to deprive themselves personally in order to decrease the suffering of a few of their brethren, this generosity that is linked to a moral philosophy will be as noble in its principle as it will be useful in its effect. However, if they are duped by the false philanthropy that people want so thoughtlessly to combine with economic laws, and are determined to pay handsomely for labor, far from doing good they will do harm. Let them double the wages they pay. But in this case, forty-five men will be better provided for, while forty-five others will increase the number of those headed to the grave. In these conditions, it is not the lowering of earnings that is the true scourge but the scarcity of capital. Low earnings are not the cause but the effect of the damage. I add that to a certain extent they are the remedy for it. They act to spread the burden of suffering as far as it can be spread, and save as many lives as a predetermined level of food productionmakes it possible to save. 1363

Let us now assume that, instead of ten capitalists, there are one hundred, two hundred, or five hundred. Is it not obvious that the situation of the entire nation, especially that of the proletarian class 1364 will be increasingly improved? Is it not obvious that, setting aside any consideration of generosity, they will obtain more work and a better reward for their labor and that they themselves will be in a better position to create capital , there being no identifiable limit on their ever-increasing ability to achieve equality and well-being? How crazy would they be therefore if they accepted doctrines and carried out acts likely to dry up the source of earnings and paralyze the driving force and the stimulus to save! Let them therefore learn this lesson: Who can deny that capital is good for those who possess it? But it is also useful for those who have not yet been able to create it, and it is important to those who lack it that others have it.

Yes, if the proletarian class were aware of their true interests, they would seek to discover with even greater care the circumstances that were favorable or unfavorable to saving in order to encourage the former and discourage the latter. They would welcome with joy any measure that led to the rapid creation of capital. They would be enthusiastically in favor of peace, freedom, order, security, the union of classes and nations, economy, the reduction of public expenditure, and the simplification of the system of government, 1365 for it is under the sway of all these circumstances that saving does its work by putting abundance within the reach of the masses, inciting the very people to amass capital who in the past were reduced to borrowing it under duress. They would strenuously reject the warlike spirit that deflects such a major proportion of human labor from its proper end, the spirit of monopoly that upsets the equitable distribution of wealth that only freedom can achieve, the multiplication of public services that only impinge on our purses in order to restrict our freedom, and finally the subversive, hateful, and reckless doctrines that frighten capital, prevent it from being created, force it to flee, and in the end make it more expensive, to the detriment of the workers who put it to work.

Well then! Is not the February Revolution a hard lesson in this connection? Is it not obvious that the insecurity that it caused in the world of business, together with the generation of the disastrous theories to which I refer, and which, originating in the political clubs, 1366 came close to infiltrating the corridors of the Chamber of Deputies, 1367 have raised the rates of interest everywhere? Is it not obvious that, once this had happened, it became more difficult for the proletarian class to obtain these materials , tools, and provisions without which work is impossible? Is this not the cause of unemployment, and does not unemployment in turn bring about a fall in earnings? Thus, work is made unavailable to the proletarian class by exactly the same causes – an increase in interest rates -- that increase the prices of the things they use. An increase in interest rates, and a fall in wages means in other words that the same object retains its price but the share of the capitalist has encroached on the share of the worker, without any profit for the latter.

One of my friends, assigned to carrying out a survey on industry in Paris, 1368 assured me that manufacturers revealed a striking fact to him, which proves better than any line of reasoning how far insecurity and uncertainty undermine the creation of capital. It had been noted that, during the most disturbed period, popular expenditure of the most irrational kind had not decreased. Small theatres, sporting rings, bars, and tobacconists were just as frequented as in prosperous times. In the survey, the workers themselves explained this phenomenon. "What is the good of saving? Who knows what the future will bring? Who knows whether interest is not going to be abolished? Who knows whether the State, once it has become the universal lender at no cost, is not going to eliminate all the benefits we might expect from our thrift?" Well then! I say that if ideas like this were able to predominate for just two years, it would be enough to turn our beautiful France into a Turkey. Poverty would become general and endemic, and what is most certain is that the first to suffer would be the poorest.

Workers, 1369 you are told a great deal about the artificial organization of labor; do you know why? Because people do not know the laws governing its natural organization, 1370 that is to say, the wonderful organization that results from freedom. You are told that freedom generates what is called the radical antagonism between the classes, that it creates and brings to blows two opposing sets of interest, the interests of capitalists and those of the proletarian class. However, what needs to be shown to start with is that this antagonism exists because of the intention of nature, and then it would remain to be proved how the system of coercion is worth more than that of freedom , for between freedom and coercion I do not see a middle road. It would also remain to be proved that coercion would always be to your advantage and to the detriment of the wealthy. No, no, this radical antagonism and this natural conflict of interest do not exist. They are the bad dreams of perverted imaginations in delirium. No, a plan so full of faults has not emanated from the Divine Mind. To claim that this was so, you would have to begin by denying God. And, by virtue of social laws and for the sole reason that men exchange their work and products freely between each other, see what harmonious links bind the classes to each other. Take landowners; what is in their interest? That the soil is fertile and the sun benevolent. What is the result of this? That wheat is abundant, its price decreases, and the advantage shifts to those who have no inherited property. Take manufacturers; what is constantly in their minds? To improve their working processes, increase the power of their machines, and to procure their raw materials under the best possible conditions. And what is the result of all these things? The abundance and low price of products, that is to say, that all the efforts of manufacturers, without their realizing it, result in benefits for the consuming public of which you are members. This is true for all types of occupations. Well then! capitalists do not escape this law; here they are, fully occupied in producing value, making savings, and producing the best return on their investments. That is very good, but the more they succeed, the more they encourage capital to become plentiful and, as a necessary corollary, interest rates to decrease. Well, who benefits from a decrease in interest rates? Is it not borrowers first of all and in the end the consumers of the items that capitalists compete to produce?

It is thus certain that the final result of the efforts made by each class is the common good of all.

You have been told that capital tyrannizes labor. I do not disagree that each person seeks to gain the best advantage from his situation, but in this they achieve only what is possible. Well, it is never possible for capital to tyrannize labor unless capital is scarce, as in this case capital dictates its terms and gets workers to bid against one another. Such tyranny is never so impossible as when capital is abundant, for in this case labor is in command.

Away then with class envy, malice, unfounded hatred, and unjust distrust. These depraved passions harm those who harbor them in their hearts. This is not moral bombast; it is a sequence of causes and effects that can be strictly and mathematically proven and it is no less sublime because it satisfies the mind and the heart equally.

I will summarize this dissertation in these words: Workers, laborers, proletarians, and those classes that are destitute and in suffering, do you wish to improve your lot? You will not succeed in this by conflict, insurrection, hatred, and error. However, there are three things that cannot improve the entire community without extending their benefits to you and these three things are PEACE, FREEDOM, and SECURITY.

25. T.275 "Comments at a Meeting of the Political Economy Society on Financial Reform" (10 Feb. 1849)↩

Source

T.275 (1849.02.10) Bastiat's comments on financial reform at a "Meeting of the Political Economy Society" (Séance de 10 fev. 1849). In "Chronique," JDE, T. 22, no. 95, 15 Feb. 1849, p. 338-39; also ASEP (1889), p. 73. Not in OC. [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

This is the fourth record of eleven which we have of Bastiat attending one of the regular monthly meetings of the Political Economy Society. See the Editor's Introduction to the first one, above pp. 000, for more details.

The records of this meeting just mention that Bastiat was present and did not record any specific comments he might have made. However it is interesting because it summarizes the view of the other members of the the PES and shows striking similarity of views with what Bastiat was trying to accomplish in the Chamber as Vice-President of the Finance Committee. We also get a sense of the variety of membership the PES had as many participants are mentioned by name, including a visit by the Ambassador of the United States to England (who is not named unfortunately).

Text

Since the events of 29 January 1371 two things have preoccupied our minds: the setting of the date of the end of the National Assembly and financial reform.

Thank God we do not make policy and that we are excused from having to discuss the proposals of Rateau, 1372 Lanjuinais, 1373 Duplan, 1374 Péan, 1375 etc. We are only pleased that at least something has been decided. Temporary (decisions) are harmful in a time of crisis, and this is something neither the Provisional Government nor the Assembly have understood. At this moment the Constituant Assembly certainly could have voted according to the Constitution and its ad hoc laws, the majority of the organic laws, and the budget.

M. Garnier-Pagès 1376 promised us a normal and republican budget, that is to say, if we have understood him correctly, a slimmer and better organised budget. It is even understood, according to his successor, that he let it be known that he would call on the assistance of a Commission composed of competent men from all parties, to work on this important matter. But … , we are always stuck at the same position and have not advanced any further than we were in 1847. M. Billault 1377 and a few other Deputies who oppose the present Minister have attempted to turn financial reform into a "war machine" (une machine de guerre). They have demanded that the revenue budget be settled before that of expenditure, in order to tie the latter to the former - the exact opposite of standard practice. In calmer times, with a government which is established and a country which is peaceful, Billault's theory, which he has borrowed from the economists and from common sense, could have been supported with some benefit. Basically sound (in principle), it is according to us inopportune (at this moment), and M. Passy 1378 has not made the effort to counter his arguments which by the way have been put forward very vigorously. M. Billault's proposal however has been defeated by a majority of only seven votes.

Nevertheless, it has led to a considerable revival of interest (in financial reform) in the Assembly. The majority of those who voted a few months ago against Bauchart's amendment 1379 to reduce taxes under the (new) Constitution, are today fanatic supporters of financial reform. Except that, when one talks of reforming the tax on alcohol, or that of tariffs, or cutting military expences either of the army or the navy, or reducing spending on public works, they put back into the saddle all their bellicose, despotic, regulatory, and even communist prejudices. Some are driven by good intentions, others by the desire to please their electorates; but none of them by the desire to tighten their belts. Thus, a large number of Deputies will vote for the 1849 budget. Now, in order to adopt well-thought out and fruitful reforms we require more time than we have at our disposal. Above all, we need a "Peel" of our own 1380 of some kind (and we have no doubt that in this connection M. Passy or M. Faucher 1381 would be very suited to this task) to conceive, study, and coordinate a plan and to be able to get the majority to accept it. Well then! Neither the Chamber, nor public opinion, nor the Minister are prepared for discussions as important as these. Now one of two things will happen: either the Assembly will bring down a budget which is popular, disorganised, and insignificant, as it did in the adjusted 1848 budget; or, it will let itself be dragged into making badly conceived changes which any future Chamber will have to waste time in undoing.

Financial reform was the topic of conversation at the last meeting of the Economists, presided over by M. Horace Say 1382 and assisted by the Ambassador of the United States to England. Several members took the floor in this very interesting discussion. Messrs Howyn de Tranchère, 1383 Frédéric Bastiat, Wolowski, 1384 Representatives of the People, Renouard, 1385 councillor at the Cour de cassation, Dussard, 1386 ex-prefect of la Seine-Inférieure, Joseph Garnier, 1387 Anisson, 1388 Louis Leclerc, 1389 Du Puynode, 1390 etc. The general sentiment which was expressed was for prompt and radical reform. Differences of opinion were revealed only concerning matters of timing and related day-to-day politics. The majority at the meeting thought that repeated disarmament and customs reforms would provide the (financial) resources capable of balancing the new (tax) cuts, such as that of the tax on alcohol.

The question was taken up concerning the marked increase in the consumption of salt since the reduction in the salt tax that M. Biaise, 1391 Councilor in the Prefecture of the Department of La Seine, who was present at the meeting, raised. Several explanations were offered for this fact about which there will shortly be further discussion.

26. T.310 "Speaks in a Discussion in the Assembly on Amending the Electoral Law" (26 Feb. 1849)↩

Source

T.310 [1849.02.26] "Speaks in a Discussion on Amending the Electoral Law". Short speech to the National Constituent Assembly, 26 Feb. 1849, CRANC, vol. 8, p. 264. Not in OC. CW4

Editor's Introduction

This is the 9th of eight speeches and seven other shorter contributions Bastiat gave in the Chamber between May 1848 and February 1850. See the Editor's Introduction above, pp. 000 for more details.

As we will see here and in the next speech Bastiat gave in the Assembly for the Third reading of a bill to amend the electoral law (10-13 March 1849), and its accompanying pamphlet on "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" (March 1849), 1392 he was very interested in who could be elected to the Assembly, how they would be paid, and who could be appointed Ministers in the Government. He had written on this before the February Revolution in several pieces: a letter "To the Electors of the Department of Les Landes" (Nov. 1830), a paper "On the Influence on Liberty of the Eligibility of Deputies for Public Office" (c. 1840), a letter to the editor of La Sentinelle des Pyrénées (21 and 25 March, 1843), and "A Letter to M. Larnac, Deputy for Les Landes" (c. 1846). 1393

These issues were important ones which had to be resolved before the election of April 1849 for the new Legislative Assembly which would replace the Constituent Assembly which came to power in the election of April 1848. The new constitution of the Second Republic was debated throughout the summer and fall of 1848. Bastiat and the other economists had played a part in opposing the insertion of clauses dealing with "the right to a job" guaranteed by the State which the socialists wanted (see his "Letter to Garnier" above, pp. 000). The new electoral law under discussion in February and March 1849 would determine how ministerial government would function in the Legislative Assembly under President Louis Napoléon (elected December 1848) and his President of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister) and Minister of Justice Odilon Barrot (appointed first on 20 December 1848 and then again on 2 June 1849 with a new Ministry).

The issues under discussion here concerned two matters. Firstly, whether or not public servants, magistrates, and military officers could be elected to the Chamber and still receive their government salaries, or should they be forced to resign their positions for the duration of their membership in the Chamber. Generally state employees were expected to resign their positions but different kinds of state employees were treated differently under the existing law. Civil servants and magistrates were permitted to return to the first available job at the level they had left before being elected, but this did not apply to government employed engineers and military officers. Bastiat in this speech wanted the law to apply equally to all state employees.

The second issue was whether or not elected Deputies should be appointed to the position of Ministers in the government. Bastiat took a hard line on this matter, arguing that they should not be allowed to do so, and this is the subjec of his second speech in March (below, pp. 000).

As a convinced supporter of the Republic and universal manhood suffrage 1394 Bastiat believed that every man had the right to stand for election, including those paid by the state as bureaucrats or military personnel, and that all elected representatives of the people should draw a salary for doing so so as not to privilege the wealthy. The only condition he wanted placed on the latter group was that their government positions and salaries should be "suspended" while they remained Representatives in order to make them truly independent of government influence. He did not think that those drawing a salary or other benefit from the state should be allowed to vote on matters which touched upon those salaries and benefits. He thought it was a serious "conflict of interest" (or "incompatibility" as the legislation phrased it) because individuals who were in the employ of the state (such as road engineers, customs officers, or professors in the state run university) could not be regarded as independent when it came to voting on cuts to state funding for road construction or the University, or reducing or eliminating tariffs. 1395 As he put it:

In this way, the civil servant will be removed from the influence of executive power; he will not be allowed promotion or dismissed from office. He will be made safe from the pushing and pulling between hope and fear. He will not be able to exercise his erstwhile functions or collect his payments for them. In a word, he will be a representative, and only a representative, throughout the duration of his mandate. His life in public service will, so to speak, be suspended and as though absorbed by his life in parliament. 1396

Concerning the converse problem, whether elected Deputies should be allowed to take up other paid and powerful positions in the Government such as Ministers or Ambassadorships, he was adamant that they should not, and this issue became the subject of an amendement he put forward and which is discussed in the following speech he gave on 13 March. Bastiat thought that the idea that Ministers could be appointed from among the elected Deputies was an "import" from the British Parliamentary tradition and was a key component which maintained the English "oligarchical class" (la classe oligarchique) in power, 1397 and was thus unsuitable for France. As soon as the inevitable jockeying for power began, ambitious Deputies would attempt to undermine and overthrow the existing government and install a new one with a new set of Ministers, namely themselves. Thus, he thought, Representatives lost their interest in those they were supposed to represent and instead began to focus on their own personal interests and ambitions as they began "climbing the greasy pole to power". 1398 Deputies, he thought, should not be allowed to "use the job of deputy as a stepping-stone to lucrative office." 1399 Hence, there should be "total exclusion" of all elected Deputies from higher paid positions within the government. 1400

Instead, the American republican experiment provided France with a better model, Bastiat believed. In the so-called American "spoils system" Ministers were appointed from talented citizens outside the Chamber and he goes into the reasons why he believes this in some detail in the March 10-13 speech and the accompanying pamphlet he wrote on "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" (March 1849).

Much of the procedural matters discussed in this and the later speech concern Articles 79, 80, and 81 and revolved around very technical matters regarding those groups who were banned or exempted from previous bans such as those on the clergy or on military personnel concurrently holding paid positions within the government, and whether or not those exemptions should be applied to other groups via various Amendments.

Text

Citizen President: 1401 That is understood. I will read Article 79 with the new phrasing proposed by the Committee:

Art. 79. The paid government positions to which, with the exception of Art. 28 of the Constitution, the Members of the National Assembly can be appointed, during the life of the Legislature, by the Executive Power, are those which are listed in Article 77.

The Committee thinks that it should not have to remind (us) of the list which has (already) been drawn up; as a result the proposed amendments of this Article will not come up for discussion. I put Article 79 to the vote with this new phrasing.

(Article 79 was adopted.)

Citizen President: "Art. 80. The same exception applies to all extraordinary assignments or temporary military posts whether they be domestic or foreign (in nature)."

Here is the wording used by M. Bastiat:

Excepted are the extraordinary assignments and temporary military posts whether they be domestic or foreign (in nature).

Citizen Bastiat: Only if Article 79 has been voted (for)!

A Voice from the extreme left: No, it has not been voted for! (Yes! Yes!)

Citizen President: Article 79 has been put to the vote and (we have heard) arguments for and against it.

Citizen Bastiat: The amendment which I would like to submit to the Assembly was on Article 79. If this Article has been voted on it is clear that the only avenue left to me is to reintroduce it myself during the Third Reading. This amendment was so closely related to Article 79 that it had reached this conclusion, that representatives of the people could only ever be representatives, and could not be appointed by the executive power to any (other) position, and if, by chance, an exception was made, this exception would not be for a ministerial position, because, according to my point of view, the greatest scourge of representative government is to permit Deputies to serve as Ministers. Thus, the Assembly has to determine whether (or not) it has adopted Article 79. If it has, then I will give up the floor.

Several Voices: Yes it has. It has voted!

Citizen President: M. Frédéric Bastiat's amendment was attached to Article 80 which was expressed as follows:

The same exception applies to all extraordinary assignments or temporary military posts whether they be domestic or foreign (in nature).

Now here is M. Bastiat's amendment:

Excepted are the extraordinary assignments and temporary military posts whether they be domestic or foreign (in nature).

That is exactly the same as Article 80.

Citizen Bastiat: I refer the Assembly to Article 80.

(Article 80 was put to the vote and adopted.)

27. T.311 "Speech in the Assembly on Amending the Electoral Law (Third Reading)" (10 and 13 March 1849)↩

Source

T.311 [1849.03.10] "Speech in the Assembly on Amending the Electoral Law (Third Reading)". Speech to the National Constituent Assembly, 10 and 13 March 1849, CRANC, vol. 8, pp. 507-9, 513-14, 542- 44, scattered interjections on pp. 546, 547. Not in OC. CW4

Editor's Introduction

This is the 10th of eight speeches and seven other shorter contributions Bastiat gave in the Chamber between May 1848 and February 1850. See the Editor's Introduction above, pp. 000 for more details.

See the Editor's Introduction to the previous speech for more details about the content of this Speech (above, pp. 000). This speech should be read in conjunction with a 72 page pamphlet he wrote at the same time, "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" (March 1849). 1402 As we saw in his Speech in the Chamber on changing the tariff on imported salt (11 Jan. 1849) (above, pp. 000) his health was failing to the point where he could barely speak to make himself heard in the Chamber so he wrote out his speech ahead of time and circulated it as a pamphlet so he could still get his point across. Nevertheless, this speech was a long one (nearly 4,000 words) with a follow up speech 3 days later, and it must have been quite a physical effort for him to give them.

The discussion begins with reference to an amendment put forward by Joseph Degousée, 1403 a member of the Chamber's Public Works Committee, in order to rectify this unequal treatment of different public servants and state employees. It stated that:

At the completion of their mandate as a Representative of the People, public servants who have temporarily left their permanent positions will have the right to the first vacancy (which appears) in a position which they exercised before they became Representatives; but they will not be eligible for a promotion before six months after the end of their legislative mandate. 1404

However this was rejected by the Committee looking into revising the electoral law. Bastiat takes the floor to defend Degousée's amendment and to speak in favour of treating all public servants and state employees equally, or in his words "to separate the man from his function." The Chamber then takes a vote and Degousée's amendment is defeated. Bastiat's next step is to propose his own amendment to Article 81 by eliminating one word. Article 81 stated:

According to Article 82 of the Constitution, the following are exempted from the conflict of interest (clause) stated in this article between all paid public positions and the mandate of a Representative of the People:

Ministers.

And the word Bastiat wanted struck out of the clause was "Ministers". This would make all Deputies subject to the conflict of interest (clause) and thus they would not be allowed to be Ministers in the government while they were serving as Deputies. Bastiat then gives his long speech on the dangers caused by ambitious Deputies who wish to become Ministers in a future government by forming parties (or "coalitions" as he called them) to undermine and overturn the current government so they can form a new one. He gives as a bad example the recent history of "oligarchic" Britain, and as a good example the practice of the republican government in the United States and the French Revolutionary government of 1791.

Alphonse de Lamartine, 1405 Deputy representing Bouches-du-Rhône, replied to Bastiat's speech and opposed most of his points. In his counter-reply, Bastiat warns that political infighting and revolving door governments will eventually make the electorate cynical of politics and that such governments are more concerned with "politicking" (la politique") than with more important legislation such as economic reforms and free trade.

The debate was taken up again three days later (13 March) when Bastiat speaks for the last time in an attempt to persuade his colleagues to ban Deputies from also serving as Ministers in the government. He likens that to judges being able to impose fines and keep the proceeds for themselves. He predicts that Deputies who are constantly trying to overthrow the current government and install themselves in a new government will turn the Chamber into political "field of battle." The only way to prevent this, he believes, is to get rid of the incentive to fight such political battles in the first place, namely the hope of Deputies becoming Minister. Only then will France be able to have political stability and a chance to have "cheap government" (le gouvernement à bon marché).

Later that day, the Chamber voted against Bastiat's amendment.

In a letter to his close friend Félix Coudroy in Mugron Bastiat recounts the saga of his failed amendment, of how he went from having initially a mere 10 Deputies in support, thinking he had won over a majority after his speech only to have Adolphe Billault 1406 send it back to the Committee for further discussion, and finally realising that pubic opinion had turned against him and that he ended up with only "a minority made up of a few enthusiasts" who didn't really understand what he was getting at. 1407

Bastiat's contributions to the discussion were broken up by the to-and-fro of debate which took place over several days. For reasons of space we have only included his contributions wherever possible and have indicated the breaks in the discussion accordingly. To conclude, we include a one line interjection by Bastiat during Adolphe Billault's disparagement of any discussion about free trade.

Text

Part 1 (10 March, 1849) 1408

Citizen President: 1409 M. Victor Lefranc 1410 has the floor and is speaking on behalf of the Committee.

Citizen Victor Lefranc (for the Committee): The Committee has been asked for the reason why it has rejected (M. Degousée's) amendment. Here it is: if the Assembly wishes to revisit the vote concerning "parliamentary conflicts of interest" it has the means to do so; that is to adopt the amendment proposed by M. Degousée.

You put forward the opposing example of engineers and military officers. Here is the difference. You want the civil servants, magistrates for example, who have quit their positons as required by law, to have the right to the first vacancy (which appears) after the expiration of the legislative mandate. This is not what you did for the army officers and the engineers; you have let them keep their rank and their area of competency, but you have not let them explicitly keep the right to the first vacancy (which appears). (From the Assembly: Yes (we have)! Yes (we have)!) Excuse me! You decided that army officers, for example the commander of a battalion, upon the expiration of his legislative mandate, would have the right to claim the first position as commander of a battalion which became available?

I have to admit that I thought you had intended letting the army officers keep their rank but not their job.

As for the engineers, what have you done? You have let them keep their area of competency as stated by their rank which they had at the moment when their legislative mandate ended. But you have decreed that the Minister of Public Works should appoint them to the first engineer's position which becomes vacant in a Department or an Arrondissement? (No!)

What you didn't do for the army officers and the engineers you shouldn't do for other public servants, for a magistrate for example, because a magistrate retains his area of competency. A Superior Court Judge who hands in his resignation in order to become a Representative (of the People) no doubt will not have the right to the first vacant position as Superior Court Judge; but he will be put forward as a candidate.

See what difficulties this amendment will cause.

Let's say you are the Superior Judge in a Department. You have all the skill for that position; you are familiar with the jargon; thus, you are the most suitable magistrate (for the position). Well then, the first available vacancy is as a Superior Judge in a Court of Appeal which is a much more important position in another district and under other conditions, and you would have the right to exclude a more suitable (candidate) from this position for which he has no knowledge! That can't be right!

Various voices in the Assemble: We call for cloture! For cloture!

Citizen Bastiat: I demand the floor to speak against Cloture.

Citizen Representatives, I don't believe the Assembly would want to close the discussion on a question as important as this. It is impossible (to think) that the Assembly would not be struck by the seriousness of the issue before it, and furthermore it seems to me impossible to close the discussion before, so to speak, it had even begun.

Indeed, what is the question at hand? It is a question of knowing if, among all the civil servants there is a category that one will completely set apart and so to speak make it an exception.

It is quite true that the Constitution states that there is a conflict of interest between the job (of a civil servant) and (having) a legislative mandate; but what the Assembly intended to prohibit was the function not the person. When it was a question of army officers, sailors, and engineers, what did the Assembly do? It took advantage of some previous legislation which certainly had not been passed for this purpose which allowed it to separate the rank from the job; as I said, it took advantage of that separation in order to rule that the civil servant could keep their rank, and I think that it has been a significant (decision). What should the Assembly do? It is not to exclude individuals, but to exclude the danger of (men being dependent on others?). From the moment the job is left at the door, from the moment the civil servant who is called here is shielded from any hint of fear (or) of hope, there is no longer any danger.

Well then, what we have done on the strength of some previous legislation, what we have done for the army officers, what we have done for the sailors, I ask that we also do for the magistrates, and for the tenured public servants. We have been made responsible for drawing up the electoral law; so here, by means of a special clause, we can use the idea that the previous legislation has given us to do (what we have to do); it is up to us to find the way.

Well, I would like us to separate the man from his function; that the judicial life of the magistrate should be suspended from the moment he accepted the legislative mandate. But for all that, I would not like his previous service (to count for nothing), no more than the military officer loses his; the officer does not lose his rank, (but) his duties are suspended. Well then, so would the duties of the magistrate be suspended. It seems to me that M. Degousée's amendment addresses this goal, that it satisfies all guarantees that the Assembly ought to require.

I submit for the Assembly's (consideration) another observation, which is this: I do not think that there is in this Assembly what one might call a prejudice against civil servants themselves. What is feared is the danger which they could bring within the walls of the legislature. This danger is of two kinds: it is that the number of civil servants could be too large, as it was in an earlier period; or that the civil servants would be subject to the whims of the executive power.

Today with universal suffrage, with the suspension of administrative duties which (would be) a condition (of election) for civil servants, you will have nothing to fear about a very great number of them entering these walls. On the other hand, those who do come here will be in a situation of complete independence, in a condition of perfect equality with their colleagues; and if they are here it is because their fellow citizens have judged them to have the virtues necessary to be sent here. Thus I do not see any reason for excluding them.

But I will go even further. (Cries of "No! No! Put it to a vote!") Universal suffrage is a principle which is eminently absolute and jealous; you cannot limit it in an arbitrary manner, you can only limit it when society needs to erect some safeguards. I completely agree that one might say to civil servants: "You are public servants, you cannot be legislators at the same time." But if the civil servant gives up his duties and thereby puts himself in an independent position, all the safeguards society requires are satisfied, and anything else would only be a war against public civil servants, (an act) unworthy of the Assembly.

Citizen President: I will reread the proposition made by M. Degoussée, which will be placed as an additional article after article 80:

At the completion of their mandate as a Representative of the People, public servants who have temporarily resigned their permanent positions will have the right to the first vacancy (which appears) in a position which they exercised before they became Representatives; but they will not be able to get a promotion before six months after the end of their legislative mandate.

I will now consult the Assembly.

(The proposition of M. Degousée is put to a vote and is not adopted.)

Citizen Charras: 1411 I propose, in order to completely integrate all the civil servants who, when they enter the Legislative Assembly, will have resigned their jobs, to guarantee them half of the vacant postions.

(Gasps from Members in the Assembly.)

This is what happens in the Army.

Citizen Rancé: 1412 Don't bet on it!

Citizen President: Does the amendment proposed by Charras have any support? (No! No!)

Then I won't put it to a vote.

I put to a vote Article 80.

Citizen de Kerdrel: 1413 Pardon me, but I propose a change of wording in accordance with the Committee.

Citizen President: You have the floor.

Citizen de Kerdrel: It is a simple change of wording which I have the honour of presenting to the Assembly, with the agreement of the Reporter from the Committee:

Any civil servant who receives payment and who has been elected a Representative of the People, and who is not included among the exceptions granted by Articles 77 and 78, will be deemed to have resigned from his position by the sole fact of their admission as a Member of the Legislative Assembly; unless he has made a choice between his government position and the legislative mandate, before the verification of his powers.

Would you like me to tell you the reason for this change?

(Yes! Yes!)

Here it is in a couple of words. It is that, according to the Article (drawn up by) the Committee, one would be required to do something, which on the face of it, one couldn't do. By putting the civil servant in this position, quite evidently he would never make this choice before the verification of his powers.

Citizen President: The Assembly understands the wording which M. de Kerdrel proposes with the agreement of the Committee; I will put it to a vote, whilst noting that we have to substitute in this wording, Articles 81, 82, and 83 for Articles 77 and 78.

(The new wording of Article 80 is put to a vote and is adopted.)

Citizen President:

Article 81. The following, according to Article 82 of the Constitution, are exempted from the conflict of interest (clause) stated in this article between all paid public positions and the mandate of a Representative of the People:

Ministers.

M. Bastiat proposes the removal of this first paragraph. (There are loud gasps).

Le citoyen Baraguey d'Hilliers: 1414 The Assembly has already removed this proposition in the previous question.

Various voices: We can change our minds! (Lively agitation)

Citizen President: M. Bastiat has the floor.

(The Citizen president says in a low voice a few words to Citizen Bastiat who has climbed to the lectern.)

Citizen Bastiat: M. President pointed out to me that at the time of the second reading of this proposal the Assembly had voted on the previous question.

Several Voices: That is incorrect!

Citizen Bastiat: I was not present at that time but that surprises me a lot; because I don't think that in any legislature a more serious question could be raised. (That is true!) The question occupied our (fore)fathers for a long time; they decided along the lines I have suggested. Only in England, an aristocratic country par excellence, have they decided (to do) the opposite, and in France during the Restoration, we followed that example. So I think my proposition is not as untimely as the previous proposal which opposes mine would have us believe. (No! No! Speak!)

I do not know of any (political) conflict of interest as false in principle and as harmful in its application as that where a Representative (of the People) can become and aspires to become a Minister.

Our representative government is an extremely simple mechanism. On one side, there is the executive power which appoints its agents and puts the Ministers in charge of them (the Ministries). On the other side, (there is the) Assembly of the Representatives of the People who control the activities of the executive power and its agents, who evaluate the political conduct of the Departments, which approves them if they are found to conform to the interests of the country, (or) which refuses to give them its support in the opposite case.

So it seems that there is a radical conflict of interest between these two things; because it is clear that, if the voters say to the representatives "Go to the Assembly and when the Minister proposes sound legislation vote for them, regardless of the people involved; and if he (the Minister) proposes bad laws, reject them. As I said, it is clear that, while the voters use this language, the law uses another (language) and says to the Representatives, "You too could be Ministers (one day), all you need to do to achieve that is to expose the mistakes of Ministers." Can't you see what difficulties, what plots and intrigues the same language will immediately create in a National Assembly? (Very good! Very good!) As far as I am concerned, I am quite taken aback by this. I am taken aback perhaps because, just as this always unfortunately happens to everybody, when one is very busy with one question, one is perhaps too preoccupied with its importance, and one exaggerates it. But whether I proceed by reasoning or by consulting the facts, I believe that there is no greater danger than this combining of powers in the person of the Representatives. If you want to look for the causes of almost all the great political disasters, of all the useless wars, the excessive expenditure, the squandering of public funds, and corruption, you would almost always find them in the (political) struggles, in the plots, in the coalitions which the admission of Deputies to (the position of) Minister inevitably gives rise to within the heart of elected Assemblies. (Very good! Very good!)

Messieurs, I think that you would have had to have never cast your eyes over the parliamentary history of Great Britain, 1415 and furthermore, to have been asleep since 1814 up until the present, not to be struck by these dangers.

As I have said in a small pamphlet which I have had distributed … (Ah! Very good! Go on!) As I have said, I challenge anyone of the Representatives to dare vote for a similar organisation for the General Councils, 1416 I challenge you to argue that, in the General Councils, when an organised opposition has formed which will attempt to put the Prefect in a position where he will not be able to function, the head of this opposition will (not) be the one who will (attempt) to become the (new) Prefect. None of you would want to wish this on your own Department, and yet you are going to introduce it here within the walls of the legislature where the questions are much more pressing.

Indeed, these parties of which I speak are generally composed of heterogeneous groups, cannot get along with each other, and create great difficulties for the future when they do get into power. How do these coalitions fight to create a breach in the (walls of the) Ministry? They fight by asking the most burning questions, questions about war or peace, and very often by misrepresenting the mind of the public. What party couldn't take (control) of a Ministry which has to face a coalition which has been created by uniting, it is true, 4, 5, or 6 various parties, but which is enough to form a majority against it? It has no other choice, and I don't approve of this, but it has no other choice but to create a majority of committed supporters on its own side. This is what we have always seen, and I challenge you to find an example of a Ministry which has lasted a few years which hasn't found a way to create a closely knit and determined majority which was willing to go to the bitter end, (even) leading to revolutions. (Activity from the Chamber which shows marked agreement.)

I will conclude with an important observation, and it is this: in all periods and under all forms of representative government I would call for a ban on Deputies becoming Ministers. But I believe it is to fulfill a very urgent duty to call for it now under the present constitution, because according to our Constitution it is impossible that a ministerial crisis would not become, at this very moment, a much greater problem, namely a conflict of power. (There is murmuring among the Deputies.)

I should express my views (more) frankly. (Speak! Speak!)

Under the regime which has recently fallen, 1417 ministerial crises caused immense harm. You can call upon the (personal) experience of those who have survived them. I am convinced that they will confirm what I have said at this lectern. But in the end, there was a legal solution: when a coalition had formed, when the Minister had fought (against it), the country was able to hear (about it) and form an opinion, often false it is true, but they were able to form an opinion about the relative value of the coalition against the Minister. Then the King could dissolve the Assembly and call upon the electors (to resolve it); the electors decided by voting for a majority; and it was the country which decided between these two powers. Today, we no longer have this method. 1418 If there is a ministerial crisis, if the coalitions, if the parties are able create an organised opposition, then (we have) a conflict of power, a conflict without any possible solution, or at least there can be only one solution which all of us should dread.

If we were able to rise above all the other (types of) regimes because we had some complicated (constitutional) mechanism, we would be able to avoid to a certain degree these problems. But today because the Constitution does not allow for any mechanisms which moderate or counterbalance, if you prefer to call them that, we are always in the presence of a conflict of powers with each ministerial crisis, and the question comes down to knowing whether or not the admission of Deputies as Minister is one cause of ministerial crises and conflicts of power. There cannot be any doubt about this. All it takes is for a political problem to arise and cause great political passions to burst into flame and for parties to begin forming. I am not saying that in my system there would not be coalitions. They would would form at least in the area of (political) principles, since personal ambition would be out of the picture. (Very good! There is some agitation.) But would it be this way if the law said to the Representatives: "A Ministerial portfolio is the prize for victory!"

And note that this dangerous language is addressed precisely to the Representative who has the greatest value, the greatest merit, the greatest genius, the greatest force of character, to he who feels he has the strength to carry the weight of public affairs (on his shoulders); these are the men who, unfortunately, will turn their talents against the public good (There is noise and murmuring), because he will have a personal interest which will drive him on in spite of (these talents). It is not necessary to know the human heart to say the contrary. (Various emotions are expressed).

Messieurs, I will now stop. I will limit myself to these brief observations. I will conclude however by saying one thing: I will not give up (my cause), (but) I would not be at all opposed to (the idea) that an exception to what I am proposing were made right now for the first cabinet which will be formed following our dissolution, 1419 because it would be (formed) with a clean slate.

What we want to avoid are coalitions, and they will not be able to be formed at the very beginning of the Legislative (session). I have my heart so set on getting my proposed (amendment) on parliamentary conflicts of interest accepted (by the Assembly) that, if, by this means, I could rally some votes in support of it, I would not insist on this point (now) because I do not see any (great) harm in it; apart from that, I will continue with the amendment I have proposed. (Noisy and prolonged agitation. The meeting is interrupted for several minutes.)

Citizen President: M. Charlemagne 1420 has the floor, representing the Committee.

Citizen Charlemagne: The Committee rejects the amendment of the Honourable M. Bastiat. (The noise continues.)

Citizen President: If the Assembly has decided not to listen we will adjourn the session. (Silence is re-established.)

Citizen Charlemagne: Citizen Representatives, the Committee asks you to reject the experiment which the Honourable M. Bastiat has proposed for you to undertake because it thinks that this motion could be dangerous.

Part 2 (10 March, 1849) 1421

Citizen Lamartine: 1422 Will you take a moment to reflect with me, quite seriously, upon the picture of great political ambitions which the Honourable M. Bastiat painted for you a moment ago, as a form of political agitation which is fatal for our country? But, my God, those great political ambitions, by the very fact that they are great, are not vulgar, they do not stem from greedy interests grasping after the emoluments of power, they do not even arise from the appointment of a minister, all it requires for them to appear is to (be able) to rule by using others as proxies, all they will need are some straw ministers. (That is what they say! That is what they say!) We will have what happened in 1791, under the Ministry of the Girondins, 1423 the Vergniauds, the Brissots, all of them truly honourable men, Clavière himself, this financial authority, who until then had enlightened us with the policies of Mirabeau, 1424 all these men will (have to) disappear from the political scene, they will stay behind the curtain and get others to act in their place (That is what will happen! That's true!). These men, these orators from the Gironde whom I have mentioned, wouldn't deign to be ministers, and the obscure ministerial agents which they would put in their place will obey them, will do a "10th of August", 1425 and will overturn the throne and the constitution!

Here is a system of unaccountable (government). (Very good!)

Therefore, Messieurs, by adopting M. Bastiat's amendment you will not be able to avoid any of the problems from which he intends to save his country. But, would you like me to tell you what you would create, in a deadly moment of thoughtless action, (if you did adopt it)? (Yes! Yes!)

You will have greatly demeaned the standing of the National Assembly, to the detriment of the Republic by making (its) pre-eminent (members) disappear, men who will build the respect and power it has in the world!

On the other hand, you will have created the danger of the non-accountability of ministers who will get their subordinates to answer on their behalf. (That's true! That's true!)

Finally, you will have created the worst of all governments, the anonymous government! (Numerous expressions of approval).

(From all quarters, speak! speak!)

Citizen Bastiat: I ask for the floor in order to reply with a few words. (Speak! Speak! Put it to the vote! Put it to the vote!)

Citizen Representatives, I owe it to myself to reject the criticism which has been made that I introduced this amendment in an unexpected and surreptitious manner to the Assembly. (No! No!)

Messieurs, I presented it at the time of the second reading, and then by other methods I made sure that the Assembly was made aware of this. 1426

The Honourable Speaker, with the great impartiality which is typical of him, pleaded both sides of the question. Firstly, he emphasised the problems of the present law, then he spoke about the problems with my proposition.

I freely admit that what struck me the most and what has remained in my mind, as a natural cause for concern, are precisely those problems which he later thought to refute. In a word, I was more struck by the beginning of his speech than by the end of it. He painted for us a picture of coalitions and the harm that they lead to. He spoke about it as someone who has been a spectator for a long time, but not as a participant. The consequence of this sad picture has not been removed by the final words of this illustrious orator.

Allow me to remind you of a problem of the most serious gravity, of the highest significance, something that I did not mention when I came to the lectern for the first time: it is the spirit of scepticism which the system I oppose tends to spread throughout the nation.

It is clear to whomever observes the games (played) by these coalitions that they all proceed in the same manner, they only have one way to succeed, that is to get popular opinion on their side, to ensure that the efforts of all the coalitions are always to attract public opinion, to win over to their side the most sympathetic (people), those with the most sensitive temperaments, with a disposition towards patriotism, towards hatred of foreigners, and towards foreign wars. 1427

Citizen Manuel: 1428 That is not too bad (a thing)!

Citizen Bastiat: Only if they are joined with very sound principles, but this is almost always never achieved.

A Voice: Like the socialists.

Citizen Bastiat: But what happens? When the coalition is successful, regardless of all the difficulties they had in trying to get along with each other, and the duration of the Ministerial crises, what happens is that these same men who had displayed these grand principles when in opposition, once they get into power are very soon after obliged to follow the policies which they had (previously) opposed. (Very good! Very good!)

I think that what I have just said is more a matter of fact than of pure theory. What happens is this: the nation, which was used to admiring the lofty principles of these men, used to having confidence in them, and which believed them to be the saviors of the country, is (now) quite surprised to see them humbly following the policies which they had condemned and castigated (for so long. (Strong agreement.)

If there had been only one coalition like this, only one similar case, it would pass without notice; but when there is a series of cases which occur over the centuries the nation says to itself: there is no longer any faith to be had in men; we must resort to force; we no longer need any more speech makers, we need men of action. I believe that if the French nation displays political scepticism the cause lies in the variability of the opinions of those men who have taken turns in crossing over from the organised opposition to being in power. (Very good!)

This variability of opinions creates in the men who come down from being in power, and who are going to form coalitions, a kind of weapon at the ready: they only have to come here, to the lectern, to remember the words spoken a few months before by the Ministers who have replaced them in order to undermine them, and that is their intention.

Citizen Odilon Barrot: 1429 That doesn't undermine them very much. (Agitation in the audience.)

Citizen Bastiat: That may not affect you personally, but it does affect popular opinion.

Citizen Odilon Barrot: (Public) opinion is more correct than you think it is. It has better judgement than you suppose.

Citizen Bastiat: We were talking about politics. I said that the system I was discussing lowered (the level of) politics.

Citizen Representatives, far be it from me to lower the quality of my country's politics, but I admit that if I supported my amendment with some vigor it was because I hope that it will lead to the limiting of the domain of politics.

I believe that politics takes up too much of our time. In my view, for too long it has taken up the time which we ought to have spent on matters relating to the economy. In the previous Chamber (I wouldn't want to talk about this one), when it was a question of a motion of confidence, oh my goodness!, there was a great deal of eagerness in the Chamber! All minds were focussed on the big question which had just arisen, because it was a question of a ministerial matter, but when it was a matter of economics, it was quite different.

Several Members: That is the same thing.

Citizen Bastiat: It is clear to me that the terrain on which coalitions can fight with some benefit is the terrain of politics. They also are always looking for ways to make the domain of politics prevail over the domain of economics. Under the representative system we have gone through many sessions and have seen that economic matters have been neglected and always sacrificed for political matters.

Thus, it is not an argument against my proposition to say that it limits the domain of politics. That is what I want. (Put it to a vote! Put it to a vote! No! Speak!).

Yet another objection has been raised: it has been said that politicians, men of great talent, will have to choose between two parties: one where in order to get elected one gives up hope of ever being a minister, or one where one doesn't get elected a representative of the people in order to be able to retain the means of becoming a minster; (thus) it has been suggested that there is the danger that men with very great talent will stay outside the Assembly. But we have forgotten, I believe, that in order to stir the passions a theatre is required, there needs to be an audience. Now, it is here that the great passions are stirred, it is here that coalitions are formed. It is much more difficult to form them outside.

These men of talent and genius which people talk about, certainly I respect them and honour them more than anyone; but the present law which allows them to become a Minister, turns this genius, which we ought to admire, against the public good. They serve it (the public), but why? Very often to do harm, without being aware of it themselves. (Very good! Very good! - Murmuring from some benches.)

Gentlemen, it seems to me that one reduces the value of the legislative mandate considerably if one thinks, says, or insinuates that the genius of a great man would be useless because this man will only be a representative. On the contrary, I believe that if he is only a representative, if he can only be a representative, he can (still) have very great authority in this Assembly, an authority which will be all the greater since it will not come under any suspicion (of his motives); he will have influence over the Ministers, he will not be a Minister, but he will influence them in a direction which will conform to the public good.

On the contrary, if this man of genius …

Several voices: Put it to the vote! To the Vote!

Many voices: Speak! Speak!

Citizen Bastiat: If, on the contrary, this man of genius, as one sees all too often, only tries to discredit the Minister, if he only intends to hinder all his negotiations, and all his measures, couldn't one say that he would be worth more if he had no genius and if he sat quietly on the back benches? (Noise from the Representatives.)

A Member: That sometimes happens!

Citizen Bastiat: I will no longer waste the time of the Assembly. (Speak! Speak!)

I continue to support my amendment more than ever, and if the Assembly is disposed to think that it was introduced in an unexpected way since I had changed the wording, I would ask that be sent back to the Committee. (Yes! Yes! - No! No!)

Part 3 (continued on 13 March 1849) 1430

Citizen Kerdrel: You are discussing the amendment of M. Sarrans, 1431 not that of M. Bastiat. You are confusing matters.

Citizen Culman: 1432 Well, in that case, I will speak on M. Sarrans' amendment. The effect of the two amendments would be the same …

Citizen President: M. Sarrans' amendment is not yet under discussion. It will come after that of M. Bastiat's.

(Citizen Culman leaves the podium.)

Citizen President: M. Bastiat has the floor.

Citizen Bastiat: Citizens Representatives, I hope that the Assembly will indeed permit me one last attempt to argue in favour of my amendment.

I agree that this amendment has some powerful forces (arrayed) against it. First of all it has the force of habit against it, as it has been a long time since were had to get used to another regime. Then it has the fear of change against it, since at this moment (fear of change) naturally exercises considerable influence after all the troubles we have experienced. It also has all the eminent men of this Assembly against it, and perhaps this secret influence is (just) one of those elements which (make up) human nature. However, one cannot deny that three days ago this amendment managed to gain some support from the benches. That would require that it had something in its favour.

Several Voices: It has its author in its favour!

Citizen Bastiat: No, it is not its author. I think that all the press outlets are unanimous in recognizing that my oratorial talents count for nothing, and I recognize that myself quite humbly. But he (the author) does have a single thing (going for him), and that is common sense.

Citizen Saint-Gaudens: 1433 And the law.

Citizen Bastiat: In the end, what is it that I am asking for? It is that he who has the honour of being elected as a Representative (should) stay a Representative. It is quite simple. And I will add that, if by some misfortune, you dangle before this Assembly some bright and shiny object coveted by (so) many people, I'm not saying a hunger for wealth, that is not my intention, but for other things, such as the desire to see one's long held beliefs prevail. 1434 If one dangles this lure in this Assembly, as soon as a Representative has received his mandate, namely to control the power (of the government), it (the mandate) is tainted in its (very) principle and in its essence, and as a result, the entire representative system is distorted. (That is true! - Very good!) That is my proposal. It appears to me to be grounded in logic. But if I then consult the facts, since logic can sometimes mislead us, (and) we must closely examine the facts, if we peruse the constitutional history of France and England, the entire world will agree, and M. Lamartine does agree, that this ability to become a Minister has produced considerable harm.

What has been put forward in opposition to my (proposal)? In my view, only some vague generalities which are so unspecific that they are not refutable.

For example, I am asked: do you intend reforming the human heart? won't there always be (human) passions in this world? do you want to eliminate vice? do you want to order (people to be) virtuous? Certainly not! But isn't there any difference between suppressing vice and offering it a huge incentive by means of legislation?

I imagine that you could find in the Civil Code a law which authorised judges to impose fines for their own profit. You would say: Here is a law which is absurd, imprudent, risky, and detestable. And if as a result of these facts you were told that this law resulted in judges gorging themselves with scandalous wealth and those subject to the law being ruined, you would demand the repeal of this law.

Well then, if someone then said: "What's the point? There will always be human passion in the world, there will always be bad judges, one cannot order (people to be) virtuous." Wouldn't you consider that reply quite inadequate?

A Member: That is no analogy.

Citizen Bastiat: Someone says that it is no analogy …

Several Members: Yes it is! Very good! Continue.

Citizen Bastiat: The Chamber of Deputies has been compared to an arena. It is absolutely essential for the well-being, stability, and the tranquility of the country that this arena is not converted into a field of battle.

Well then, I see (before us) a prize of incalculable (value), much sought after, and coveted to the nth degree and I see immediately a battle breaking out. I think that there is a correlation between these two things, and (so) I say: Get rid of the incentive if you want to get rid of the battle.

In reply you say: "What is the point? There will always be human passions." I know very well that there will be (such passions), especially if you feed them.

There is another objection which has been raised, which I will not spend much time addressing, namely the unity of the Republic. M. de Lamartine quoted this great maxim, " The Republic, one and indivisible ", and came to the conclusion that there would be a "fracture" 1435 between the two branches of government if Representatives could not be at the same time Ministers.

But I will observe in passing that it is the constitution itself which not only states that the branches ought to be separate and distinct, but even states that this is the basis for any free government.

One has also spoken of (Ministerial) responsibility. I confess that I have found it impossible to understand the argument that they are making against me. Responsibility is written into the constitution. In my system as well as in the one which exists now, (Ministerial) responsibility will be implemented. It has been said that in my system the High Court of Justice will be the end point for the resolution of all the major political questions. This is possible if the constitution wanted it it (to be) this way. But here is the difference, in the present system the intervention of the Court of Justice threatens to intervene several times a year, while in my system it would certainly be extremely rare.

Finally, if you agree with (only) one part, as I think everybody does, that the ability given to the Deputies to become Ministers is a source of political coalitions and, as a result, of ministerial crises. If you agree on the other hand, that in this fight passions become embittered and are inflamed, then you ought to necessarily conclude that the arguments of the prosecution are necessarily more numerous against the present system that against the one I am proposing to you.

It is an argument, or rather a feeling which I very much want to oppose.

From that part of my amendment which has a democratic aspect, it has been concluded that it was directed against the executive branch, that it was designed to weaken and diminish it, and to make its exercise more difficult.

Citizens, I appreciate perfectly how such an impression might militate against my amendment, in the circumstances where we find ourselves today, at a moment when the tide of opinion is more in favour of re-establishing things the way they were previously, than in making them advance further.

From the Left: Very good!

From the Right: Let's get on with it!

Citizen Bastiat: I don't think that there is anybody on the benches of this Assembly who appreciates more than I do the benefits of stability and security, (which are) the main benefits for the entire world and for all classes. I may be deceiving myself, I may be deluding myself, but it must be either that this illusion is much deeper, or that I am quite poorly informed; because I (do) believe in granting considerable power to the executive branch, I do believe in protecting it from shocks and from intrigues against which it would not be able to resist.

And I am convinced that if it were permissible for a candidate for the (office) of President of the Republic to impose conditions on the voters, the first condition ought to be this: elect me President if you wish but don't impose on me the obligation to choose my Ministers from (members of) the Assembly, because my position would be untenable. 1436

A Member: The President is not obliged to do that!

Citizen Bastiat: I am told that he is not obliged to do that. I know that full well, but those who interrupt me also know full well that the way in which things happen the King or the President is required to choose Ministers from the Majority in the Parliament, so that it has become an obligation which is not written in the law but which is the inevitable result of it. And indeed Citizens, take note for a minute the manner in which these things happen. There are enough facts from our history to enlighten us on this (matter). In the long run, how are coalitions and Ministers formed? Here we have (the explanation), I think.

In the Assembly there are a certain number of groups each of which has a man of great talent as its head. These groups are divided by some differences of principles, sometimes only by nuances (of principle). Whatever the case may be, it is not long before they feel the need to get along with each other, if not on their principles (which is quite difficult to do), at least on a key point which is to overturn the Cabinet which is in their way. These various groups have not joined forces to achieve the victory of a great cause, since they do not agree on their principles. Instead, they choose whatever issue is suitable for them to achieve their goal, especially a foreign matter. They look for ways to excite feelings of (national) patriotism and to swing popular sentiment to their side. For example, they (might) choose the question of whether a certain patch of ground in Syria should be governed by the Pasha of Egypt or the Grand Turk. 1437

Thus the opposition will win and the Minister will lose ground every day. Finally, the moment will come when the latter will have to resign.

Now I ask you, what would be the position of a President of the Republic in such a situation? How will he choose his Ministry? Will he choose the leaders of these various groups? The first difficulty he would face is (their) personal ambition. For one of them, such a portfolio would be too lowly; another would like to be the President of the Council (of Advisors); yet another would say "I have been Minister of (such and such) Department and I do not want a demotion," etc. Here is the first difficulty faced by the President. He will often meet another in the principles which he will not be able to reconcile. But I admit he (will be able to) overcome the crisis as soon as he forms a new coalition made up of all the disappointed aspirants and all the Ministers who have fallen from power, ensuring that you march towards a new crisis.

Citizens, under the previous regime there was a remedy for this situation, from the point of view of the government, quite a sad and deplorable remedy, but at least it existed, namely parliamentary and electoral corruption. By dint of changes in Ministers it could happen that (a government) emerges which could not care less how it created a majority by any of the means available to it as a result of the parliamentary practices and the electoral law of that period.

It is in this way that the only Ministries which have lasted any period of time have survived.

However shameful this means (of winning power) might be, and however disposed I might be to believing that the President of the Republic 1438 would not resort to (using) it, it is no less true that it is no longer available to him because of the changes which we have made to our constitution. On the one hand, (Ministerial) positions are forbidden to the members of the Assembly, and on the other hand, universal suffrage does not even allow the thought of corrupting the electorate.

So Gentlemen, if you draw the logical conclusion, by dint of what I have just said, the President of the Republic will find himself faced with perpetual and never ending ministerial crises, without having any means of even arriving at the kind of stability enjoyed by the Ministries of Villèle 1439 and Guizot, 1440 which was as little desired as it was secure.

I am saying that this position is untenable for the President of the Republic. George II cursed his crown so tired had he become with these crises; George III went mad; 1441 two dynasties have fallen in France, and I do not see how the President of the Republic, even less well armed (as they were), will be able to hold onto his position.

Several Members: Enough! Put it to the vote!

Other Members: Speak! Speak!

Citizen Bastiat: Perhaps I am pushing things too far; if you reject my amendment, so be it! But I think that the day will come when the President of the Republic will come to beg you to adopt it.

I will end with an final observation.

The Honourable Speaker said something from a moral perspective. I think that that has not been examined sufficiently. Some people are too inclined to believe that the harm, which it is agreed, results from the clause in the law which I reject, will be confined within these walls. This is not what I believe. I believe that they extend across the entire nation. I think that the legal clause which I am talking about, from which comes the perversion of representative government (itself), tends to spread (a feeling of) indifference, a (certain) scepticism, and a selfishness among the public, things which are the real harms to our (current) situation and our historical period.

So Gentlemen, go into the provinces, talk to ordinary people, the inhabitants of the countryside, the people who judge a cause by its effect and a tree by its fruit, what will they say to you? They will say: "Representative government is good in theory but in practice it keeps none of its promises. Since it puts in your own hands the purse strings (of the nation) it appears that it should be able to at least bring about "cheap government", 1442 however, we see our finances in disarray, the debt increasing, taxes growing, and in spite of all these sacrifices, we are not even able to get that security, that stability that we are paying so dearly for.

This is what they will say, there is their faith in (our) institutions!

If you reply to them: "Be patient. There is a new opposition which is being formed and which has a chance of (coming to power) in a little while …"

From the Right: Enough! Enough!

From the Left: Speak! Speak!

Citizen Bastiat: If you reply to them: "Have confidence in this opposition. You will see that they will invoke the most beautiful slogans, they will only speak of liberty, or order, or economy," then these men will say to you "We know all that. We were promised all that a long time ago. It is always the same. Get out of my way so I can have a go."

So there is no confidence in the future. They have lost faith, not only in men but in the institutions. I am saying that this is a great harm, and if you think that this has no connection with the provision of the law which I am attacking you are deceiving yourselves, because if one has lost faith in the representative system, it is the representative system (itself) which is tainted, even to its core, by the provision of the law I am fighting. (Various noises - Put it to the vote!).

Part 4 (also 13 March, 1849) 1443

Citizen Billault, reporter from the Committee: 1444 … I know, for example, there is one party to which the Honourable Speaker belongs, which considers politics in the deliberating Assemblies to be a sort of plague, and who would like to reduce the Legislative Assemblies to the size of a Grand General Council which discusses with great care the question of free trade for example … (There is laughter).

Citizen Léon Faucher, Minister of the Interior: That has no bearing on the question.

Citizen Bastiat: Questions of free trade are questions about property.

Citizen Billault, reporter from the Committee: … But let us not become preoccupied with stirring matters of politics. You heard the other day the Honourable Speaker whine from this lectern about the fact that, when a matter of economics was debated the corridors (outside) had more people than the Chamber, but when maters of politics are raised the Chamber recovers all of its (lost) parliamentary population. I would be the last person (in the world) to want both this country and its deliberative assemblies to have (any) enthusiasm for a deep study of economic matters. …

28. T.239 Damned Money! (April 1849, JDE)↩

Source

T.239 (1849.04.15) "Damned Money!" (Maudit argent!), JDE , 15 Apr. 1849, T. 23, no. 97, pp. 1-20. Also published as a pamphlet: Bastiat, L'État. Maudit argent! (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849). [OC5.4, pp. 64-93.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

This is one of Bastiat's 12 Anti-Socialist Pamphlets which were published between late 1848 and July 1850 by the Guillaumin publishing firm and promoted as the "Petits Pamphlets" (Short or Little Pamphlets). It was part of a concerted campaign by the publishing firm to counter socialist ideas during the Revolution and the Second Republic. A special four page Catalog entitled "Publications nouvelles sur les questions économiques du jour" (New Publications on the Economic Questions of the Day) listed 40 of the firm's books on the right to work, socialism, the condition of the working class, and other similar topics. It was included with the first of Bastiat's Petits Pamphlets Propriété et loi. Justice et fraternité (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848) which was published in late 1848.

"Maudit argent!" is one of only two extended discussions of money written by Bastiat, the other is his debate about "Free Credit" which he had with Proudhon in late 1849 and early 1850, especially Letter 12 (February 1850). 1445 It was written to counter the growing socialist demand for government measures to solve the economic crisis which followed the February Revolution. This came in the form of two demands: for banks to issue credit at very low or zero interest rates (especially from Proudhon), and to expand the money supply in order to cover growing government debt to fund unemployment measures and other government expenditures. Bastiat refers in the essay to a Report from the Finance Committee which was presented to the Chamber on 14 April 1849 on behalf of the Committee by the banker and Deputy Charles Louvet which was very critical of a proposal put forward by the socialist Pierre Leroux to have the state reimburse some of its creditors the sum of one billion francs with paper money. 1446 This would have been hotly debated by the Committee in which Bastiat would have no doubt participated.

Bastiat was the Vice-President of the Finance Committee which had been established by the National Assembly to oversee the government's taxing and spending policies and consisted of 60 Deputies. He was an ardent defender of lower taxation and balanced budgets and an opponent of various high-spending schemes by the socialists such as the National Workshops which provided employment for unemployed workers at taxpayer expence. Throughout 1848 as the government's financial situation deteriorated there were many calls within the National Assembly for the government to issue up to 2 billion francs worth of paper money in order to shore up its finances. In a debate in the Assembly Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès, the Minister of Finance, made a speech attacking such schemes and warning of their danger. 1447 Numerous other reports by the Finance Committee addressed to the Assembly made similar points, such as Léon Faucher (who was a member of the Société de l'Économie Politique) who presented one on 29 August, 1848 opposing a forced loan of 200 million francs to replace other taxes such as the 45 centime tax; 1448 Adolphe Thiers presented one on 26 July, 1848 attacking the ideas of the socialist anarchist Proudhon on taxation and credit; 1449 one presented by Bastiat on 9 August 1848 on a 2 million franc emergency assistance measure for inhabitants of La Seine (see above, pp. 000); 1450 and the banker and Deputy Charles Louvet presented one on 14 April, 1849 attacking the ideas of the socialist Pierre Leroux (mentioned above). So, when Bastiat came to write this dialogue there had been yet another attempt to solve the government's budget woes by issuing paper currency unbacked by gold.

In a fairly complex technical discussion of the issue Bastiat uses over a dozen different expressions to describe various forms of money, bank notes, and other financial instruments. This is a difficult linguistic minefield for the translator to cross. Bastiat's terminology revolves around a fundamental distinction between two types of money; one based upon valuable metals such as gold and silver, and the other based upon paper notes which may or may not have been backed by government owned assets such as land. He uses two general words to cover all forms of money: "monnaie" (money) and "argent" (originally meaning silver but which also means money in a general sense). He also uses the term "numéraire" (cash) to refer to any gold or silver coins which were used as money. Some of the coins he specifically mentions are Louis, Napoléons, and écus. The smaller denomination copper coin, the sou (penny), is also mentioned. Bastiat also refers to "billets de banque" (bank notes) which are paper money which can be redeemed upon demand at a bank for gold or silver coins. He describes coins which have been "clipped" or watered down in their metallic content as "pièces altérées" (debased coins).

The other type of money Bastiat refers to is "papier-monnaie" (paper money) which is money which has been issued by a bank, usually a state bank, which is not backed by reserves of gold or silver. The most important historical example of this was the paper currency known as the Assignat which was issued during the Revolution. It was backed by the land which had been confiscated from the aristocrats and the church. It experienced a serious hyper-inflation which led to its ultimate collapse in 1796. In this essay Bastiat wittily refers to the Paris Mint using "la planche aux assignats" (the Assignat master plate) to create new paper money in an effort to solve the financial problems of the Second Republic. Other terms he used for this kind of paper money were "la fausse monnaie" (counterfeit or false money) and "francs fictifs" (imaginary or false francs). The latter were contrasted with "francs métalliques" (gold francs).

A final kind of money Bastiat refers to are "jetons" (tokens, or chips). This expression is also used in a discussion of the value of "poker chips" which can be increased or decreased at will vis-à-vis an unchanging quantity of goods and services in the economy.

This pamphlet is in the form of a dialogue between two adversaries who debate the nature of money. It is similar to many of the economic sophisms which Bastiat wrote between 1846 and 1848 in which the dialogue form was used. These are collected in CW3. This essay differs markedly from them in that it is much longer. It is also rather tedious in places as a result and it reads more like the "conversations" Molinari used in each Soirée in his 1849 book between an Economist (him), a Socialist, and a Conservative. 1451 Bastiat's shorter economic sophisms are wittier and easier to read, and hence more effective in getting his message across. Even the character "ABC" tells us he is getting tired and wants to end the conversation.

In the French original each speaker's contribution to the dialogue is introduced by a long dash. To aid the reader we have indicated who is speaking by prefacing their remarks with "Economist F*" for the economist who is a member of the Finance Committee of the National Assembly and "ABC" who acts as his foil in the discussion. By using the name "Economist F*" Bastiat is most likely referring to himself, as "F" stands for Frédéric, his arguments sound very much like Bastiat's, and he presents "ABC" with a copy of his recently published pamphlet Capital and Rent (Feb. 1849) towards the end of the conversation. However, it is possible the "F" might also be based upon Achille Fould (1800-1867) 1452 who was Minister of Finance in the Second Republic and a strong opponent of the government issuing any "new assignats" (by which he meant paper money not backed by gold) to pay off its debts and wrote a pamphlet, Plus d'assignats (No More Assignats), denouncing this trend. 1453

Some of the other topics raised by Bastiat in this essay include:

the problems faced by the free market economists in getting teaching positions in the university and other colleges. The economists had overcome with some difficulty a crisis in 1848 when one the very few who had a chair, Michel Chevalier at the Collège de France, had his position cancelled by the Provisional Government in early 1848. It took considerable lobbying by the Political Economy Society over the rest of the year to get him reinstated. See the glossary entry on "Teaching Political Economy in the Universities."
Bastiat's opposition to the idea of a "Legislator" who can design and run a new, artificially structured organisation to solve social problems. See the glossary entries on "The Social Mechanism" and the essay on "Natural and Artificial Organisation", below pp. 000
his other writings on "The Balance of Trade," see below, pp. 000.
his idea that exchange is the mutual exchange of services, or "service for service." See the glossary entry on "Service for Service."
the intriguing idea he puts forward concerning those who benefit from inflation by getting access to the new money first.

Damned Money!

Economist F*: "Damned money! Damned money!" 1454 The economist F* cried dejectedly as he came out of a meeting of the Finance Committee during which a project for paper money had just been discussed. 1455

ABC: "What is wrong with you?" I asked him, "Where does this sudden distaste for the most worshipped of all the gods in this world come from?"

Economist F*: Damned money! Damned money!

ABC: You are alarming me. Only once or twice have I heard peace, freedom, and life blasphemed like that, and Brutus went so far as to say "Virtue, you are just an empty word!" 1456 But if I have missed something so far …

Economist F*: Damned money! Damned money!

ABC: Come on, be a little philosophical. What has happened to you? Has Croesus 1457 just splattered you with one of his chariots? 1458 Has Mondor 1459 just stolen the love of your life? Or has Zoilus 1460 just paid a journalist to write a diatribe against you?

Economist F*: I do not envy Croesus his chariot; my lack of renown spares me Zoilus's eloquence and as for the love of my life, never, never has the slightest shadow of the faintest stain …

ABC: Ah, I am with you. What was I thinking of? You, too, are the inventor of a system of social organization, the F* system . 1461 You want your society to be more perfect than that of Sparta, 1462 and to achieve this any form of money has to be strictly banished from it. What is troubling you is how to persuade your followers to empty their purses. What does it matter? This is the trap for all reorganizers. There is not one who would not do marvelous things if he succeeded in overcoming all resistance and if the entire human race was willing to become soft wax in his fingers; however it is stubbornly opposed to becoming soft wax. It listens, applauds or rejects and … goes on as before.

Economist F*: Thank heavens, I have up to now resisted the current mania. Instead of inventing social laws, I study those that God has been pleased to invent, being happy moreover to find them admirable in their gradual development. And it is for this reason that I am saying "Damned money! Damned money!" over and over again.

ABC: Are you then a Proudhonian or a Proudhonist? 1463 Goodness me! You have an easy way of gaining satisfaction. Throw your purse into the Seine, except for one hundred sous 1464 to buy a share in the Exchange Bank. 1465

Economist F*: Since I am cursing money, you can decide whether I ought to curse its deceitful symbolism.

ABC: Then, there is just one guess left to me. You are a new Diogenes 1466 and you are going to weary me with a tirade, Seneca-style, on contempt for wealth. 1467

Economist F*: God forbid! For wealth, you see, is not a little more or a little less money. It is bread for the hungry, clothing for those who are naked, wood for heating, oil for extending the number of hours of light in the day, the opening of a career for your son, the assurance of a dowry for your daughter, a day of rest for tired limbs, a medicine to rejuvenate you, assistance slipped into the hand of a poor person who is ashamed, a roof against a storm, wings to bring friends together more quickly, a diversion for a head bursting with ideas, and the incomparable joy of making our loved ones happy. Wealth is education, independence, dignity, confidence, charity, everything that the development of our faculties can provide for the needs of our bodies and minds; it is progress and civilization. Wealth is the admirable civilizing result of two admirable agents that are even more civilizing than it is: work and trade.

ABC: Good. Are you now going to extol the benefits of wealth in dithyrambic verse when, just a moment ago, you were busy cursing gold?

Economist F*: Oh! Don't you understand that this is quite simply an economist's tirade! I am cursing money precisely because people confuse it with wealth, as you have just done, and from this confusion arises countless errors and calamities. I curse it because its function in society is poorly understood and very difficult to explain. I curse it because it confuses every idea, mistakes the means for the end, the obstacle for the cause, and the alpha for the omega. Because its presence in the world, beneficial in itself, has nevertheless introduced into it a disastrous notion, the begging of the question, a theory that is upside down, which in its myriad forms has impoverished men and caused the earth to run with blood. I curse it because I feel incapable of combating the error to which it has given birth other than by issuing a long and extremely detailed dissertation that nobody will listen to. Ah! If only I had my hands on a patient and indulgent listener!

ABC: Good heavens! It must never be said that for lack of a victim you will remain in your present state of irritation. I am listening: say your piece and get it off your chest! Throw off your inhibitions!

Economist F*: You promise to be interested?

ABC: I promise to be patient.

Economist F*: That's not very much.

ABC: That is all I can do. Fire away and tell me first of all how a mistake about money, if mistake there is, is at the root of all economic errors.

Economist F*: Frankly, with your hand on your heart, have you never confused wealth with money?

ABC: I don't know. I have never bored myself with political economy. But if I had confused them, what would the result be?

Economist F*: Not very much. It is like an error in your mind that does not influence your actions; for, you see, with regard to work and trade, although there are as many points of view as there are minds, we all act in the same way.

ABC: Rather like us walking according to the same principles although we do not agree on the theory of equilibrium and gravity.

Economist F*: Exactly. Anyone who is led by induction to believe that during the night we have our heads down and our feet up would be able to produce some fine books on the subject, but he would still stand up like everyone else.

ABC: I am sure of it. Otherwise, he would be quickly punished for being too good a logician.

Economist F*: In the same way, a man who was convinced that money is the real form of wealth and was consistent to the very end would soon die of hunger. This is why this theory is wrong for there are no correct theories that do not result from genuine facts that have been noted through the ages and everywhere.

ABC: I understand that, in practice and under the influence of self-interest, the disastrous consequence of a mistaken act constantly tends to correct the error. But if the error you are talking about has so little influence, why does it put you in such a bad mood?

Economist F*: It is because when a man, instead of acting on his own account, takes decisions for someone else, self-interest, that vigilant and perceptive watchman, is no longer there to cry: "Look out!" Responsibility has been displaced. It is Pierre who makes the mistake but Jean who suffers as a result. The false system of the Legislator 1468 inevitably becomes the rule of action for entire nations. And look at the difference. When you have money and are very hungry, whatever your theory about cash, what do you do?

ABC: I go into a bakery and buy some bread.

Economist F*: You have no hesitation in parting with your money?

ABC: That is all I have it for.

Economist F*: And if in turn this baker is thirsty, what does he do?

ABC: He goes to the wine-seller and drinks a glass with the money I have given him.

Economist F*: What! Isn't he afraid of ruining himself?

ABC: The real ruin would be not to eat and drink.

Economist F*: And do all the people in the world, if they are free, act in the same way?

ABC: Without any doubt. Do you want them to die of hunger so that they can hoard their pennies?

Economist F*: Far from it, I think they are acting wisely, and I would like the theory to be an exact image of this universal practice. But just suppose now that you were the Legislator, the absolute monarch of a vast empire in which there were no gold mines. 1469

ABC: I quite like the idea.

Economist F*: Let us also suppose that you are utterly convinced of this: Wealth consists uniquely and exclusively of cash; what would you deduce?

ABC: I would deduce that there is no other means for me to make my people wealthier or for them to enrich themselves than to take cash from other people.

Economist F*: In other words, to make them poorer. The first consequence you will come to is therefore this: one nation can gain only what another loses.

ABC: This axiom rings with the authority of Bacon and Montaigne. 1470

Economist F*: It is no less a sorry one, even so, for in the end it amounts to saying: Progress is impossible. Two nations cannot prosper living side by side any more than two men can.

ABC: It does appear that this follows from the principle.

Economist F*: And since all men aspire to become wealthier, it has to be said that all of them aspire to ruining their fellow-men, by virtue of a providential law.

ABC: That is not Christian practice but it is political economy.

Economist F*: It is dreadful. But let us go on. I have made you into an absolute monarch. It is not for you to reason, but to act. There is no limit to your power. What are you going to do in the light of this doctrine: Wealth is money?

ABC: My ideas would be directed towards constantly increasing the amount of cash available to my people.

Economist F*: But there are no mines in your kingdom. How are you going to manage to do this? What will you order to be done?

ABC: I will not order anything; I will forbid. I will forbid any écus 1471 from leaving the country, under pain of death. 1472

Economist F*: And if your people, who have money, are hungry as well?

ABC: It doesn't matter. Under the set of principles within which we are reasoning, allowing them to export écus would be to allow them to become poorer.

Economist F*: So that, by your own admission, you would force them to act in accordance with a principle in opposition to the one that guides you yourself in similar circumstances. Why is this?

ABC: It is doubtless because my own hunger is painful but the people's hunger does not hurt the Legislators.

Economist F*: Well then! I can tell you that your plan will fail and that there is no form of surveillance that is vigilant enough to prevent écus from leaving when people are hungry and wheat is free to enter.

ABC: In that case, this plan, whether wrong or not, is as ineffectual for good as it is for evil, and we no longer need to bother with it.

Economist F*: You are forgetting that you are the Legislator. Can a Legislator be put off by so little when he is experimenting on others? Once the first decree has failed, would you not be looking for another means of achieving your aim?

ABC: What aim?

Economist F*: You have a short memory. The aim of increasing the amount of cash among your people, that being regarded as the only true wealth.

ABC: Ah! You have reminded me. I beg your pardon. But, you see, it is what is said of music: a little goes a long way. I think this is even more true of political economy. There I go again. But I really do not know what to think …

Economist F*: Think hard. First of all, I will point out to you that your first decree solved the problem only negatively. Preventing écus from leaving is indeed preventing wealth from decreasing, but it does not increase it.

ABC: Ah! I am on the right track … the wheat that is free to enter … I have just had a bright idea … Yes, the detour is brilliant and the means infallible. I am attaining my goal.

Economist F*: In turn, I will ask you; what goal?

ABC: Good heavens! To increase the amount of cash.

Economist F*: How will you manage this, please?

ABC: Is it not true that in order for the pile of money to grow constantly, the first condition is that it should never decrease?

Economist F*: Good.

ABC: And the second is that it should constantly be added to?

Economist F*: Very good.

ABC: Therefore the problem will be solved, both positively and negatively, as the socialists say, if on the one hand I prevent foreigners from reducing it and on the other I force them to add to it.

Economist F*: Better and better.

ABC: And to do this, you need two simple decrees in which cash is not even mentioned. By one of them, my subjects will be forbidden to buy anything abroad; by the other, they will be ordered to sell a great deal there.

Economist F*: This is a very well-laid out plan.

ABC: Is it new? I will take out an inventor's patent on it.

Economist F*: Don't go to that trouble; your priority will be contested. But be careful of one thing.

ABC: What?

Economist F*: I have made you an all-powerful king. I understand that you will prevent your subjects from buying foreign products. All you need to do is to forbid them from entering. Thirty or forty thousand Customs officers will do the trick. 1473

ABC: That will be a bit expensive. What does it matter? The money they will be paid will not be leaving the country.

Economist F*: Doubtless. And in our system, that is the essential point. But what are you going to do to force sales abroad?

ABC: I will encourage it by subsidies, raised through a few good taxes slapped on my people.

Economist F*: In that case exporters, constrained by the competition between them, will decrease their prices by the same amount, and it would be as though you were making a gift of these subsidies or taxes to foreigners.

ABC: It would still be true that the money would not leave the country.

Economist F*: That is true. It meets all your criteria, but if your system is so beneficial, the kings of the neighboring states will adopt it. They will copy your decrees and have Customs officers who reject your products in order that the pile of money in their country does not decrease either.

ABC: I will have an army and break through their barriers.

Economist F*: They will have an army and break through yours.

ABC: I will arm ships, make conquests, acquire colonies, and create consumers for my people who will be obliged to eat our wheat and drink our wine. 1474

Economist F*: The other kings will do the same things. They will challenge your conquests, your colonies, and your consumers. War will be everywhere and the world will be engulfed in flames.

ABC: I will increase my taxes, Customs officers, navy and army.

Economist F*: The others will imitate you.

ABC: I will redouble my efforts.

Economist F*: They will do the same thing. In the meantime, nothing proves that you will have succeeded in selling very much.

ABC: That is only too true. We will be lucky if our commercial efforts (don't?) cancel each other out.

Economist F*: And this is also true for your military efforts. And tell me, aren't these Customs officers, soldiers, ships, and crushing taxes, this constant tension aspiring to an impossible goal and this permanent state of open or secret warfare with the entire world the logical and necessary consequence of the fact that the Legislator has been obsessed with the idea (which is not within the reach, you will agree, of any man acting on his own account) that "wealth is cash; increasing cash is to increase wealth"?

ABC: I agree. Either the axiom is true, in which case the Legislator ought to act along the lines I have indicated, even though that leads to world war. Or it is false, in which case people are tearing each other apart in order to ruin themselves.

Economist F*: And do you remember that before you became king, this very axiom led you logically to the following maxims: "What one person gains, the other loses. The profit made by one is the loss of another" which implies irreconcilable conflict between all men. 1475

ABC: That is only too true. Whether I am a Philosopher or a Legislator, whether I reason or act, if I follow the principle that money is wealth I always reach this conclusion or result: world war. Before discussing this, you did the right thing to point out the consequences to me; without this, I would never have had the courage to follow you right to the end of your dissertation on economics for, to be quite frank with you, it is not very entertaining.

Economist F*: You're telling me. This is what I was thinking when you heard me mutter "Damned money!" I was grumbling because my fellow-citizens do not have the courage to study what it is so important for them to know.

ABC: And yet the consequences are frightful.

Economist F*: The consequences! I have pointed out just one. I might have shown you some that were even more disastrous.

ABC: You are making my hair stand on end! What other evils has this confusion between money and wealth been able to inflict on the human race?

Economist F*: I would need a long time to list them. It is a doctrine that has had a host of descendants. We have just become acquainted with its eldest son whose name is the Protectionist Regime . Its second son is the Colonial System , the third a Hatred of Capital and the youngest, Paper Money .

ABC: What! Does paper money result from the same error?

Economist F*: Directly. Once the Legislators have ruined men through war and taxes, they pursue their idea and say to each other "If the people are suffering, it is because there is not enough money. We must make more." And since it is not easy to increase the amount of precious metals, especially when the alleged benefits of trade prohibition have been exhausted, they add "We will make imaginary money, 1476 nothing is easier and each citizen will have a purse overflowing with it! They will all be rich!"

ABC: In fact, this procedure acts much faster than the other, and also it does not end up in a foreign war.

Economist F*: No, but in civil war.

ABC: You are very pessimistic. Hurry up then and examine the matter in more detail. I am very surprised that, for the first time, I want to know whether money (or its symbol) is wealth.

Economist F*: You will readily agree that people do not immediately satisfy any of their needs with écus. If they are hungry, it is bread that they need, if they are naked, clothes, if they are sick, medicine, if they are cold, shelter and fuel; if they wish to learn, they need books, if they want to travel, they need vehicles and so on. The wealth of a country can be seen in the abundance and proper distribution of all of these things.

From which you ought to be happy to guess how wrong Bacon's sad maxim, "What one nation gains, another of necessity loses" is. 1477 This maxim is expressed in an even more depressing way by Montaigne in these words: "One man's profit is another man's loss." 1478 When Shem, Ham and Japheth 1479 shared the vast solitudes of this earth, it is certain that each of them was able to build, drain, sow, harvest, house himself better, feed himself better, clothe himself better, educate himself better, improve his lot, become more wealthy, in a word, increase his economic satisfaction without any necessary decline in the economic satisfaction enjoyed by his brothers. This is the same for two nations.

ABC: Doubtless, two nations, like two separate men, are able to prosper side by side by working more and harder. This is not what the sayings of Bacon and Montaigne deny. They simply say that, when two nations or two men trade, if one gains, the other has to lose. And that goes without saying; as trade adds nothing by itself to the mass of useful things you are talking about, if one party has more following trade, the other has to end up having less.

Economist F*: You have a very inadequate idea of trade, inadequate to the point of being wrong. If Shem is in a plain that is fertile in wheat, Japheth on a hill that is good for wine production, and Ham in lush pasture, it is quite possible that the physical distance between them, far from damaging one of them, will enable all three to prosper. This is actually bound to happen, for the distribution of work brought about by trade will have the effect of increasing the mass of wheat, wine, and meat to be shared. How can this be otherwise if you allow liberty in these transactions? From the time that one of the three brothers notices that work done in co-operation, so to speak, results in a constant loss for him in comparison to working on his own, he will abandon trade. Trade is its own reason for getting our attention. It takes place and therefore it is good.

ABC: But Bacon's saying is true when it refers to gold and silver. If we accept that at a given time there is a given quantity of these in existence, it is perfectly clear that one purse cannot be filled without another purse emptying.

Economist F*: And if you claim that gold is wealth, you conclude that fortunes move from one man to another and there is never any general progress. This is exactly what I said at the beginning. If, on the other hand, you see true wealth is an abundance of useful things that will satisfy our needs and tastes, you will understand that simultaneous prosperity is possible. Cash serves only to facilitate the transmission of these useful things from one hand to another, which is accomplished just as effectively with one ounce of a rare metal like gold as with a pound of a metal that is more abundant, like silver, or with a half-hundredweight of one that is even more abundant, like copper. It follows that, if the French people had at their disposal double the present supply of useful things, France would be twice as rich, even though the quantity of cash remained the same; but this would not be true if there was double the amount of cash and the supply of useful things did not increase.

ABC: The question is whether the effect of a greater number of écus is not precisely to increase the mass of useful things.

Economist F*: What connection can there be between these two quantities? Food, clothing, houses, and fuel are all the result of nature and work, work that is more or less skilled and exercised over a nature that is more or less bountiful.

ABC: You are forgetting one major factor, namely trade. If you admit that it is a powerful force, and if, as you have agreed, that money like écus facilitates trade, then you ought to agree that these écus have a powerful indirect influence on production.

Economist F*: But I also added that a small amount of rare metal facilitates transactions just as well as a large amount of a more abundant metal, from which it follows that a nation is not made wealthy by being forced to hand over useful things in order to have more money.

ABC: So, according to you, the treasure that is being found in California is not increasing the world's wealth? 1480

Economist F*: I do not believe that it adds very much to the benefits and genuine satisfactions of the human race as a whole. If the gold in California replaces only the gold that is lost and destroyed in the world, it may be useful. If it increases the quantity of it, it will lower its value. Gold prospectors will be wealthier than they would be if this did not happen. But those prospectors who have an amount of gold in hand at the very moment of its depreciation will get less satisfaction in the future than they would have for the same amount before. I cannot see this as an increase but a displacement of genuine wealth as I have defined it.

ABC: All of this is very subtle. But it will be very difficult for you to get me to understand that I am not wealthier, all other things being equal, 1481 if I have two écus instead of one.

Economist F*: This is not what I am saying.

ABC: And what is true for me is also true for my neighbor and my neighbor's neighbor and so on, from one neighbor to another all around the country. Therefore, if each Frenchman has more écus, France is wealthier. 1482

Economist F*: And that is your mistake, a common mistake, which consists in concluding that what is true for one is true for all , and extrapolating from the particular to the general.

ABC: What! Is this not the most decisive of all conclusions? Is not what is true for one true for all? What is all , if not each one gathered into a single unit? It would be just as good telling me that every Frenchman could grow one inch suddenly without the average height of all French people being greater.

Economist F*: The reasoning is plausible, I agree, and this is exactly why the illusion it harbors is so common. Let us examine it, though.

Ten gamblers gather in a drawing room. For reasons of convenience, they used to take ten chips each for which they deposited one hundred francs in the kitty, so that each chip was worth ten francs. After the game, they settled their accounts and the players withdrew from the kitty as many sums of ten francs as they had chips. When he saw this, one of them, perhaps a great mathematician but a poor reasoner, said: "Sirs, constant experience teaches me that at the end of the game, I am all the richer the more chips I have. Have you not noticed the same thing with regard to yourselves? Thus, what is true for me is true in turn for each of you and what is true for each is true for all . Thus, we would all be richer at the end of the game if all of us had more chips. Well, nothing is easier, we just have to distribute twice as many." This was what was done. But, when at the end of the game they came to settle the accounts, they noticed that the thousand francs in the kitty had not miraculously multiplied as had generally been expected. They had to be shared out pro rata , as they say, and the only result (quite an illusion!) was: each person had indeed twice as many chips but each chip, instead of corresponding to ten francs, now corresponded to five only . It was then perfectly clear that what is true for one is not always true for all.

ABC: I can well believe it. You assume a general increase in chips without a corresponding increase in the deposit in the kitty.

Economist F*: And you assume a general increase in écus without a corresponding increase in the things whose exchange the écus facilitate.

ABC: Are you likening écus to chips?

Economist F*: Certainly not, in other respects, but yes from the point of view of the reasoning you have put to me and which I had to argue against. Note one thing. For there to be a general increase of écus in a country, this country either has to have mines or its trade has to take place in such a way that it trades useful things for cash. Apart from these two sets of circumstances a universal increase is impossible, as écus just change hands and in this case, although it is very true that each person taken individually is the richer the more écus he has, the generalization you were making just now cannot be deduced from this, since one écu more in a purse necessarily implies one écu less in another. It is just as in your comparison using average height. If each of us grew only at the expense of others, it would be very true for each person, taken individually, that he would be a finer figure of a man if he were lucky, but it would never be true for all, taken together.

ABC: Very well. But in the two sets of circumstances you have painted, the increase is genuine and you will agree that I am right.

Economist F*: Up to a certain point.

Gold and silver have a value. In order to obtain them, people agree to hand over useful items that also have a value. Therefore, when a country has mines and extracts sufficient gold to buy something useful from abroad, for example a locomotive, it becomes wealthier by all the benefits that a locomotive can produce, exactly as though it had manufactured it. For this country, the question is whether the first option requires more effort than the second; whether if it did not export this gold, the latter might not depreciate in value such that something worse might happen than what we see in California, for at least precious metals are used there to buy useful items that are made elsewhere. That said, in all this one runs the risk of dying of hunger sitting on heaps of gold. What would happen if the law prohibited gold exports?

As for the second possibility, in which we acquire gold through commerce, this is either an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on whether the country's need for it is more or less pressing compared with its equal need for the useful items it has to hand over in order to acquire it. It is for those concerned to judge and not for the law, for if the law is based on the principle that gold is to be preferred over useful items, never mind questions of value, and if it succeeds in acting according to this principle, it would tend to make France into a California in reverse, in which there would be a great deal of cash with which to buy things but nothing to buy. This is still the set of arrangements symbolized by Midas. 1483

ABC: Gold that is imported implies that something useful is exported, I agree, and from this point of view, a certain benefit is taken out of the country. But is it not replaced to some body's advantage and how many new examples of such consumption will not this gold produce as it circulates from hand to hand, stimulating employment and output, until at length it in turn leaves the country, the implication being that something useful has entered?

Economist F*: Here you are at the heart of the question. Is it true that an écu is the reason behind the production of all the products whose trade it facilitates? People readily agree that an écu of five francs is worth just five francs, but they are led to believe that this character is singular in nature, that it is not destroyed like all other things of value or at least only over a very long period, that it is regenerated, so to speak, every time it is passed on, and that in the final analysis this écu has been worth as many times five francs as it has produced transactions and that, all by itself, it has been worth all the things for which it has been exchanged in turn. 1484 People believe that because they suppose that without this écu these items would not even have been produced. People say: "Without it, the shoemaker would have sold one fewer pair of shoes and consequently he could have bought less meat; the butcher would have gone less frequently to the grocer, the grocer to the doctor, the doctor to the lawyer, and so on."

ABC: That seems indisputable to me.

Economist F*: It is just the right time to analyze the true function of cash, setting aside both mines and imports.

You have one écu. What does it signify in your hands? It is both the evidence and the proof that you have, at some time, produced something which, instead of consuming for your own satisfaction, you have got society, in the person of your customer, to enjoy. This écu demonstrates that you have provided a service to society and, what is more, it makes its value apparent. Moreover, it demonstrates that you have not yet drawn from society a genuine and equivalent service, as you have the right to do. 1485 To enable you to exercise this right when and where you please, society, through your customer, has given you an acknowledgement of debt , a title , a voucher from the Republic , a chip , in short an écu , which differs from fiduciary claims only in that it bears its value within itself, and if you are able to read the inscriptions on it with the eyes of the mind, you will decipher distinctly the following words: "P rovide a service to the bearer that is equivalent to the one he has provided to society for a value that has been received, noted, proven, and measured by that which is present in myself ."

You now hand me your écu. Either this is for free or it comes at a price. If you are giving it to me as the price of a service, the following will be the result: your account with society in terms of real satisfactions enjoyed, will be settled, balanced, and closed. You had previously provided a service to society for one écu and you are now paying back the écu for a service; you are now, therefore, even. For my part, I am exactly in the position in which you were a moment ago. It is I who am now ahead of society by the service I have just provided it through your person. It is I who have become its creditor for the value of the work I have done for you and that I might have devoted to myself. It is therefore through my hands that the title for this debt has to pass as the evidence and proof of society's debt. You cannot say that I am richer, for if I am owed something, it is because I have given something. Above all, you cannot say that society is richer by one écu because one of its members has one écu more, since someone else has one less.

If you hand me this écu freely, in this case it is clear that I will be all the richer for it, but you will be all the poorer, and social wealth taken as a whole will remain unchanged, for this wealth, as I have already said, consists in genuine services, real satisfactions, in useful items. You were a creditor of society, you have transferred your rights to me and it is of little matter to society whether it provides the service it owes to you or to me. It acquits itself by providing the service to the bearer of the title to it.

ABC: But if we all had a great many écus, we would all draw a great many services from society. Wouldn't that be very pleasant?

Economist F*: You are forgetting that, in the arrangements I have just described, arrangements which mirror reality, you can draw services from society only because you have paid some in. Services imply both services received and given , for these two terms entail each other, such that they must always be in balance. You cannot imagine society providing more services than it receives, and yet this is the illusion that is being pursued with the multiplication of écus, the debasement of money, the use of paper money, etc.

ABC: All this appears quite reasonable in theory , but in practice 1486 when I see what is happening, I cannot get it out of my head that if by some happy miracle the number of écus happened to increase so that each of us saw his tiny store doubled, we would all be more prosperous. We would all buy more and production would be strongly stimulated.

Economist F*: More purchases! But what would you buy? Doubtless something useful, things likely to provide real satisfaction, foodstuffs, fabrics, houses, books, or pictures. You would therefore have to start by proving that all these things are self-generated by the sole fact that at the Paris Mint (Hôtel des Monnaies) 1487 ingots that have fallen from the moon are being melted down or that at the National Printing Works 1488 someone has set the master plate for Assignats in motion; 1489 for you cannot reasonably think that if the quantity of wheat, cloth, ships, hats, or shoes remains the same, each person's share can be greater, because we all come into the market with a greater quantity of either gold or paper francs 1490 . Remember our gamblers. In the social order, the useful items are those that the workers themselves place under the candlestick and the écus that pass from hand to hand are the chips. If you increase the number of francs without increasing the number of useful items, the only result will be that more francs will be needed for each trade, just as each player needs more chips for each bet. You have proof of this in what is happening with regard to gold, silver, and copper. Why does the same exchange require more copper than silver and more silver than gold? Is it not because these metals are distributed around the world in a variety of proportions? What reason have you to believe that if gold suddenly became as abundant as silver, you would not need as much of one as of the other to buy a house?

ABC: You may be right, but I want you to be wrong. In the midst of the suffering that surrounds us, so cruel in itself and so dangerous because of its consequences, I found some consolation in the thought that there was an easy way of making all the members of society happy.

Economist F*: Even if gold and silver did constitute wealth, it would still not be easy to increase their supply in a country with no mines.

ABC: No, but it is easy to substitute something else. I agree with you that gold and silver do not provide much service as instruments of trade. You might as well have paper money, banknotes, and so on. If, therefore, we all have a great deal of this type of money, which is so easy to create, we would all be able to buy a great deal and would lack nothing. Your cruel theory dissipates hopes, or illusions if you like, whose principle is clearly very philanthropic.

Economist F*: Yes, just like the vain hopes that can be formulated for universal happiness. The extreme facility of the means you suggest is enough to demonstrate your proposal's futility. Do you think that if it were enough to print banknotes for us all to be able to satisfy our needs, our tastes or our desires, the human race would have reached this stage without having had recourse to this means? I agree with you that the proposal is seductive. It would instantly banish from the world, not only plunder in all its utterly deplorable forms, but work itself, except for the work of running the Assignat master plate. It remains to be understood how the Assignats would buy houses that nobody had built, wheat that nobody had grown, or fabrics that nobody had taken the trouble to weave.

ABC: One thing in your argument strikes me. According to your own statements, if there is no profit, there is also no loss in increasing the instruments of trade, as can be seen in the example of your gamblers, who reached agreement through a very gentle deception. So why reject the philosopher's stone which will finally reveal the secret of how to change pebbles into gold and while we are waiting for this, paper money? Are you so stubbornly attached to your logic that you would refuse an experiment that carries no risk? If you are mistaken, from what your opponents say, you are depriving the nation of an immense benefit. If they are wrong, from what you say, it is just a question of dashed hopes for the people. The measure, which is excellent according to them, is neutral according to you. Let it be tried, since the worst that can happen is not the production of harm but the non-production of something good.

Economist F*: First of all, dashed hopes already do major harm to a nation. So does a government when it announces the abolition of several taxes in the vain hope that it can rely instead on a resource that is bound to disappear. 1491 Nevertheless, your remark would carry force if, following the issue of paper money and its depreciation, the equilibrium of values were achieved instantaneously, with perfect simultaneity, in all things and in every part of the country. As in my gaming room, the measure would result in a universal hoax at which the best thing would be to laugh when we look at one another. But things do not happen like that. The experiment has been carried out and each time that despots have debased the currency. …

ABC: Who is suggesting that the currency should be debased?

Economist F*: Good heavens! Forcing people to take bits of paper that have officially been labeled francs as payment or forcing them to accept as weighing five grams a silver coin that weighs only two and a half but which has just as officially been labeled a franc , is exactly the same thing if not worse, and all the arguments that can be put forward in favor of counterfeit government issued money 1492 have already been made in favor of Assignats. Certainly taking the point of view which you espoused a short time ago and which you still appear to hold, according to which it was believed that to increase the instrument of trade was to increase the amount of trade itself as well as the number of things traded, people had to believe, in entirely good faith, that the simplest means was to double the number of écus and by law give the half écu coin the same denomination and value as the whole écu coin. Well! In either case, depreciation is inevitable. I think I have told you the reason for this. What remains for me to demonstrate to you is that this depreciation which, on paper, can reach zero, operates by creating dupes 1493 of which the poor, the naive, the workers, and country folk form the majority.

ABC: I am listening, but be brief. This dose of Political Economy is a bit indigestible in one sitting.

Economist F*: Very well. We are thus firmly settled on this point, that wealth is the sum of the useful items that we produce by working, or better still, the results of all the effort we make to satisfy our needs and tastes. These useful items are traded for one another as it suits their owners. These transactions may take two forms: barter , by which a person provides a service and receives an equivalent one immediately in return. Transactions in this form are extremely limited. In order for them to increase in number, to take place over time and space and between people who do not know one another, and to involve ever more diverse kinds of goods, an intermediary has become necessary: money. Money gives rise to trade, which is nothing other than a complex form of barter. This is what should be noted and understood. Trade consists of two operations of barter , that is of two factors, a sale and a purchase , that must be combined in order for it to be possible. 1494 You sell a service for one écu, then with this écu you purchase a service. It is only then that the barter is complete and only then that your effort has been followed by genuine satisfaction. Obviously, you work in order to satisfy the needs of others only in order for others to work to satisfy yours. As long you have in your hands only the écu you have been given for your work, all you are in a position to lay claim to is the work of one other person. And it is when you have done this that the economic process will be complete in your respect, since it is only then that you will have obtained the true reward for your efforts by way of genuine satisfaction. The notion of barter implies a service provided and a service received. Why should this not also be true for the notion of trade, which is just a form of barter in two stages?

Here two comments need to be made in this regard. First of all, it is not very significant whether there is a lot or a little cash in the world. If there is a lot, a lot is needed; if a little, little is needed for each transaction, that is all. The second comment is this: since money is always seen to appear in each trading operation, people have ended up thinking that it is the symbol and measure for all the items traded.

ABC: Do you still deny that cash is the symbol of the useful items you are talking about?

Economist F*: A louis is no more the symbol of a sack of wheat than a sack of wheat is that of a louis. 1495

ABC: What harm is there in thinking that money is a symbol of wealth?

Economist F*: There is this disadvantage, that people believe that it is enough to increase the symbol to increase the items for which it is a symbol, and they fall into all the erroneous measures that you did yourself when I made you an absolute monarch. They go even further. In the same way that money is seen as a symbol of wealth, paper money is also seen as a symbol of money and the conclusion is drawn that there is an extremely easy and simple way of acquiring the comfort of riches for all.

ABC: But you certainly would not go so far as to question that money is the measure of values?

Economist F*: Certainly, I would go that far, for that is exactly where the illusion lies.

It has become the custom to relate the value of all things to cash. People say: "This is worth 5, 10, or 20 francs" just as they say "this weighs 5, 10, or 20 grams, this measures 5, 10, or 20 meters, this field is 500, 1,000, or 2,000 square meters," etc. and from this it has been concluded that money is the measure of values .

ABC: Good heavens, that is because it appears to be so.

Economist F*: Yes, it appears to be so, and this is what I am complaining about, but it is not so in reality. A measure of length, capacity, weight, and area is an agreed upon and immutable quantity. This is not the case for the value of gold and silver. This varies just as the value of wheat, wine, cloth, and labor does and for the same reasons, for they have the same source and are subject to the same laws. Gold is put within our reach exactly as iron is, through the labor of miners, the advance payments made by capitalists, and the co-operation of sailors and traders. It is worth more or less, depending on whether it costs more or less to produce, whether there is a lot or a little on the market, or whether it is more or less in demand; in a word, its fluctuations are subject to the fate of all human production. But there is one thing that is strange, and which is the cause of a great deal of misunderstanding. When the value of cash varies, it is to the other products for which it is traded that people attribute the variation. Thus, I suppose that all the circumstances relating to gold remain as they were and that the wheat harvest had been taken away. Wheat will be dearer; people will say that a hectoliter of wheat that was worth 20 francs is now worth 30 and they will be right, for it is really the value of wheat that has changed, and what they say agrees with the facts. But let us make the contrary assumption; let us assume that all the circumstances relating to wheat remain the same and that half of all the gold in the world is swallowed up. This time, it is the value of gold that will rise. I think people will have to say that this gold napoleon that was worth 20 francs is now worth 40. Well, do you know what people say? They talk as though the other term of comparison has fallen and say, "Wheat that was worth 20 francs is now worth only ten."

ABC: As far as the result goes, it amounts to the same thing.

Economist F*: Doubtless, but imagine all the upheavals and trickery that must occur in trading operations when the value of the intermediary changes without people being warned by a change in the denomination. Debased coins or notes are issued with the face value of twenty francs and they keep this face value through all subsequent depreciations. Their value will be reduced by a quarter or half but they will still be called twenty-franc coins or notes . Clever people will be careful to deliver their products only in return for a greater number of notes. In other words, they will demand forty francs for what they used to sell for twenty in the past. However, naive people will be taken in. Many years will pass before the change is accomplished for all values. Under the influence of ignorance and habit , the daily rate for labor in our country districts will remain at one franc for a long time, whereas the market price for all consumer products rises around them. Labor will descend into dreadful poverty without being able to discern its cause. Finally, Sir, since you want me to stop, I ask you, in concluding, to please pay close attention to this essential point. Once debased money, 1496 in whatever form, is put into circulation, depreciation has to follow, and will be shown by a universal price increase in everything saleable. However, this increase will not be instantaneous and equal for everything. 1497 Those who are clever, the second-hand dealers and businessmen, will emerge relatively unscathed, as it is their job to note fluctuations in price, recognize their cause and even speculate on what is happening. But small merchants, country folk, and workers will all feel the shock. The wealthy will not be any wealthier but the poor will become poorer. The effects of expedients of this type will be to increase the gap between the wealthy and the poor, to paralyze the social trends that constantly bring men closer to the same level, and centuries will then be needed for the long suffering classes to regain the ground they have lost in their march toward the equality of conditions.

ABC: Goodbye, Sir, I will leave you and go to meditate on the dissertation you have just so kindly given me.

Economist F*: Are you already at the end of yours? I have scarcely begun. I have not yet talked to you about the hatred of capital or free credit , 1498 a disastrous sentiment, a deplorable error that is fueled by the same source!

ABC: What! This terrible uprising of the proletarians against the capitalists also results from a confusion between money and wealth?

Economist F*: It is the fruit of a variety of causes. Unfortunately, certain capitalists have claimed monopolies and privileges for themselves that would be enough to explain this sentiment. But when the theoreticians of demagogy wished to justify such sentiment, systemize it, give it the appearance of a reasoned opinion, and turn it against the very nature of capital, they had recourse to the false political economy at the base of which the same confusion is always to be found. They told the people: "Take a one-écu coin, put it under glass, and forget it for one year. Then go and look at it and you will be convinced that it has not generated ten sous, five sous, or any fraction of a sou. Money, therefore, does not produce interest." Then, substituting the word capital , their alleged synonym, for money, they have modified their conclusion thus: "Capital, therefore, does not produce interest." Then comes this series of consequences: "Therefore the person who lends you capital should not gain anything for it; therefore the person who lends you capital is robbing you if he gains anything from it; therefore all capitalists are thieves; therefore, since wealth ought to serve those who borrow it free of charge, in reality it belongs to those to whom it does not belong; therefore there is no property; therefore everything belongs to everyone; therefore …"

ABC: That is serious, all the more so as the syllogism, I must admit, seems to follow perfectly. I would like to clear up the matter but, alas! I cannot control my concentration any longer. I feel the words cash, money, services, capital, and interest buzzing in confusion in my head to the point where, truly, I can no longer think straight. Please let us postpone our discussion to another day.

Economist F*: In the meantime, here is a small volume entitled Capital and Rent . 1499 It will perhaps clear up a few of your doubts. Take a look at it when you are bored.

ABC: Will it relieve my boredom?

Economist F*: Who knows? One thing takes the place of another; one cause of boredom takes the place of another; similia similibus ( like things are cured by like things) 1500 …

ABC: I cannot make up my mind whether you see the functions of cash and political economy in general in their true light. But I have retained this from your conversation: these matters are of the highest importance, for peace or war, order or anarchy, or the agreement or opposition of the citizens depend on their solution. How is it that in France so little is known of a science that affects us all so closely and whose dissemination would have such a decisive influence on the fate of the human race? Is it because the State does not have it taught enough? 1501

Economist F*: Not exactly. It is because, unknowingly, it takes infinite care to flood people's minds with prejudices and instill in every heart sentiments that favor the spirit of anarchy, war, and hatred. So that, when a doctrine favoring order, peace, and union is put forward, however clear and truthful it may be, there is no room for it.

ABC: You really are a dreadful pessimist. What interest has the State in misleading people's minds in favor of revolution and civil and foreign war? You are certainly exaggerating.

Economist F*: Make your own mind up. At the period when our intellectual faculties begin to develop, at the age at which our impressions are so vivid, when habits of mind are so easily brought under control, when we might cast a glance on our society and understand it, in a word, when we reach the age of seven or eight, what does the State do? 1502 It puts a blindfold over our eyes, extricates us gently from the social environment that surrounds us, at a time when our minds are so lively and our hearts so impressionable, in order to plunge us into the bosom of Roman society. It keeps us there for about ten years, the time necessary to make an indelible imprint on our minds. Well, note that Roman society is the complete opposite of what our society ought to be. 1503 Then, people lived on war; we ought to hate war. Then, they hated work; we have to live from our work. Then, the means of subsistence was based on slavery and plunder; now, we live by free industry. Roman society was organized in line with its principle. It had to admire what caused it to prosper. Its people had to call virtues what we call vices. Its poets and historians had to exalt what we ought to scorn. The very words, f reedom, order, justice, people, honor, influence , etc. could not have the same meaning in Rome as they have or ought to have in Paris. Why wouldn't you expect that all our young people who leave university or religious schools, who have had the histories of Livy and Quintus Curtius as their catechism, 1504 would understand freedom as the Gracchi did, virtue as Cato did, and patriotism as Caesar did? 1505 Why wouldn't you expect them to be faction-ridden and warlike? Why would you expect them in particular to take the slightest interest in the workings of our social order? Do you think that their minds are well prepared to understand them? Do you not see that in order to understand them, they would have to divest themselves of the things that have been impressed on them in order to take in ideas that are totally opposite?

ABC: What do you conclude from this?

Economist F*: This. The most urgent need is not for the State to teach but for it to allow teaching to take place. All monopolies are hateful but the worst of all is the monopoly of education. 1506

29. T.276 "Comments at a Meeting of the Political Economy Society on the Peace Congress and State support for an Experimental Socialist Community" (10 May 1849)↩

Source

T.276 (1849.05.10) Bastiat's comments on the Peace Congress and state support for an experimental socialist community at a Meeting of the PES (Séance de 10 mai 1849). In "Chronique," JDE, T. 23, no. 98, 15 mai 1849, p. 216; also ASEP (1889), pp. 74-75. Not in OC. [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

This is the fifth record of eleven which we have of Bastiat attending one of the regular monthly meetings of the Political Economy Society. See the Editor's Introduction to the first one, above pp. 000, for more details.

The meeting begins with a discussion of the Society's plans for the big International Friends of Peace Conference which was to be held in Paris in August later that year and in which several of the Society's members would play a significant role. The Friends of Peace organised a series of international conference to promote their ideas between 1843 and 1853. The first one took place in 1843 on the initiative of the American Peace Society, the President of which was Elihu Burritt, 1507 and the English Quaker Joseph Sturge. 1508 Some 340 delegates attended, the bulk of which were British. The second conference was organized by Elihu Burritt and chaired by the Belgian lawyer Auguste Visschers 1509 and took place in Brussels in September 1848. The third Congress was held in Paris in 22-24 August 1849 and was chaired by the novelist Victor Hugo, and Richard Cobden and Bastiat gave important speeches. 1510 The 4th was held in Frankfurt in August 1850 with 600 delegates, the 5th in London in July 1851, the 6th in Manchester in 1852, and the 7th in Edinburgh in 1853. The Congresses came to an end with outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854. Joseph Garnier was one of the organisers of the 1849 Paris meeting and edited a volume of its Proceedings which included Bastiat's speech.

The second topic of discussion was Victor Considerant's 1511 recent speech in the Chamber on 13 April, 1849 in which he reiterated his demand that the government fund an experimental socialist community in order to demonstrate the viability of socialism. The first time he had done this was a couple of days after the February Revolution broke out when he and the other editors of the Fourierist magazine La Démocratie pacifique circulated on the streets of Paris a petition calling on the Provisional Government to create a Ministry of Progress and the Organisation of Work to study socialist ways to reorganise society. They especially called for support from the new government for funding of small experimental socialist communities which would quickly demonstrate (they believed) the feasibility of much larger, even nation wide socialist policies. The key passage was:

In order to organize production in French society, you have to know how to organize it at the village level, in the living and breathing workshops of the nation. Any serious doctrine of social development must therefore succeed at the level of the basic workshop and be tried out initially on a small parcel of land. Let the Republic therefore create a Ministry of Progress and Organization of Production whose function will be to examine all the plans put forward by the various socialist doctrines and to support one of them for a local, free, and voluntary experiment carried out in a territorial unit, the square league. 1512

Bastiat quickly responded to this petition in the 6th issue of his street magazine La République française (Thursday 2 March, 1848) with his own "Petition from an Economist" in which he said a better option would be to set up competing experimental communities to see which one produced the greatest peace and prosperity. He wanted to register his own experimental community with the government to put into practice laissez-faire economic policies.

If this idea is put into practice, we will ask that we too be given our square league to try out our ideas. Why, after all, should the various socialist schools of thought be the only ones to have the privilege of having at their disposal square leagues, basic workshops, and everything which constitutes a locality, in short, villages? 1513

His experimental community would be funded by a low flat tax on income on all residents "to ensure the respect of persons and ownership, the elimination of fraud, misdemeanors, and crimes." Aside from this the government would do nothing and "religion, teaching, production, and trade would be perfectly free." He predicted that it would soon be more productive and peaceful than any other experimental community, especially the socialist ones.

Victor Considerant returned to this idea in a speech in the Chamber on 13 April, 1849 1514 which is what the Economists were referring to in this meeting of the Society (10 May 1849). He wanted the French government to give him and his followers some government owned land (1200-1600 hectares; about 4,000 acres) outside Paris and enough money to build homes and workshops which, he promised, would prove in a very short time the viability of socialism. Joseph Garnier estimated that this amounted to a gift to the socialists from the French taxpayers of some 4-5 million francs. The lawyer Claude-Marie Raudot jokingly said that you would not have to built entirely new communities from scratch if you had enough money to pay everybody 10,000-20,000 francs to behave differently.

Bastiat returned to Considerant's proposed experiment community in Economic Harmonies where he dismissed these schemes in a similarly mocking fashion:

According to current parlance, it was a question of trying things out: Faciamus experimentum in corpore vili (Let us experiment on a worthless body). And people seemed to have reached such a degree of scorn for individuality, assimilating man so closely to inert matter, that people spoke of carrying out social experiments on people just as you carry out chemical experiments using alkalis and acids. The first experiment was begun in the Luxembourg Palace, and we know what result it produced. Shortly after this the Constituent Assembly set up an Employment Committee, in which thousands of social plans were engulfed. We saw a representative of Fourierism seriously asking for land and money (he would doubtless not have waited long before asking for men as well) with which to manipulate his model form of society. 1515

Text

In spite of the sad events taking place at the present time, 1516 we observe with great satisfaction that the enthusiasm of "the friends of peace" has not relented. Messrs Elihu Burritt, the president of the Society in the United States, (Henry) Richard, 1517 secretary of the Peace Society in London, and M. (Auguste) Wisschers, president of the last Peace Congress which was held in London, have spent several days in Paris to lay the foundation of a Congress which will take place in Paris in early August (of this year). Several important religious, political, and scientific figures from government and the press have promised their support for this event. The Political Economy Society decided at the meeting that it will instruct its office to represent the Society at the Peace Congress. 1518

At the same meeting, presided over by M. Horace Say and assisted by several members of the Constituent Assembly (including M. Victor Lefranc among others) who have shown themselves to be very favourable to the idea of such a Congress, the conversation also turned to the question of whether or not the State ought to support experimental socialist communities. The negative point of view was given by Messrs Bastiat, Howyn de Tranchère, 1519 and Raudot. 1520 M. Bastiat in particular invoked the great principle of the non-intervention of the State, without which the need for and expences of the government would have no limits. M. Howyn de Tranchère delivered a critique of socialist systems and their inanity which was spirited and full of good sense. Finally, M. Raudot showed with some economic figures that the millions of francs which the leaders of these schools of thought 1521 have soaked up in order to make a few hundred citizens better off, will soon show the tax-payers the impossibility of continuing with this largesse, and that, in any case, there would be no need for a new social mechanism to make people happy at a rate of 10 or 20 thousand francs per person, even if there were enough to go around.

Without challenging any of these principles, criticisms, or figures brought up by these honourable members, M. Joseph Garnier maintained that the (financial) support of the State ought to be offered and given to the heads of theses schools of thought in order to back them into a corner and thus (make them) work towards disillusioning the people who had fought against social order with weapons in their hands, and who have cost society as a whole torrents of blood and billions of francs. Indeed, M. Joseph Garnier referred to the subsidies M. Considérant had demanded in one of the recent sittings of the Chamber of Deputies, namely a grant of 15 to 1800 hectares close to Paris, in addition to capital of 4-5 million francs in order to establish a Fouriest Phalanstery of 500 people.

30. T.230 "Capital" (mid-1849, Almanac rép.)↩

Source

T.230 (summer 1849) "Capital" (Le capital). Published in Almanach Républicain pour 1849 (Paris: Pagnerre, 1849). Bastiat mentions the cholera outbreak which swept through Paris in July-Aug. 1849 so this might date the publication. [OC7.64, pp. 248-55.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

Many of the political economists attempted to reach out to a broader audience after the Revolution broke out in February 1848 by writing more popular books and pamphlets in order to appeal to the workers who had been influenced by socialist ideas. Bastiat and Molinari edited, wrote, and handed out two revolutionary newspapers on the streets of Paris - one in February-March, called La République française , and another in June 1848, which was named Jacques Bonhomme after the French "everyman" who appeared in every issue with pronouncements and commentary on the events of the week and was clearly the voice of Bastiat himself. 1522 The Guillaumin publishing firm arranged for some of the economists to write pieces in the form of conversations or dialogues between workers or socialists, and conservatives, and supporters of the free market, which they marketed as part of their anti-socialist campaign in 1848-49. Two of the best examples which were modelled on Bastiat's clever dialogues in the Economic Sophisms were Molinari's conversations between "a Socialist," "a Conservative," and "an Economist" in Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare (1849) 1523 and the Swiss economist Antoine-Elisée Cherbuliez's Le potage à la tortue (Turtle Soup) which was a series of conversations between "a worker" and "a professor." 1524

Another important figure in this strategy was the young Mauritian economist Alcide Fonteyraud (1822-1849) 1525 who also worked on Bastiat's two revolutionary journals. Because of his oratorical gifts he played an important role in the economists' debating club "Le Club de la liberté du travail" (The Club for the Freedom of Working) which took on the socialist debating clubs on the streets of Paris in March and April 1848 before it was forced to close because socialist thugs were beating up and intimidating the economists and their supporters. 1526 Fonteyraud wrote in early 1849 an introduction to political economy which was published in a widely distributed popular encyclopedia of useful knowledge, Instruction for the People: 100 Treatises on the Most Indispensible Knowledge , 1527 before he died suddenly during the cholera epidemic which swept France in the summer of 1849.

Another example of Bastiat's contribution to this campaign of popularization was this pamphlet published in a radical republican journal, the Almanach Républicain, whose aim was to "gather together all the intelligent elite, who wanted to consolidate the Republic through the education of the People." 1528 It was published by Laurent Pagnerre 1529 who, like Bastiat, had been elected to the National Assembly in April 1848. He was appointed the Director of a new bank, the Comptoir d'escompte de Paris, which had been established in March 1848 by the Minister of Finance Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès to help solve the liquidity crisis caused by the revolution and the collapse of the banking system of the July Monarchy. Pagnerre would would have been well known to him since Bastiat served as Vice President of the Assembly's Finance Committee which would have discussed monetary policy on many occasions. It is rather strange that Pagnerre would ask Bastiat to write this piece on "Capital" given Bastiat's strong opposition to attempts by the government to issue unbacked paper money to solve its liquidity problem, as he stated forcefully in his pamphlet "Damned Money!" (April 1849). Bastiat's other anti-socialist pamphlets for the most part were aimed at intellectuals and some educated workers, such as the readers of Proudhon's magazine La Voix du peuple (The Voice of the People) in their debate over "Free Credit" in late 1849 and early 1850 (see below).

This essay was probably written over the summer of 1849 when Bastiat was in seclusion in the Butard hunting lodge in a forest just outside Paris which had been lent to him so he could work on finishing his treatise Economic Harmonies . His reference to the cholera epidemic which killed thousands of Parisians in August suggests a late summer date. Thus, he would have written this essay while he was also working on the chapter on "Capital" (Chap. VII) which would appear in the book. The latter was much more technical and theoretical in nature, while the former was designed for a more popular readership. Bastiat's strategy in the essay was to persuade ordinary workers that capital was not their enemy (like some plague or scourge) but rather the means for them to get higher wages in the medium to long term. The more capital there was in the form of "materials, tools, and provisions," the more productive the workers' labour was, and thus the higher the wages they would be paid. So, instead of supporting Louis Blanc and his government make-work schemes in the National Workshops, and Proudhon's schemes for a low or free interest People's Bank, the workers should be supporting the economists' policy of "security for property, freedom of economic activity, and economy in government spending."

The influence of Louis Blanc and his National Workshops program on the workers was one that Bastiat tries to counter in this essay. 1530 A more formidable theoretical opponent whose views he and the other economists had to counter was Proudhon. 1531 In a series of works Proudhon attacked the very heart of the free market position with his attacks on the legitimacy of property ("property is theft") in Qu'est-ce que la propriété? ou Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement (What is Property? or Research on the Principles of Justice and of Government) (1840), that the free market inevitably produces conflict and disharmony in Système des contradictions économiques (The System of Economic Contradictions) (1846), and that workers have the right to a job guaranteed by the state if necessary in Le droit au travail et le droit de propriété (The Right to a Job and the Right to Property) (1850). Bastiat and Proudhon would also have clashed personally in the Constituent Assembly to which both had been elected and they would meet again in a much more extended debate which took place at the end of 1849 in Proudhon's journal la Voix du Peuple (The Voice of the People) over a period of 3 months on the topic of the legitimacy of charging interest and free credit. Their exchanges were published in early 1850 as separate books by both Proudhon and Bastiat - Gratuité du crédit (Free Credit) (1850) (see below, pp. 000). There is some evidence that this article in Almanach Républicain came to the attention of the readers of Proudhon's magazine, some of whom were persuaded by Bastiat's arguments. To counter Bastiat's influence over these workers, the editor F.C. Chevé began a debate with Bastiat in the pages of L a Voix du peuple in October 1849 which Proudhon took over even though he was still in prison for having insulted the President of the Republic in print. The full exchange between the two can be found below, pp. 000.

It should also be noted that in this essay Bastiat uses the thought experiment of the story of Robinson Crusoe on his island to explain the nature of individual economic decision making which is one of Bastiat's significant contributions to economic theory. 1532 His first use of "Crusoe economics" can be found in "Organisation and Liberty" ( JDE , January 1847), which was followed by "Making a Mountain out of a Mole Hill" (ES3 16, in CW3, pp. 343-50), "Something Else" (LE, 21 March 1847) in ES2 14, CW3, pp. 226-34, "Property and Plunder" ( JDD, 24 July 1848) in CW2, pp. 147-84, and then the most detailed use of it in the chapter on "Exchange" in Economic Harmonies (1850). Interestingly, Proudhon also uses Robinson Crusoe extensively in his critique of free market economics in the "9th Letter" on Free Credit (Dec. 1849) (see below). Bastiat's use of "Crusoe economics" was largely ignored for 100 years until it was taken up in the 1950s by Murray Rothbard when he was reworking the foundations of modern Austrian economic theory in his book Man, Economy, and State (1962). 1533

On Bastiat's other writings on credit see the Editor's Introductions to "Capital and Rent" (above, pp. 000) and "Free Credit" (below, pp. 000).

Text

Who does not recall the shiver of terror that ran through an astonished Europe when travelers, returning from far-off lands, brought the following news to their ears: "India has spewed out cholera over the world! It is growing, spreading, advancing and decimating nations in its passage, and our civilization will not stop it." 1534

Could it conceivably be true that civilization in its turn, jealous of barbarism, has given birth to a scourge a thousand times more terrible, a devouring monster or a cancer that attacks the most sacred thing of all, labor , the very sustenance of the life of nations, an implacable tyrant ever bent on widening constantly the abyss of inequality between men, impoverishing the poor to make the rich more wealthy, sowing poverty, exhaustion, hunger, envy, rage, and upheaval in its wake, unceasingly filling convict settlements and prisons, hospices and tombs, a scourge more deadly in its constant and eternal action than cholera and the plague : CAPITAL, to give it at last as we must its proper name! 1535

Quite clearly men are not ready to get on well with one another, for this very entity, Capital, that is painted by some in such odious colors, is held up by others, including myself, as being the sustenance of the poor, the universal agent of equality, the stimulus of progress, and the liberator of the classes that labor and suffer.

Who is wrong and who is right? This is not a question merely of curiosity, for in the end, if capital is a destructive scourge, we ought to side with the serried ranks of those who combat it so arduously. If, on the other hand, it is a benefactor of the human race, this senseless war is strange in that the assailants inflict on themselves all the blows that they aim at it.

What is capital, then? What is its origin? What is its nature? What is its purpose? What are the elements that compose it? And what are its effects?

Some people say: "It is the land , this source of all wealth, which has been taken over by just a few." Others say: "It is money , this vile metal, the object of such filthy greed that has drenched the world in blood from the dawn of mankind."

Let us witness the birth and initial accumulation of capital; in this way, we will be able to form an accurate idea of it.

When Robinson Crusoe, the peace-loving hero so constantly loved by every generation of children, found himself washed ashore by a storm on to a desert island, the most pressing need of our precarious nature forced him to pursue the prey that would save him from death each day. He would have liked to build himself a hut, fence a vegetable patch, mend his clothes, or make himself some weapons, but he realized that, in order to be able to devote time to these tasks, he needed raw materials, tools, and above all, provisions, for our needs are structured in such a way that we cannot work to satisfy some without having accumulated enough to satisfy the others. Even if he lived for an eternity, Crusoe would never have been able to undertake the construction of a hut or the manufacture of a tool without having previously established a stock of game or fish.

This is why he often said to himself: "I am the greatest landowner in the world and the most destitute of men. Land does not constitute capital for me. Even if I had saved a sack of louis [gold coins] from the shipwreck, 1536 I would be no further advanced, since money does not constitute capital for me. My sole and obligatory task is to hunt. The only thing that would enable me to move on to other occupations would be each day to kill a little more game than I need for the day and thus to amass some provisions . While living on these provisions, I would be able to manufacture weapons that would make my hunting more productive, thus enabling me to increase my stock of provisions, freeing my time for more lengthy tasks. I am perfectly aware that the main constituent of capital is provisions and the second, tools .

Materials, tools, and provisions , these constitute the capital of a man on his own; three things without which he is tied to the pursuit of basic subsistence, three things without which there can be no subsequent tasks for him, nor consequently any possible progress, three things that assume that it has been possible for his consumption to be less than his production and that he has been able to build up a reserve and save some of it.

And this is also the true definition of capital for people living in society. The capital of a nation is the sum of its materials, provisions, and tools.

When I speak of materials, I mean those things that are the fruit of work and saving. If this condition is not met, they belong to nobody. In accordance with this condition, they naturally belong to the people who produced them and who, while they might have consumed them, have refrained from doing so.

To do anything at all in this world, you need a certain amount of one or two of these things, or all three. How would we be able to build, construct, plough, weave, spin, forge, read, or study if we have not acquired materials, tools, and in any case a few provisions, through hard work and saving?

When, while he is working, a man consumes the capital he himself has built up, he can be considered as encompassing all the qualities of a producer, consumer, lender, borrower, debtor, creditor, capitalist, or worker, and since all aspects of economic activity are fully realised in a single individual, the mechanism is extremely simple to understand, as the example of Robinson Crusoe demonstrates.

However, if this man uses the material, tools, and provisions produced and saved by someone else, the phenomenon becomes more complicated. He obtains them only as a result of a transaction, and this transaction always requires a reward for the lender. Thus, for example, does the man who borrows for a year the three things without which he could do nothing and would die of hunger, owe anything other than the straightforward and full return of the things he has borrowed? I consider the affirmative to be incontestable, and this has been true for all men from the dawn of time up to Proudhon. Indeed, if Robinson forgoes part of his food today, if he puts aside some of his game in order to devote himself to a more profitable line of work than hunting, and if Friday borrows this game from him (RC), it is clear that he (Friday) will not be able to obtain it (from RC) with a simple offer of mere restitution unless Robinson, as part of their mutual exchange of services, didn't wish to inflict some harm upon himself. The basis for the transaction will be as follows:

Robinson Crusoe will make a loan if he calculates that an additional day spent hunting, plus the agreed upon payment, is worth more to him than other work he was planning to do.

Friday will take out a loan if he calculates that the work that this loan will enable him to do, once the agreed upon payment has been deducted, will be worth more to him than the work which he would have done without this loan.

In this way, it can be stated that the principle of remuneration is inherent in capital. Since it is advantageous to the person who has accumulated it, this person cannot fairly be expected to hand it over without any compensation.

This compensation is given a variety of names, depending on the nature of the object being lent. If it is a house, it is called a rent , if it is a piece of land, land rent , etc.

In complex societies, it is rare for a lender to have exactly the thing a borrower needs. For this reason, the lender converts his capital (materials, tools, and provisions) into cash and lends this money to the borrower, who is then able to procure for himself the type of materials, tools, and provisions he needs. The payment for capital lent in this form is known as interest .

Since the majority of loans require, for convenience, this prior double conversion of capital into money and money into capital, people have ended up by confusing capital with money. This is one of the most disastrous errors in political economy.

Money is just one way of facilitating the passage of things, physical objects , from one hand to another. Therefore simple notes and simple transfers from one account to another are often enough. How much of an illusion, then, are people under when they think they are increasing materials, tools, and provisions in the country by increasing the amount of money (argent) and notes (billets)! 1537

Naturally, we all come into the world with no capital, which is something we are too prone to forget. Some people receive a great deal from their father, others just a little, and yet others none at all.

This latter category would be like Robinson Crusoe on his island if nobody before them and around them had worked and saved .

They are thus compelled to borrow, which as we have seen, means that they work on materials with tools while living on provisions that other people have produced and saved, and by paying a price for this.

This having been said, what interest have they in doing this? Their interest is that the price should be as little as possible, that is to say, that the proportion of the production to be handed over in return for the use of the capital is held within limits that are increasingly narrow. The more restricted this share that the capitalist takes from the worker is, the more the worker will be able to save in his turn and to accumulate capital. 1538

Yes, the worker should know and be convinced that his interest, his dominant and fundamental interest, lies in the abundance of capital around him and in there being a proliferation of materials, tools, and provisions , for these things are also in competition with each other. The more there are of them in the country, the less payment is asked for them from those to whom they are lent. Workers have an interest in being able to put their labor up for auction or leaving the employ of one capitalist for another who is more agreeable to them.

When capital is abundant, earnings rise: that is as inevitable as a tray of a set of scales falling when weight is put into it.

Workers, do not let yourselves be imposed upon. Nothing is finer or more pleasant than fraternity . 1539 It may heal a great many small pains and put balm on a great many wounds, but what it cannot do is raise the general rate of pay. No, it cannot do this, because neither words, sentiments, nor wishes can ensure that a given quantity of tools and materials can yield more output, or that a given quantity of provisions can provide a greater share to each person.

You have been told that capital attracts the majority of profit to itself. This is true when it is scarce, not when it is abundant.

You have been told that capital competes with labor. This is more than an error, it is a ridiculous absurdity. The abundance of tools and materials cannot damage production any more than an abundance of provisions exacerbates need.

Workers compete with each other; work competes with itself.

Capitalists compete with each other; capital competes with itself.

That is the truth. But to say that capital competes with labor is to say that bread competes with hunger or that light obstructs one's view.

And, workers, if it were true that you had only one lifeline, the indefinite increase in capital and the constant accumulation of materials, tools, and provisions , what should you want?

You should want society to be in the most favorable condition possible for this increase and accumulation of capital to occur.

What are these conditions?

The first and foremost of these is security . If people are not certain of enjoying the fruit of their labor, they will neither work nor accumulate anything. Under a regime of uncertainty and fear, old capital will be hidden, spent, or abandoned and new capital will not be created. The mass of provisions will be frittered away and each person's share will decrease, starting with yours. You should therefore demand security from the government and help establish it.

The second is freedom . When people are no longer able to work freely, they work less; the share of saving is less, capital does not increase in proportion to the number of hands, earnings decrease, and poverty decimates you. In these circumstances, charity itself is a useless remedy, if not for a few individuals, at least for the masses, for although charity has huge merits, unlike production, it cannot increase the amount of bread available.

The third is economy . When a nation's entire annual savings are eroded through the folly of its government or the ostentatious living of individual citizens, capital cannot increase.

People of France, do we have to put this into words? Our beloved country shines in the view of other nations because of its eminent qualities, but the three conditions that are essential for the establishment of capital, security, freedom, and economy, are not to be found in our midst. This is the reason, and the sole reason, for our impoverishment.

31. T.290 "When extremes meet" (June 1849)↩

Source

T.290 (1849.06.??) "When extremes meet" (Les Extrêmes se touchent) (June 1849). In Ronce, Appendix VII, pp. 303-6. [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

An edited version of this piece appeared in Hortense Cheuvreux's 1540 collection of Bastiat's letters to her which she published in 1877 1541 and which was published as Letter 139 in CW1, pp. 203-205. Two paragraph-long sections towards the end were cut in the Cheuvreux book which were retained in Ronce's Appendix. They are curious as they reveal something about the taste of what was acceptable to put in print at the time.

The first passage cut is a reflection on why French men want to look fierce by wearing facial hair and frowning in the portraits they have painted of themselves. Concerning fierce looking facial hair one immediately thinks of how President Louis Napoléon chose to cut his moustache and goatee beard and how much Bastiat opposed everything the President stood for. Bastiat's remarks in this passage seem quite innocent, although rather critical of the fashion current in Paris at the time, and the critical comments of an outsider like Bastiat from the provinces (Gascony) might not have been welcome by some:

If you stop while walking along the boulevard at a print shop, take a look at the portraits. Those which have been posed are frowning and pouting. It must be that a kind look and a smile, a benevolent face, are very unpopular in France and that everyone wants to look like an enemy of the human race! It is the widespread nature of this taste which bothers me. It is a sad symptom. It indicates that there are bad thoughts in the hearts of the (French) people, a return to the ideas of barbarism. Shouldn't it be up to the women to fight this idiosyncrasy? 1542

The second passage which was cut is more understandable as it consists of Bastiat's reflections on his taste in women, the only one of its kind in his work. Apparently he preferred women who looked like they were from the Italian Renaissance. It may not have been thought proper to include this in Madame Cheuvreux's collection of his letters as it may appear to be quite suggestive. Since Madame Cheuvreux had died in 1893 Ronce may have felt free to publish the full piece in his book which was published in 1905. The offending passage reads:

I have examined carefully four types of women and my opinion is set.

The Greek type is superior to all the others for her symmetry and perfection. This is physical perfection.

The southern type which is reproduced in the paintings of the virgins by Murillo. These are the ones which … (Editor: the sentence is left unfinished).

The sensual or fleshy type which shows the good effects of health.

Finally, the type painted by Raphael, who aspires to paint purity and feelings.

Of these four types the one which I prefer is the last one, and the one which is the least appealing to me is the one which is the furthest removed from this.

Bastiat got married in 1831 to Marie Clotilde Hiart but never spoke of her in his correspondence and we known nothing about her. She did not appear to have accompanied him to Paris but stayed out of sight in Mugron perhaps. She died in February 1850 and again there is no mention of this fact in his correspondence. It is possible that there might have been some kind of flirtatious relationship between Hortense and Frédéric but this remains speculation.

The bulk of this piece are his musings about travelling in Belgium by the recently introduced technological innovation of train travel and being a tourist seeing the sights. His comments about men's fashion are amusing (he disliked the custom of French men wearing facial hair - he himself was clean shaven). It should be read in conjunction with the two other letters he wrote to Madame Cheuvreux in June 1849 while on this trip. 1543 Among other things he tells us that he crossed the border into Belgium without a passport and wondered whether or not he would be treated like the exiled Proudhon, with whom he would have a long discussion later in 1849 on Free Credit (see below, pp. 000); that he first crossed a national frontier when he was 18 when he went to Spain on horseback and encountered many armed men who were engaged in the civil war which was ranging there; he was impressed by the prosperity he could see in Belgium which was rapidly industrialising in the 1840s and wondered about the "form of poetry" which would emerge from this new industrial world and how it would compare to the older "biblical, warlike, or feudal" forms of poetry; and his fretting about the forthcoming Peace Conference which would be held in Paris in July and at which he would give a major speech (see below, pp. 000).

Concerning the latter, he worried that the large contingent of peace advocates from England and America would see how weak the peace movement was in France:

What a disappointment they will have when they see that the cause of peace in France is represented by Guillaumin, Garnier, and Bastiat. In England, it arouses entire populations, men and women, priests and the laity; does my country always have to be left behind? 1544

He was also conscious of his responsibility to look after Richard Cobden ("one of the most remarkable men of our time") while he was in Paris. Given the hostility to the causes of free trade and peace which existed in France, Cobden had only agreed to visit Paris on condition that Bastiat be there and participate. Given the state of his health and his rapidly failing voice Bastiat was understandably anxious.

Text

"When extremes meet." This is what one experiences (when travelling) on a train. The extreme multiplicity of impressions (one experiences) wipe each other out. One sees too many things in order to see some (particular) thing.

What a strange way to travel! One doesn't look (out) and one doesn't speak. The eye and the ear go to sleep. One is wrapped up with one's own thoughts in solitude. The present which should be everything is nothing. Yet at the same time, with what tenderness the heart returns to the past! With what eagerness does it throw itself towards the future. "A week ago," "in a week's time." Here are some well chosen words to meditate upon when for the first time the towns of Vilvorde 1545 and Malines 1546 and the province of Brabant flee past under a gaze which is not looking. 1547

This morning at 8 o'clock I was in Brussels; this evening at 5 o'clock I was again in Brussels. In the interval I had visited Anvers (Antwerp), its churches, its museum, its port, and its fortifications. Is that then what it means to travel?

What I call "travelling" is to get inside the society which one is visiting, to get to know the state of its mind, its tastes, customs, activities, pleasures, the relations between its classes, its moral, intellectual, and artistic level which these classes have reached, (or) what one might expect of the advancement of (its people). I would question its statesmen, businessmen, farmers, workers, its children and especially the women, since it is the women who get the coming generation ready and direct its moral development. Instead of (doing) that I look at a hundred paintings, fifty church confessionals, twenty bell towers, and I don't know how many statues made of stone, marble, and wood. And one tells me "that is Belgium."

In truth, there is one (important) resource for the traveller, namely the hotel dining room. Today it brings together around the table some sixty diners … not one of whom is Belgian. I notice that there are five Frenchmen and five long beards belonging to Frenchmen, or rather there are five Frenchmen who belong to five beards, since one shouldn't confuse the principal with the incidental. Immediately, I ask myself this question: why do the Belgians, the English, the Dutch, and the Germans shave and why don't the French? In every country men like to let one believe that they possess the qualities which are most highly regarded. If fashion runs to blond wigs, I say to myself that these people are effeminate. If in personal portraits I notice an exaggerated forehead I think to myself that these people have taken up a cult which worships intelligence. When savages tattoo and disfigure themselves to make them look frightening I come to the conclusion that they put brute force above everything else.

This is why today I am feeling such terrible shame at seeing the efforts of my compatriots to give themselves a fierce look. Why all these beards and moustaches? (To invoke) fear (in others)! Is that the contribution which my country is making to civilisation?

Unfortunately it isn't only my fellow travellers who contribute to this ridiculous peculiarity. 1548 If you stop while walking along the boulevard at a print shop, take a look at the portraits. Those which have been posed are frowning and pouting. It must be that a kind look and a smile, a benevolent face, are very unpopular in France and that everyone wants to look like an enemy of the human race! It is the widespread nature of this taste which bothers me. It is a sad symptom. It indicates that there are bad thoughts in the hearts of the (French) people, a return to the ideas of barbarism. Shouldn't it be up to the women to fight this idiosyncrasy?

Is that all I have to report about Anvers? It was well worth the trouble of travelling all those leagues without end or number.

I saw some Rubens 1549 in their own country. You quite rightly think that I looked for living examples of the models with the ample curves which the master of the Flemish School so kindly reproduced for us. I did not find them and truly I believe than the Brabant race are inferior to the Norman race. I was told to go to Brugge. I would go to Amsterdam if that was my preferred type. This red flesh which seems to me to be aroused by their own fullness is not my ideal. Sentiment and grace, now there is a woman, or at least a woman worthy of a paintbrush. 1550 I have examined carefully four types of women and my opinion is set.

The Greek type is superior to all the others for her symmetry and perfection. This is physical perfection.

The southern type which is reproduced in the paintings of the virgins by Murillo. 1551 These are the ones which … 1552

The sensual or fleshy type which shows the good effects of health.

Finally, the type painted by Raphael, 1553 who aspires to paint purity and feelings.

Of these four types the one which I prefer is the last one, and the one which is the least appealing to me is the one which is the furthest removed from this.

Rubens is perhaps an inimitable painter from the point of view of execution. He interprets admirably what he he wants to interpret. But what he interprets is not a woman in her ideal form.

32. T.240 and T. 283 Speech on "Disarmament, Taxes, and the Influence of Political Economy on the Peace Movement." (22 Aug. 1849)↩

Source

T.240 (English) and T.283 (French) (1849.08.22) A speech on "Disarmament, Taxes, and the Influence of Political Economy on the Peace Movement." A speech at the Friends of Peace Conference in Paris, 22 Aug., 1849. A short version (1 1/2 pages, 1,300 words) is in French in Joseph Garnier, Congrès des amis de la paix universelle réuni à Paris en 1849 , pp. 25-26; a longer longer version in English (3 1/2 pages, 2,600 words) in Report of the Proceedings of the Second General Peace Congress, held in Paris, on the 22nd, 23rd and 24th of August, 1849 (translator unknown), pp. 49-52 . It is untitled in both versions so we have given it one. [DMH] [CW3] [CW4]

Joseph Garnier, Congrès des amis de la paix universelle réuni à Paris en 1849 : compte-rendu, séances des 22, 23, 24 Aout; - Résolutions adoptées; discours de Mm. Victor Hugo, Visschers, Rév. John Burnett; Rév. Asa Mahan, de l'Ohio; Henri Vincent, de Londres; Ath. Coquerel; Suringar, d'Amsterdam; Francisque Bouvet, Émile de Girardin; Ewart, membre du Parlement; Frédéric Bastiat; Richard Cobden, Elihu Burritt, Deguerry; Amasa Walker, de Massachussets; Ch. Hindley, membre du Parlement, etc., etc.; Compte-rendu d'une visite au Président de la République, de trois meetings en Angleterre; statistique des membres du congrès, etc.; précédé d'une Note historique sur le mouvement en faveur de la paix, par M. Joseph Garnier . (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850). This is a shorter version of Bastiat's speech than in the English version, pp. 25-26.

Report of the Proceedings of the Second General Peace Congress, held in Paris, on the 22nd, 23rd and 24th of August, 1849. Compiled from Authentic Documents, under the Superintendence of the Peace Congress Committee. (London: Charles Gilpin, 5, Bishopsgate Street Without, 1849). This is a longer version of Bastiat's speech than in the French version, pp. 49-52.

Editor's Introduction

For details about the International Friends of Peace Congresses see the Editor's Introduction to "Comments at a Meeting of the Political Economy Society on the Peace Congress and State support for an Experimental Socialist Community" (10 May 1849) above, pp. 000. See also the glossary entry on "Peace Congress."

The economist Joseph Garnier was on the organising committee for the conference and was its Secretary and so edited the French language version of the Conference Proceedings. There was another English language version of the Proceedings which for some reason had a much longer version of Bastiat's speech, so it is that version which we include below. It was done by an unnamed translator. In his introduction Garnier tells us there were about 600 official delegates from North America, England, France, Belgium and other European countries. The largest delegation came from England with over 300 delegates, followed by France with 230. 1554 The meeting was held in Saint-Cécile Hall which had room for the over 2,000 other guests who attended.

The conference was opened by the President of the Congress, the French poet and dramatist Victor Hugo who gave an impassioned speech denouncing war and its destructiveness, as well as condemning the continued existence of an armed peace which had existed since the fall of Napoléon. One section which caught the ear of Bastiat was this one where Hugo talked about the opportunity costs of war and military spending:

You see, gentlemen, in what a state of blindness war has placed nations and rulers. If the 128,000,000 francs given for the last thirty-two years by Europe to the war which was not waged had been given to the peace which existed, we positively declare that nothing of what is now passing in Europe would have occurred. The continent in place of being a battlefield would have become an universal workshop, and in place of this sad and terrible spectacle of Piedmont prostrated, of the Eternal City given up to the miserable oscillations of human policy, of Venice and noble Hungary struggling heroically, France uneasy, impoverished, and gloomy; misery, mourning, civil war, gloom in the future—in place, I say, of so sad a spectacle, we should have before our eyes, hope, joy, benevolence, the efforts of all towards the common good, and we should everywhere behold the majestic ray of universal concord issue forth from civilization. And this fact is worthy of meditation—that revolutions have been owing to those very precautions against war. All has been done—all this expenditure has been incurred, against an imaginary danger. Misery, which was the only real danger, has by these very means been augmented. We have been fortifying ourselves against a chimerical peril; our eyes have been turned to all sides except to the one where the black spot was visible. We have been looking out for wars when there were none, and we have not seen the revolutions that were coming on. 1555

Bastiat would take up this idea of war being a cause of revolution in his speech which he delivered on the second day. He was immediately followed by Richard Cobden, so in a sense Bastiat was the warm up act for the main attraction. Cobden had made it clear to the organisers of the Congress that he would not attend unless Bastiat was also present. Cobden felt uneasy in France given the general hostility towards the English free trade movement and its numerous anti-war supporters, which some cynical French people thought was a stalking horse for British imperialism. Hence his felt need for some moral support from the leader of the French trade movement. He also needed help with his French as he planned to give the speech in that language and Bastiat proved to be a willing coach and tutor for him. As Cobden wrote in his diary:

My first speech, although there is really little in it, produced a famous effect in the audience and has been almost universally lauded in the papers. It ought to have been well received, for it cost me a good deal of time with the aid of Bastiat to write and prepare to read it . My good friend Bastiat has been two mornings with me in my room, translating and teaching, before eight o'clock. 1556

The motion being discussed that day was the second Resolution of the Congress:

It is of the highest importance to call the immediate attention of governments to the necessity of a general and simultaneous disarmament, not only as a means of reducing the vast expenditure devoted to the support of standing armies and navies, but also of removing a permanent cause of disquietude and irritation from among the nations. 1557

Given the large number of delegates who were religious, such as the English and American Quakers and other anti-war protestants, it was Bastiat's task to give the economic side to the anti-war position which had been mostly moral and religious up until that point. In this he had the support of Hugo and Cobden who also stressed economic as well as moral reasons to oppose war and military spending. In his speech Bastiat made a link between external and internal peace, with the former being guaranteed by general and mutual disarmament of the major powers, and the latter made possible by removing what he thought was the major cause of internal conflict and revolution, namely the poverty brought about by high taxation. The connecting threads between the two was that high military spending required high taxes, which were unfairly borne by the poor who were both impoverished by indirect taxes and resentful towards the unequal and unfair manner in which they were levied, and this in turn inclined the poor to rise up in revolt or open revolution as many parts of Europe had witnessed in 1848 and 1849. As he concisely put it:

Large armaments necessarily entail heavy taxes : heavy taxes force governments to have recourse to indirect taxation. Indirect taxation cannot possibly be proportionate, and the want of proportion in taxation is a crying injustice inflicted upon the poor to the advantage of the rich. This question, then, alone remains to be considered : Are not injustice and misery, combined together, an always imminent cause of revolutions? (see below)

Bastiat's solution to this followed naturally from what he said several times before in writings and speeches on tax matters 1558 and which he would repeat in a major speech in the Chamber in December 1849 on reducing the tax on alcohol. 1559 The tax burden on the poor had to be drastically reduced and made more equal. Bastiat is very hostile towards indirect taxes which he describes as a kind of deliberate trickery or deception on the part of governments to hide the true burden of taxation which the poor have to bear and these had to be cut immediately. In a letter to Cobden written a year later when Cobden was about to go to the next Peace Congress in Frankfurt, which Bastiat could not attend because of his poor health, he urged Cobden to slay "this monster of war":

Try to deal a mighty blow to this monster of war, an ogre that is almost as voracious when digesting as it is when eating, for I truly believe that arms cause almost as much harm to nations as war itself. What is more, they hinder good. For my part, I constantly return to what seems to me to be as clear as daylight: as long as disarmament prevents France from restructuring her finances, reforming her taxes, and satisfying the just hopes of the workers, she will continue to be a nation in convulsion . . . and God alone knows what the consequences will be. 1560

This could be achieved he thought by cutting military spending which would then make it possible to abolish most if not all indirect taxes, and to replace these with a low and equal single tax (an income tax) on everybody. Government would not take these measure, he thought, unless they could be convinced of the possibility of mutual and "simultaneous disarmament" of all the powers in Europe. It was to be the task of the Congress delegates to go back to their respective countries and lobby their governments to do this, using a combination of moral, political, as well as economic arguments.

Bastiat must have known what a difficult if not impossible task this would prove to be, especially given the rise to power of another Napoléon as President of France in December 1848. We can see in several letters he wrote to Cobden in which he practically begs him to lobby Parliament harder to begin cutting the size of its military which would encourage France to do the same. 1561 There is a hint in his correspondence 1562 that following the Congress Bastiat was sent on an unofficial and thus secret mission by a pro-peace faction within the French government in October and November to sound out Cobden and some his allies in Parliament about the possibility of beginning some kind of disarmament talks to get the ball rolling. It is possible that Alexis de Tocqueville might have sent Bastiat on this mission to London. He was the Minister for Foreign Affairs in Odilon Barrot's second government (2 June to 31 October 1849) and had hosted a "grand soirée" at the Ministry building during the Peace Congress and spoke to many of the "leading orators of the Congress." 1563 We know the trip took place but nothing came of it. The fact that Odilon Barrot's government, along with Tocqueville, was dismissed by Louis Napoléon who replaced it with one formed by Alphonse Henri d'Hautpoul with many of his close friends and allies, meant that any surreptitious pro-peace activity by members of the Chamber would immediately have come to an end.

Bastiat concludes his speech by reiterating the important set of pro-peace arguments that the economists could provide in order to bolster the traditional moral and religious case agains war and military spending:

Amidst this illustrious galaxy (Cobden the journalist, and the clergymen), permit me to claim a humble place for my brethren, the political economists ; for, gentlemen, I sincerely believe that no science will bring a more valorous contingent to serve under the standard of peace than political economy. Religion and morality do not endeavour to discover whether the interests of men are antagonistic or harmonious. They say to them : Live in peace, no matter whether it be profitable or hurtful to you, for it is your duty to do so. Political economy steps in and adds : Live in peace, for the interests of men are harmonious, and the apparent antagonism which leads them to take up arms is only a gross error. Doubtless, it would be a noble sight to behold men realize peace at the expense of their material interests ; but for those who know the weakness of human nature, it is consoling to think that duty and interest are not here two hostile forces … 1564

There are two further things to note. We can also see here Bastiat's strong opposition to conscription which he described as a kind of "military taxation" whereby seven years out of young man's working life was taken away from him unless he was wealthy enough to buy a substitute, the going rate for which was about 2,000 francs.

The English language version of Bastiat's speech (2,600 words) is twice the length of its French language version (only 1,300 words) for some unknown reason. The section cut out is indicated below and it contains some of his most radical arguments.

Text:

M. Frederic Bastiat, member of the French National Assembly, spoke as follows: 1565

Gentlemen, our excellent and learned colleague, M. Coquerel, 1566 spoke to us a little while since, of a cruel malady with which French society is afflicted, namely, scepticism. 1567 This malady is the fruit of our long dissensions, of our revolutions which have failed to bring about the desired end, of our attempts without results, and of that torrent of visionary projects which has recently overflowed our policy. This strange evil will, I hope, be only temporary: at all events, I know of no more efficacious remedy for it, than the extraordinary spectacle which I have now before my eyes, for if I consider the number and the importance of the men who now do me the honour of listening to me, if I consider that many of them do not act in their individual capacity, but in the name of large constituencies, who have delegated them to this Congress, I have no hesitation in saying that the cause of peace unites to-day in this assembly, more religious, intellectual, and moral force, more positive power, than could be brought together for any other imaginable cause, in any other part of the world. Yes, this is a grand and magnificent spectacle, and I do not think that the sun has often shone on one equal to it in interest and importance. Here are men who have traversed the wide Atlantic: others have left vast undertakings in England, and others have come from the disturbed land of Germany, or from the peaceful soil of Belgium or of Holland. Paris is the place of their rendezvous. And what have they come to do? Are they drawn hither by cupidity, by vanity, or by curiosity, those three motives to which are customarily attributed all the actions of the sons of Adam? No; they come, led on by the generous hope of being able to do some good to humanity, without having lost sight of the difficulties of their task, and knowing well that they are working less for themselves, than for the benefit of future generations. Thrice welcome then, ye men of faith, to the land of France. Faith is as contagious as scepticism. France will not fail you. She also will yield her tribute to your generous enterprise. 1568

At the present stage of the discussion, I shall only trespass on your time to make a few observations on the subject of disarmament. They have been suggested to me by a passage in the speech of our eloquent President, who said yesterday, that the cause of external peace was also that of internal order. He very reasonably based this assertion on the fact that a powerful military state is forced to exact heavy taxes, 1569 which engender misery, which in its turn engenders the spirit of turbulence and of revolution. I also wish to speak on the subject of taxes, and I shall consider them with regard to their distribution. That the maintenance of large military and naval forces requires heavy taxes, is a self-evident fact. But I make this additional remark: these heavy taxes, notwithstanding the best intentions on the part of the legislator, are necessarily most unfairly distributed ; whence it follows that great armaments present two causes of revolution—misery in the first place, and secondly, the deep feeling that this misery is the result of injustice. The first species of military taxation that I meet with is, that which is called, according to circumstances, conscription or recruitment. 1570 The young man who belongs to a wealthy family, escapes by the payment of two or three thousand francs; the son of an artizan or a labourer, is forced to throw away the seven best years of his life. Can we imagine a more dreadful inequality ? Do we not know that it caused the people to revolt even under the empire, and do we imagine that it can long survive the revolution of February ?

With regard to taxes, there is one principle universally admitted in France, namely, that they ought to be proportional to the resources and capabilities of the citizens. This principle was not only proclaimed by our last constitution, but will be found in the charter of 1830, as well as in that of 1814. Now, after having given my almost undivided attention to these matters, 1571 I affirm that in order that a tax may be proportional, it must be very moderate, and if the state is under the necessity of taking a very large part of the revenues of its citizens, it can only be done by means of an indirect contribution, which is utterly at variance with proportionality, that is to say, with justice. And this is a grave matter, gentlemen. The correctness of my statement may be doubted, but if it be correct, we cannot shut our eyes to the consequences which it entails, without being guilty of the greatest folly. I only know of one country in the world where all the public expenses, with very slight exceptions, are covered by a direct and proportional taxation. I refer to the State of Massachusetts. 1572 But there also, precisely, because the taxation is direct, and every body knows what he has to pay, the public expenditure is as limited as possible. The citizens prefer acting by themselves in a multitude of cases, in which elsewhere the intervention of the state would be required. If the government of France would be contented with asking of us five, six, or even ten per cent of our income, we should consider the tax a direct and proportional one. 1573 In such a case, the tax might be levied according to the declaration of the tax-payers, care being taken that these declarations were correct, although, even if some of them were false, no very serious consequences would ensue. But suppose that the treasury had need of 1,500 or 1,800 millions of money. 1574 Does it come directly to us and ask us for a quarter, a third, or a half of our incomes? No: that would be impracticable; and consequently, to arrive at the desired end, it has recourse to a trick, and gets our money from us without our perceiving it, by subjecting us to an indirect tax laid on food. And this is why the Minister of Finance, when he proposed to renew the tax on drinks, 1575 said that this tax had one great recommendation, that it was so entirely mixed up with the price of the article, that the tax-payer, as it were, paid without knowing it. 1576 This certainly is a recommendation of taxes on articles of consumption: but they have this bad characteristic, they are unequal and unjust, and are levied just in inverse proportion to the capabilities of the tax-payer. For, whoever has studied these matters, even very superficially, knows well that these taxes are productive and valuable only when laid upon articles of universal consumption, such as salt, wine, tobacco, sugar and such like ; and when we speak of universal consumption, we necessarily speak of those things on which the labouring classes spend the whole of their small incomes. From this it follows, that these classes do not make a single purchase which is not increased to a great extent by taxation, while such is not the case with the rich.

Gentlemen, I venture to call your close attention to these facts. Large armaments necessarily entail heavy taxes : heavy taxes force governments to have recourse to indirect taxation. Indirect taxation cannot possibly be proportionate, and the want of proportion in taxation is a crying injustice inflicted upon the poor to the advantage of the rich. This question, then, alone remains to be considered : Are not injustice and misery, combined together, an always imminent cause of revolutions? Gentlemen, it is no use to be willfully blind. At this moment, in France, the need which is most imperious and most universally felt, is doubtless that of order, and of security. Rich and poor, labourers and proprietors, all are disposed to make great sacrifices to secure such precious benefits, even to abandon their political affections and convictions, and, as we have seen, their liberty. But, in fine, can we reasonably hope, by the aid of this sentiment, to perpetuate, to systematize, injustice in this country? Is it not certain that injustice will, sooner or later, engender disaffection? disaffection all the more dangerous because it is legitimate, because its complaints are well-founded, because it has reason on its side, because it is supported by all men of upright minds and generous hearts, and, at the same time, is cleverly managed by persons whose intentions are less pure, and who seek to make it an instrument for the execution of their ambitious designs. We talk about reconciling the peoples. Ah! let us pursue this object with all the more ardour, because at the same time we seek to reconcile the classes of society. In France because, in consequence of our ancient electoral laws, 1577 the wealthy class had the management of public business, the people think that the inequality of the taxes is the fruit of a systematic cupidity. On the contrary, it is the necessary consequence of their exaggeration. 1578 I am convinced that if the wealthy class could, by a single blow, assess the taxes in a more equitable manner, they would do so instantly. And in doing so, they would be actuated more by motives of justice than by motives of prudence. They do not do it, because they cannot, and if those who complain were the governors of the country, they would not be able to do it any more than those now in power ; for I repeat, the very nature of things has placed a radical incompatibility between the exaggeration and the equal distribution of taxes. There is, then, only one means of diverting from this country the calamities which menace it, and that is, to equalize taxation ; to equalize it, we must reduce it; to reduce it, we must diminish our military force. 1579 For this reason, amongst others, I support with all my heart the resolution in favour of a simultaneous disarmament. 1580

I have just uttered the word "disarmament." This subject occupies the thoughts and the wishes of all ; and nevertheless, by one of those inexplicable contradictions of the human heart, there are some persons, both in France and England, who, I am sure, would be sorry to see it carried into effect. What will become, they will say, of our preponderance? Shall we allow the influence which, as a great and powerful nation, we possess, to depart from us? Oh, fatal illusion! Oh, strange misconception of the meaning of a word! What! can great nations exert an influence only by means of cannon and bayonets ? Does the influence of England consist not in her industry, her commerce, her wealth, and the exercise of her free and ancient institutions ? Does it not consist, above all, in those gigantic efforts, which we have seen made there, with so much perseverance and sagacity, for obtaining the triumph of some great principle, such as the liberty of the press, the extension of the electoral franchise, Catholic emancipation, the abolition of slavery, and free-trade. 1581 And as I have alluded to this last and glorious triumph of public opinion in England, as we have amongst us many valiant champions of commercial liberty, who, adopting the motto of Caesar, "Nil actum reputans, dum quid superesset agendum," 1582 have no sooner gained one great victory than they hasten to another still greater, let me be permitted to say for how immense a moral influence England is indebted to them, less on account of the object, all glorious as it was, which they attained, than on account of the means which they employed for obtaining it, and which they thus made known to all nations. Yes! from this school the peoples may learn to ally moral force with reason ; there we ought to study the strategy of those pacific agitations which possess the double advantage of rendering every dangerous innovation impossible, and every useful reform irresistible.

By such examples as these, I venture to say, Great Britain will exercise that species of influence which brings no disasters, no hatreds, no reprisals in its train, but, on the contrary, awakens no feelings but those of admiration and of gratitude. And with regard to my own country, I am proud to say, it possesses other and purer sources of influence than that of arms. But even this last might be contested, if the question were pressed, and influence measured by results. But that which cannot be taken away from us, nor be contested for a moment, is the universality of our language, the incomparable brilliancy of our literature, the genius of our poets, of our philosophers, of our historians, of our novelists, and even of our feuilletonistes, and, last though not least, the devotedness of our patriots. France owes her true influence to that almost unbroken chain of great men which, beginning with Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal, and passing on by Bossuet, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau, has not, thanks to heaven, come to an end in the tomb of Chateaubriand. 1583 Ah! let my country fear nothing for her influence, so long as her soil is not unable to produce that noble fruit which is called Genius, and which is ever to be seen on the side of liberty and democracy. And, at this moment, my brethren, you who were born in other lands, and who speak another language, do you not behold all the illustrious men of my country uniting with you to secure the triumph of universal peace? Are we not presided over by that great and noble poet, 1584 whose glory and privilege it has been to introduce a whole generation into the path of a renovated literature? Do we not deplore the absence of that other poet-orator, 1585 of powerful intellect and noble heart, who, I am sure, will as much regret his inability to raise his voice amongst us, as you will regret not to have heard it? Have we not borrowed from the songs of our national bard 1586 the touching device:

People (of the world), form a Holy Alliance And take each other by the hand. 1587

Do we not number in our ranks that indefatigable and courageous journalist, 1588 who did not wait for your arrival to place at the service of absolute non-intervention the immense publicity, and the immense influence which he has at his command ? And have we not amongst us, as fellow-labourers, ministers of nearly all Christian religions ? Amidst this illustrious galaxy, permit me to claim a humble place for my brethren, the political economists ; for, gentlemen, I sincerely believe that no science will bring a more valorous contingent to serve under the standard of peace than political economy. Religion and morality do not endeavour to discover whether the interests of men are antagonistic or harmonious. They say to them : Live in peace, no matter whether it be profitable or hurtful to you, for it is your duty to do so. Political economy steps in and adds : Live in peace, for the interests of men are harmonious, and the apparent antagonism which leads them to take up arms is only a gross error. 1589 Doubtless, it would be a noble sight to behold men realize peace at the expense of their material interests ; but for those who know the weakness of human nature, it is consoling to think that duty and interest are not here two hostile forces, and the heart rests with confidence upon this maxim: "Seek first after righteousness, and all things shall be added unto you." 1590

[The President of the Congress: The floor is handed over to M. Richard Cobden. The whole Assembly stands and for a considerable period makes the Hall reverberate with bravos and cheers.] 1591

33. T.312 "Speaks in a Discussion in the Assembly on changing the Law on the Appropriation of Private Property for Public Use" (6 Oct. 1849)↩

Source

T.312 [1849.10.06] "Speaks in a Discussion on changing the law on the appropriation of private property for public use." Short speech to the National Legislative Assembly, 6 Oct. 1849, CRANL, vol. 2, p. 438. Not in OC. CW4

Editor's Introduction

This is the 11th of eight speeches and seven other shorter contributions Bastiat gave in the Chamber between May 1848 and February 1850. See the Editor's Introduction above, pp. 000 for more details.

This is a very technical discussion of certain procedural matters concerning how Committees of the Assembly present bills for discussion before the Chamber. Bastiat had personal experience of this as Vice-President of the Finance Committee which had 60 members. It was one of 16 such committees established to discuss issues such as labour, foreign affairs, and so on.

The topic under discussion was an amendment put forward by the socialist Martin Nadaud 1592 to amend a 1841 law 1593 about the confiscation of property by the state for public works. This law had been enacted when large tracts of land around Paris were being confiscated by the state to build the military wall around Paris and the large circle of 16 immense forts which were known as "the fortifications of Paris" or "Thiers' Wall." This project took 4 years to complete (1841-44) and cost 120 million francs and used army conscripts as labour. 1594 The project was vigorously opposed by the economist Michel Chevalier 1595 and the mathematician François Arago. 1596 Nadaud wanted to amend the law so that whenever part of a building or piece of land was expropriated by the city of Paris it also would have the right to seize all of the property, not just part of it, so long as compensation was paid to the owner. The Assembly did not vote in favour of the amendment.

This issue of compulsory acquisition of private property divided the members of the Political Economy Society with the more radical wing represented by Gustave de Molinari who opposed the idea completely in his book Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare (Sept. 1849), 1597 and the majority which were of the view that the state had the right to do this but only on a limited scale. They rejected plans to expand the power of the state to do this as put forward by the socialist Deputy Nadaud here. Molinari's book and the issue of compulsory state acquisition of property was discussed a few days later at the next meeting of the Political Economy Society held on 10 October. 1598

Text

M. F. Bastiat: I ask the Assembly to take note of the path down which it is going. The proposal is rejected not because it is completely wrong, but because it is not as perfect as it could be. So if all proposals have to be approved by the Committee, and if the Assembly were to reject proposals simply because they were not approved by the Committee on the first pass, because they were not as perfect as one would like, then this is to do away with the right of initiating legislation. (There are gasps by some Members)

I do not wish to harm anybody, Messieurs; but I rely upon the argument which has been put forward to reject M. Nadaud's proposal, one which I cannot assess and on which I have no opinion. I can only speak of the reasons put forward by the Committee. They say: The proposal can be useful in many circumstances but it has not yet reached its level of perfection, hence we will reject it.

We know from experience that proposals do not pass scrutiny (in Committee) in the same form as they were made by their authors. I do not think that the aim of this institution of the parliamentary legislative committee is exactly to examine proposals and only pass on to the Assembly those it finds to be good; I think that it is sufficient that the Committee says that a proposal might provide some benefit if it were taken into consideration (by the Assembly).

34. T.277 "Comments at a Meeting of the Political Economy Society on the Limits to the Functions of the State (Part 1) and Molinari's Book" (10 Oct. 1849)↩

Source

T.277 (1849.10.10) Bastiat's comments on the limits to the functions of the state (part 1) and Molinari's book at a Meeting of the PES (Séance de 10 oct. 1849). In "Chronique," JDE, T. 24, no. 103, Oct. 1849, pp. 315-16; also ASEP (1889), pp. 82-86. Not in OC. [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

This is the sixth record of eleven which we have of Bastiat attending one of the regular monthly meetings of the Political Economy Society. See the Editor's Introduction to the first one, above pp. 000, for more details.

This is the first of three discussions at meetings of the Society on the topic of the propers limits to the power of the state and it was followed by similar discussions in January and February 1850 (see below, pp. 000). It was stimulated by the appearance of Gustave de Molinari's book Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare, Entretiens sur les lois économiques et défense de la propriété (Evenings on Saint Lazarus Street: Discussions on Economic Laws and the Defence of Property) 1599 in which there is a discussion between a Socialist, a Conservative, and an Economist every night for 12 nights. Over the course of these evenings Molinari presents his radical free market ideas which he based firmly on the principle of the natural right to own one's self and the things one created, and the non-use of coercion by all groups, in particular the government. Every evening he argued that monopolies of all kinds, whether government monopolies in the provision if in so-called public goods, or private monopolies granted to favoured groups by the state, could be better and more cheaply provided by private firms operating in a competitive free market. The most controversial evenings for the other members of the Society were the Third Evening, when he rejected completely the principle of the compulsory expropriation of property by the state for reasons of public utility, and the Eleventh Evening, when he advocated the private and competitive provision of security (both police and national defence) by voluntary associations such as insurance companies. He had first put forward the latter idea in an article in the February issue of the JDE but it had been ignored by his colleagues until this meeting. 1600

Bastiat rejected the viability of Molinari's proposal and like Charles Coquelin thought that "the functions of the State ought to be confined to guaranteeing justice and security; but, since this guarantee only exists through force, and that force can only be the attribute of a supreme power, he does not understand (how) society (would function) with a similar power assigned to groups which were equal to each other, and which would not have a superior point of reference."

Text

[The meeting began with a discussion of the progress which had been made in the teaching of political economy, before turning to the topic of the functions of the state.]

After these discussions M. (Horace) Say who presided at the meeting, proposed to bring the conversation around to a very difficult subject (one which had already been abandoned in a previous meeting because of a digression on the topic of state assistance (to the poor)), namely on the question of knowing where the limits were between the functions of the state and individual activity; if these limits were well defined, and if there was a way to make them more precise. Unfortunately, as M. Say said, this subject was suggested to him by reading the book just published by M. Molinari ( Evenings on Saint Lazarus Street , dialogs on several principles of social economy) 1601 and it wouldn't take very much more for the main question to once again be treated very timidly and for the discussion to get sidetracked onto the other topics treated by Molinari such as the principle of (compulsory) expropriation of property (by the state) for reasons of public utility, which he had fought against in a very absolute manner. 1602 Nevertheless, the conversation was very lively and instructive at the same time. The following gentlemen spoke in turn (on the topic): Messieurs (Charles) Coquelin, Bastiat, (Félix Esquirou) de Parieu, (Louis) Wolowski, (Charles) Dunoyer, (Pierre) Sainte-Beuve (Representative of l'Oise, who was attending for the first time, as was M. (Salomon) Lopès-Dubec, 1603 Representative of la Gironde), (Denis Louis) Rodet, and (Claude-Marie) Raudot (Representative of Saône-et-Loire).

M. Coquelin 1604 took as his starting point M. Molinari's opinion that in the future competition will be established between insurance companies which will be capable of guaranteeing security for the citizens who would be their clients. He noted that M. Molinari had not taken care (to ensure that), without a supreme authority, justice had (a legal) sanction, and that competition, which was the sole remedy against fraud and violence, and which alone was capable of making the nature of things triumph in the mutual relations between (human beings), could not exist without this supreme authority, without the State. Beneath the State, competition is possible and productive; above the State, it is impossible to put (competition) into practice and even to conceive of it. 1605 Bastiat spoke in the same vein as M. Coquelin. He believes that the functions of the State ought to be confined to guaranteeing justice and security; but, since this guarantee only exists through force, and that force can only be the attribute of a supreme power, he does not understand (how) society (would function) with a similar power assigned to groups which were equal to each other, and which would not have a superior point of reference. M. Bastiat then wondered if this idea, that the State ought to undertake no other function than to guarantee security, when expressed in such a very well-defined, clear, and obvious manner, might become useful and effective propaganda given the presence of socialist ideas which are expressed everywhere, even in the minds of those who would like to fight it.

M. de Parieu, 1606 following Molinari in his discussion of a very distant ideal (society), thought that the question which was raised by the latter concerned the struggle between liberty and nationalism. 1607 Now, it was possible that the two principles could be reconciled quite naturally. Switzerland already offered the example of populations which let go of old cantons in order to form independent States. They decentralised (power) in a certain way but they remained united by the tie of nationality. M. Rodet 1608 similarly cited analogous examples from the history of the American Union.

M. Wolowski 1609 expressed the opinion that civilisation consists of the coexistence of the two principles marching in parallel: the principle of liberty of the individual and the principle of the social state, which ought not be misunderstood and which is endowed with its own life. The Honourable Representative did not think that the future lay with the breaking up of nations, on the contrary he believed in their enlargement by means of successive annexations (of territory).

M. Dunoyer, 1610 like M. Coquelin and M. Bastiat, thinks that M. de Molinari let himself be mislead by illusions of logic, and that competition between companies exercising government-like functions was utopian, because it would lead to violent struggles. Now these struggles would only come to an end with (the use of) force, and it is more prudent to leave force where civilisation had put it, in (the hands of) the State. Furthermore, M. Dunoyer believes that in fact competition (had already) entered into government by the role played by representative institutions. For example, in France all the parties are engaged in a real competition, and each of them offers its services to the public who really make a choice every time they vote in elections. M. Dunoyer also wanted to say that if M. de Molinari had been too absolute in forbidding any kind of expropriation (of property) for reasons of public utility, (perhaps it was because) some others in recent times had been too ready to violate property (rights); he cited the actions of the government before February 1848, as well as the theories espoused within the Constituent Assembly itself, with the support it must be said of the majority. M. Saint-Beuve 1611 and M. Bastiat did not accept this accusation directed against the majority of the Assembly to which they belonged. The fact remains that if indeed the Constituent Assembly made any decisions in the sense mentioned by M. Dunoyer there was always grounds to believe that it wasn't the perfectly sound judgement of the majority, not one based upon economic reason, but one taken by the spirit of political reaction against the extreme left, dominated by socialism, that caused them to act in this way.

M. Raudot, 1612 who spoke last, shared M. Wolowski's opinion about the probability which favoured the formation of larger and larger States in the future; but he thought that this concentration (of political power) would lead people to the greatest tyranny and greatest poverty (imaginable), if the State continued to want to absorb everything and to bring the municipalities under a tutelage which would anger the communes and give rise to socialism, the dangers of which we were beginning to understand.

As one can see, the original question put forward by M. Say had not been specifically addressed but several members at the meeting promised to return to it (in the future).

35. T.241 Free Credit (Oct. 1849 - March 1850, Voix du peuple )↩

Source

T.241 (1849.10.22) Gratuité du crédit. Discussion entre M. Fr. Bastiat et M. Proudhon (Free Credit. A Discussion between M. Fr. Bastiat and M. Proudhon). An exchange of 14 Letters between Bastiat and Proudhon in The Voice of the People , (22 Oct. 1849 to 11 Feb. 1850, with Bastiat's final say in Letter 14 on 7 March 1850.

First published by Proudhon without Bastiat's final letter as Intérêt et principale. Discussion entre M. Proudhon et M. Bastiat sur l'intérêt des capitaux (Extraits de la Voix d Peuple) (Interest and Principle. A Discussion between M. Proudhon and M. Bastiat on Interest from Capital (Originally The Voice of the People)) (Paris: Garnier frères, 1850) [first 13 Letters].

Bastiat responded with his own edition with his final letter (7 March 1850), Gratuité du crédit. Discussion entre M. Fr. Bastiat et M. Proudhon (Free Credit. A Discussion between M. Fr. Bastiat and M. Proudhon) (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850). [OC5, pp. 94-335.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

Marche, marche, capital ! poursuis ta carrière, réalisant du bien pour l'humanité ! C'est toi qui as affranchi les esclaves ; c'est toi qui as renversé les châteaux forts de la féodalité ! Grandis encore ; asservis la nature : fais concourir aux jouissances humaines la gravitation, la chaleur, la lumière, l'électricité ; prends à ta charge ce qu'il y a de répugnant et d'abrutissant dans le travail mécanique ; élève la démocratie, transforme les machines humaines en hommes, en hommes doués de loisirs, d'idées, de sentiment et d'espérances !

March on, Capital, march on! Pursue your career doing good for the human race! It is you that have freed slaves and overturned the fortified castles of feudal times! Grow even greater; make nature subject to you; make gravity, heat, light, and electricity contribute to human satisfaction! Take upon yourself what is repulsive and mind-numbing in mechanical work; make democracy rise up and transform human machines into men, men endowed with leisure, ideas, feelings, and hopes!

[Source] 1613

So ends Letter 6 of this debate between the socialist anarchist Proudhon and Frédéric Bastiat. It is one example of several in this collection which demonstrates the passion Bastiat expressed for the free market (another is his "hymn to leisure" in Letter 4 discussed below) in his efforts to appeal to the working class readership of Proudhon's magazine La Voix du peuple (The Voice of the People).

Free Credit is one of the twelve Anti-Socialist Pamphlets which consisted of 15 separate essays and were written by Bastiat between May 1848 and July 1850. 1614 They were promoted by the Guillaumin publishing firm as a collection which was marketed as "Petits Pamphlets de M. Bastiat" (Mister Bastiat's Little Pamphlets) although several of them were by no means "small" in length, such as this one which was 292 pages. Paillottet tells us that one of these "Petits Pamphlets," Capital and Rent (Feb. 1849) (see above, pp. 000), was very critical of Proudhon's ideas and had made an impression on the working class readership of his magazine, some of whom began to question his standing within the socialist movement. The magazine therefore considered it necessary to attempt to refute Bastiat's criticisms. The editor in charge of the magazine while Proudhon was in prison in late 1849, F.C. Chevé, wrote the first critique of Bastiat in the October 22, 1849 issue and Bastiat asked for the opportunity to reply and obtained it. However, he was told after that first response that, for the rest of the discussion, Mr. Proudhon would take the place of Mr. Chevé, such was the threat they perceived Bastiat to be. After six Letters each Proudhon abruptly ended the debate on 11 February 1850, thinking he had won hands down, and published it as a book Interest and Principal . 1615 However, Bastiat also wanted to have the last word on the subject so he published his edition of the debate with a new title, Gratuité du crédit (Free Credit) , and an additional 14th Letter dated 7 March 1850 which had not appeared in the original series in La Voix du Peuple. 1616

Proudhon on Money and Banking

Proudhon was involved with a string of short-lived magazines during the Revolution and the Second Republic, some of them while he was in prison for various political offences. 1617 La Voix du peuple appeared in 223 issues between 1 Oct. 1849 to 14 May 1850 while Proudhon was incarcerated in Sainte-Pélagie prison. On March 28, 1849 Proudhon had been sentenced to three years in prison and a 3,000 franc fine for "offending the President of the Republic" (Louis Napoléon) who had been elected in December 1848. Proudhon had written some articles attacking the President's decision to send troops to Italy, and was convicted of a kind of "lèse-majesté" even though he had been elected to the Assembly in June 1848 and should have enjoyed parliamentary immunity. He continued to write articles attacking the President while he was in jail such as "Vive l'Empereur" (5 Feb. 1850) in which he compared President Louis Napoléon to an emperor and predicted that he would engineer a coup d'état to make himself emperor in the near future (which he did on 2 Dec. 1851 when he seized power in a coup and then proclaimed himself Emperor Napoléon III on 2 Dec. 1852). 1618 Proudhon ran the risk of being sentenced to additional time in prison but was eventually put into solitary confinement and transferred to another prison. This may explain some of the extraordinarily nasty personal language Proudhon used against Bastiat during the debate, attacks which Bastiat showed great strength in ignoring in spite of his deteriorating health.

Proudhon was well know to the Economists as he had written an article for the JDE in 1845 on subsidies for the railways and its impact on river transport which was not subsidised, and he had a book on Système des contradictions économiques (The System of Economic Contradictions) published by Guillaumin in 1846 1619 which had been reviewed by Molinari. 1620 He was highly regarded by some of the economists (like Molinari) because of his knowledge of economics, but they disagreed with him on several fundamental questions such as the legitimacy of interest and the justice of the ownership of private property. They were also very aware of his campaigns throughout 1848 and 1849 to reform the banking system with his schemes for a "Peoples' Bank" which he advocated within the Chamber of Deputies, where he was a Deputy like Bastiat, and in print.

Monetary matters came to a head after the Revolution and the creation of the Second Republic. Serious budget deficits confronted the new government as tax receipts collapsed and demands for spending on new programs like the National Workshops increased rapidly. There were calls for tax reforms from both sides of the political spectrum. The Minister of Finance in the Provisional Government, Garnier-Pagès, immediately increased direct taxes by 45% (the so-called 45 centimes tax) 1621 which fell on the lower classes most heavily; and Bastiat and the other political economists wanted to cut or abolish all direct taxes and replace them with a uniform low 5% tariff on all imported goods; while Proudhon argued for a kind of VAT on all economic exchanges and a tax on capital.

Another option instead of reforming the tax system was to nationalise the Bank of France (which had been a private monopoly) and to use it to expand the money supply and to issue very low or zero interest loans to ease the bad economic recession which followed the Revolution. It was as part of this discussion about the future of the Bank of France and the budgetary problems of the new government that Proudhon put forward his own ideas for an "Exchange Bank" between March and June 1848, culminating in his book Organisation du crédit et de la circulation in July 1848. When this came to nothing, he developed another scheme for a "Peoples' Bank" in January 1849 which would issue very low interest rate loans to ordinary workers. 1622 He attempted to raise money to get a People's Bank running with a prospectus for the formation of such a bank through popular subscription. The key features of the bank was that it would use the assets of the French nation to provide very low or zero interest loans to workers to set up their businesses and workshops, that gold coins and other hard currency would be replaced by paper currency, and that the banks would act as a clearing house to cancel out debts among the workers. Proudhon attempted to establish this bank between January and April 1849 but it failed to get the funds it needed and was forced to close. When Proudhon, the anarchist, tried to get government support for his failed bank, he was mocked by economists like Bastiat for his hypocrisy.

In addition to his attempts to reform the banking system, Proudhon also attempted, like Bastiat, to reform the system of taxation. Tax reform was debated in the Chamber in July 1848 during which Citizen Proudhon introduced a radical proposal to "simplify" taxes by eliminating many taxes (such as personal property taxes, taxes on doors and windows) and reducing others (1% tax on wine and beer, 2% on sugar, 1% octroi tax), but also introducing new taxes such as an across the board 1% tax on net capital above the value of 200 francs. This was completely rejected by the Chamber which defeated his motion 691-2. 1623 Elsewhere in his writings Proudhon argued against a separate tax on capital or on income, but for a universal and low tax on all economic transactions (or what he called "circulation"). It should be noted that Proudhon addressed his proposal to the Finance Committee of the Chamber of which Bastiat was Vice-President and where he might have found some support as they were similar to Bastiat's own views in many respects. Bastiat also lobbied for the reduction of taxes and the "simplification" of the French tax system from within the Finance Committee and gave several speeches in the Chamber on this topic. 1624 He wanted to abolish or reduce the same taxes as Proudhon but he would have strongly opposed the introduction of any taxes on capital or "transactions" (an early form of VAT). He wanted to replace all existing taxes with a low 5% tariff on both imports and exports for revenue purposes only (not for protection). In the long run he also wanted eventually to replace all indirect taxes with a low universal tax on income similar to the one proposed by Sir Robert Peel and William Ewart. 1625 Bastiat had about the same success as Proudhon did in getting his reforms accepted in the Chamber.

Bastiat's Response to Proudhon

It was most likely that Proudhon's advocacy of a People's Bank throughout 1848, both in the Chamber (where he sat with Bastiat on the left) and in his magazines and books, prompted Bastiat to more fully address the question of what he called "la papier-monnaie forcé" (compulsory paper money) and "la fausse monnaie légale" (legal counterfeit or false money) which would be issued by the state with the legal protection provided by "le cours forcé" (coerced exchange) either by the suspension of redeeming bank notes for gold, or by the imposition of legal tender laws for the new paper currency. This he did only in passing to begin with in the essay "Justice et fraternité" (Fraternity and Justice (JDE, June 1848) in which he used the expression "la papier-monnaie forcé" (compulsory paper money), 1626 and most importantly and in much more detail in the essay "Damn Money!" (JDE, April 1849) in which he used the phrase "la fausse monnaie légale" (legal counterfeit or false money) along with many other similar terms. 1627

However, it was in the Letters on Free Credit that Bastiat was able to expound at some length on his previously under-developed ideas about money and banking. Ideas about "free banking," 1628 or the "de-monopolisation" of the banking industry and the competitive issuing of currency were circulating among the economists in the mid-1840s largely as a result of the pioneering work of Charles Coquelin. 1629 In these "Letters" Bastiat adopted Coquelin's views on free banking and presented them as the solution to the problem of interest. As with any other business in a free market, competition among banks which can issue their own currency would lead to greater choice for consumers, more efficient and greater output, and thus lead to a lowering of cost of borrowing across the entire economy. Interest would not disappear, but it would drop to a very low level as the prices of goods and services would in any competitive industry. His clearest statement in support of free banking can be found in L10 where he states that "we claim and vigorously pursue the freedom of transactions, those that relate to capital, money, and bank notes as well as all the others. I would like it to be possible quite freely to open money shops and offices for loans and borrowing 1630 just as you open shoe shops or grocery shops." Several, but not all, economists in the Guillaumin circle advocated free banking. The most radical advocates were Bastiat, Molinari, and Coquelin himself. 1631 In his conclusion to the debate with Proudhon Bastiat makes another clear statement in favour of "la liberté des banques" (free banking) but slightly rephrases it to better align with Proudhon's advocacy of "la gratuité du crédit" (free credit). His slogan is now "la liberté du crédit" (freedom to issue credit): 1632

La gratuité du crédit, c'est l'absurdité scientifique, l'antagonisme des intérêts, la haine des classes, la barbarie.	... (F)ree credit is a scientific absurdity, involving antagonism to established interests, class hatred, and barbarity.
La liberté du crédit, c'est l'harmonie sociale, c'est le droit, c'est le respect de l'indépendance et de la dignité humaine, c'est la foi dans le progrès et les destinées de la société.	Freedom of credit is social harmony, it is right, it is respect for human independence and dignity, and it is faith in the progress and destiny of society.

In Letters 12 and 14 Bastiat gives his most detailed criticism of "la papier-monnaie" (paper money). In Letter 12 he makes it clear that he is not referring to bank notes which can be redeemed for hard currency like gold or silver upon presentation of the note at a bank. He is referring to "la monnaie de papier" (money which is made out of paper) which he considers to be a kind of "false" or "counterfeit" or "fictif" (fictitious or imaginary) money. Once this point has been established he goes back to referring to this kind of money generally as "paper money." 1633 The danger France faced in the difficult post-February period was that the new government, under pressure from various interest groups (especially the socialists like Louis Blanc and Proudhon) would turn the Bank of France into "une fabrique inépuisable de papier-monnaie" (an inexhaustible paper money factory) which would result inevitably in the debasement of the currency.

In Letter 14 he uses the metaphor of water to describe what happens when the currency is debased in this fashion. Whereas today we talk about the "inflation" of the money supply (using the metaphor of air), Bastiat used words like "gorger" (to swamp), "saturer" (to saturate), and "affluer" (to flood), as in "la circulation en sera tellement saturée, qu'ils seront dépréciés" (the circulation of money will be so saturated with it that they (the paper notes) will be depreciated (in value)). 1634 The result will be the opposite of that hoped for by advocates of a Central Bank or a Peoples' Bank like Proudhon. The people who will benefit the most will not be the poor or the working class but the better off, the existing large property owners, the politically well-connected, and the "craftiest" opportunists who can spot a quick deal to be made before anybody else. 1635 This makes the prescient point that those who have first access to the new, false money will benefit the most before it depreciates in value as it goes into general circulation.

Hayek's accusation of Bastiat's neglect of Money and Banking issues

Friedrich Hayek accused Bastiat of neglecting in his writings "one of the main dangers or our time," namely the topic of money and inflation, because he had been distracted with the task of refuting "various queer proposals for using credit which were current in his time." 1636 However, as we argue here, Bastiat devoted a considerable amount of time to issues concerning money, banking, credit, and interest in the last two years of his life, and in doing this he inevitably discussed the problem of paper money and inflation, especially the historical example offered by the use of paper Assignats during the 1790s in the first Revolution and the threat of something similar happening if reformers like Proudhon had his way in 1849. It is true that before the Revolution of February 1848 he had spent most of his time writing on taxes, tariffs, and free trade, although he did touch on monetary matters in "Nominal Prices" (ES1 11 (Oct. 1845) and "The Export of Bullion" (LE, Dec. 1847). 1637 He did not take this matter any further as he was significantly distracted by the outbreak of the Revolution, standing for election in the new Constituent Assembly, serving on the Chamber's Finance Committee (where he was forced to confront monetary issues head on), and opposing the rise of socialism throughout 1848. In the year between the appearance of his pamphlet Capital and Rent (Feb. 1849) and his last Letter to Proudhon in March 1850 Bastiat wrote two lengthy essays, a shorter article, and seven Letters to Proudhon for a total of 58,000 words on the topics of money, capital, and interest. His most extensive treatment of money was of course Damn Money! (April 1850) which was designed to refute the monetary ideas of socialists like Proudhon. 1638

After this flurry of activity ended, Bastiat's failing health meant he had to devote himself to other matters, such as finishing his treatise Economic Harmonies and his last three major essays on "Plunder and Law" (May 1850), The Law (June, 1850), and What is Seen and What is Not Seen (July 1850). 1639 Bastiat no doubt intended to have a chapter on money in the Economic Harmonies and his posthumous editor Paillottet dutifully indicated where it would have gone had the volume ever been finished. Unfortunately, it is an empty chapter with only a footnote telling the reader to consult the pamphlet "Damned Money!" to learn what Bastiat's views were. After the debate with Proudhon Bastiat did not write any more on the topic of money and banking, other than some brief remarks on the topic of capital and thrift (saving) in his last work What is Seen and What is Not Seen (July 1850). It would seem that Hayek's assertion about Bastiat's neglect of monetary issues is unfounded.

The Debate between Proudhon and Bastiat on Credit

As Roderick Long notes in his essay on the debate, in many ways it was "a dialogue of the deaf". 1640 Neither party seemed to understand or appreciate what the other was saying, and both had methodologies of analysis which were vastly different: "Kantian antinomies and Hegelian contradictions" for Proudhon versus the "natural laws of economics and Providential harmony" for Bastiat. Although they shared some common ground, such as their hostility to state intervention, an early appreciation of subjectivist value theory, and certain ideas about class theory and the exploitation of the workers by the politically privileged, there never was a real meeting of the minds as one might have hoped for, and on a couple of occasions the debate degenerated into name calling and ad hominem attacks especially by Proudhon. Bastiat kept his cool throughout although he was badly insulted by Proudhon who accused him of not knowing "the first thing about political economy" (L9), of not being "even a man" (L13), and the very hurtful insult, given Bastiat's fatal health condition, of being "a dead man" (L13). 1641 Proudhon's list of all Bastiat's intellectual "sins" in L13 provided Bastiat with an opportunity for a very witty and damning reply to the anti-religious and rather dyspeptic Proudhon. Bastiat quotes a real 9th century excommunication and the similarity of language and personal venom allows him to imply that Proudhon is running a kind of "economic high church" which has just excommunicated the heretic Bastiat. Perhaps one might excuse Proudhon for his bad temper and name calling as he conducted the entire debate from the prison in which he had been incarcerated in June 1849 for lèse-majesté against the new President of the Republic. But, then again, Bastiat was seriously ill and would have had his own reasons for behaving badly, but he didn't.

Some key issues which were raised during the debate include the following:

their very different definitions of capital
their different use of theory and history to make their debating points
the use of thought experiments by both men
the use of class analysis of contemporary French society
their common interest in the idea of the "mutuality of services"
Proudhon's very Keynesian notion of the stimulatory effects of an increase in the circulation of money
both Proudhon and Bastiat were close to developing a subjective value theory similar to that of the Austrian school
Proudhon's notorious habit of inventing new words which complicates the understanding of what he was trying to say
Bastiat's quite lyrical reflection on the importance of leisure and the role capital plays in making this increasingly possible for ordinary people
Bastiat's understanding of the importance of time (an early notion of time preference) versus Proudhon's lack of understanding of this

(1.) their very different definitions of capital

Bastiat's most succinct definition of capital can be found in the pamphlet Capital and Rent (Feb. 1849): 1642

What is capital, then? It is made up of three things:

1. Materials , on which people work, when these materials already have a value bestowed upon them by human effort of one kind or another, which has endowed them with the possibility of being bought and sold: wool, linen, leather, silk, wood, etc.

2. I mplements people use in order to work: tools, machines, ships, vehicles, etc., etc.

3. Provisions that they consume while they are working: foodstuffs, fabrics, houses, etc.

Proudhon's definition of capital is harder to pin down. It can be anything of "la valeur faite" (created value) which is exchanged and put into circulation. In L9 he states that " in the same way as in society net product is indistinguishable from gross product, so in the overall make-up of economic reality capital is indistinguishable from output (or product). These two terms in fact do not designate two distinct things; they distinguish only relationships. Output is capital, capital is output." And also that "Money, above all, money! This is capital par excellence, capital that is lent, that is to say that is hired out."

In L11 and in L5 he states that these "products" do not become capital until they are exchanged or put into "circulation," as in this quotation "Everything that is capital is of necessity a product, but everything that is a product, even when accumulated and even intended for reproduction, like the tools and implements of work in manufacturers' workshops, is not capital because of that. Capital, once again, supposes a prior evaluation, an act of exchange, or having been put into circulation, without which there is no capital."

His most succinct statement can also be found in L11, where he states that "I therefore call capital anything of created value in the form of land, tools, or implements of production, goods, food products, or cash, which is used or can be used for production ."

(2.) their different use of theory and history to make their debating points

Both men made very different use of theory and history to make their points. Proudhon did not believe that there were any universal economic "laws" which were valid at all times and in all places. He believed in Kantian "antinomies," that something could be true at one time in one respect and be false at other time in another respect. This lead him to believe that human institutions and ideas about what was right and proper evolved over time, and that what was legitimate and necessary in an earlier epoch, such as the charging of interest on high risk maritime cargo in the late middle ages or early modern period, was no longer legitimate and necessary in the modern period with its greater wealth, division of labour, and different social relations. Bastiat on the other hand, believed that economists have identified aspects of human behaviour, such as time preference and incentives to work, which were universal, and had also discovered certain "natural laws of economics" which could not be violated by either individuals or societies without incurring severe penalties. Among the latter were Malthusian limits to rapid population growth and the problem of the scarcity of or the competing uses for physical resources. Too often the debate collapsed into Proudhon saying that "things have changed" and that therefore there was no longer any need to charge interest on loans; to which Bastiat would reply that certain things may have changed but human nature and the physical fact of scarcity had not, and therefore interest was still necessary. The result was not a very productive or enlightening discussion which went round and round.

(3.) the use of thought experiments by both men

Another issue concerns the difference between what one might learn from abstract economic theory and the study of actually existing human societies with all their imperfections and injustices. Both Proudhon and Bastiat liked to use "thought experiments" in order to explore the logical and moral problems of making economic choices. This was central to Bastiat's invention and use of "Crusoe economics", in which he used the fictional figure of Robinson Crusoe on the Island of Despair to explore, even in the absence of exchange with others, how a single individual economises on their scarce time, labour, and resources in order to survive as best they can, most often by attempting to build capital goods like a fishing hook or an axe. 1643 The modern Austrian economist Murray Rothbard thinks that this way of thinking was one of Bastiat's most original insights which places him squarely in the Austrian praxeological camp. 1644 He uses this method of abstracting the logic of human action several times in the letters: such as the stories of the Carpenter and the Worker in L4, the Borrower and the Lender in L6, the Joiner and the Blacksmith in L10, and the rebuilding of the world by Hellen following the flood in L14. A common thread is Bastiat's discussion of opportunity costs and economic incentives and how these influence the decisions individuals will make. Although Proudhon dismisses them as mere "fables" their apparent simplicity masks deep economic insights which is a topic we discuss at more length in the Introduction to the CW3. 1645 On occasion, Proudhon also uses some "thought experiments" of his own, as if he were attempting to beat Bastiat at his own game, but his stories lack the wit and insight of Bastiat's. In L7 he has two, one on "the Millionaire and the Proletarian" which is a classic example of a "life boat" situation (here literally), which is followed by his own version of Crusoe economics with "Robinson and the Castaway." One might also consider Proudhon's very long and elaborate discussion of the "accounting" done by "A", who represents the entire class of landowners, capitalists, and businessmen, and the rest of the alphabet, which represents all wage earners, as a very clumsy thought experiment which eventually collapses under its own weight of overelaborate and invented detail.

(4.) the use of class analysis of contemporary French society

Proudhon is on better ground when he points out the widespread injustices which exist throughout French society, which benefit a minority of privileged landed, business, and financial elites, and which adversely affect the welfare of the ordinary working person. Many of these were also recognised and opposed by Bastiat, such as legal bans on the formation of trade unions, restrictions on who could work in certain industries, indirect taxes on food, salt, and other essential items for working people (interesting also including wine), and of course tariffs on imported goods. 1646 Thus it is odd that neither seems to make the best use of these historical examples drawn from how the actual French state functioned in practice. Proudhon for example, although an anarchist, thinks that the privileged monopoly Bank of France could and should be used to put his idea of a Peoples' Bank into practice, or that the state should guarantee the subscription for a loan to start his own bank - hypocrisies which Bastiat naturally, and perhaps with some enjoyment, points out in L10. On the other hand, Bastiat correctly argues that his use of thought experiments to explain how individuals make economic decisions does not make him "l'avocat du privilége capitaliste" (an advocate or apologist for capitalist privilege), yet he does not discuss here his own quite detailed and radical ideas about institutionalised "legal plunder" 1647 and the vast array of "causes perturbatrices" (disturbing factors) such as war, slavery, the seizure of land, legal monopolies, and subsidies which interfered with the harmonious operation of free markets. 1648 In other writings he develops a theory of how societies evolve through various eras such as slavery, theocracy, monopoly, and governmental exploitation in which each stage has its own kind of ruling "oligarchy" and "la classe spoliatrice" (plundering class). He would be the last to admit that the France in which he lived was an example of the kind of free market, voluntary society which he advocated. In fact, he thought it was becoming increasingly ruled by "une classe de fonctionnaires" (a class of government bureaucrats) who were "un parasite légal" (legal or state-supported parasites) who sucked the life blood out of the industrious working class. 1649 Bastiat's language is very similar to that used by Proudhon in L9 where he makes a similar contrast between "la classe travailleuse" (the labouring classe) and"la classe parasite" (the parasitic class), 1650 so it is strange that they didn't seek some common ground on this issue in the debate.

The following is an example of how Bastiat too could become as impassioned on the issue of class as his socialist opponents. This passage comes from the Conclusion of the first edition of the Economic Harmonies which appeared in print in January 1850 as this debate with Proudhon was underway: 1651

La Spoliation ! voici un élément nouveau dans l'économie des sociétés.	Plunder! This is a new element in social economics.
Depuis le jour où il a fait son apparition dans le monde jusqu'au jour, si jamais il arrive, où il aura complétement disparu, cet élément affectera profondément tout le mécanisme social ; il troublera, au point de les rendre méconnaissables, les lois harmoniques que nous nous sommes efforcés de découvrir et de décrire.	From the day it first appeared in the world to the day, if ever that should arrive, when it will have completely disappeared, this element will profoundly affect the entire social mechanism. It will perturb the laws of harmony that we have endeavored to elucidate and describe, to the extent of making them unrecognizable.
Notre tâche ne sera donc accomplie que lorsque nous aurons fait la complète monographie de la Spoliation.	Our task will therefore be completed only when we have written a detailed monograph on Plunder.
Peut-être pensera-t-on qu'il s'agit d'un fait accidentel, anormal, d'une plaie passagère, indigne des investigations de la science.	Perhaps some will think that it is an accidental contingency, abnormal, a short-lived wound unworthy of scientific investigation.
Mais qu'on y prenne garde. La Spoliation occupe, dans la tradition des familles, dans l'histoire des peuples, dans les occupations des individus, dans les énergies physiques et intellectuelles des classes, dans les arrangements de la société, dans les prévisions des gouvernements, presque autant de place que la Propriété elle-même.	But be careful. In family tradition, in the history of nations, in individual occupations, in the physical and intellectual energy of classes, in the organization of society or in government forecasts, plunder plays nearly as large a part as Property itself. [p. 409, CW5] ...
On entre ainsi dans l'ère des priviléges. La Spoliation, toujours plus subtile, se cantonne dans les Monopoles et se cache derrière les Restrictions ; elle déplace le courant naturel des échanges, elle pousse dans des directions artificielles le capital, avec le capital le travail, et avec le travail la population elle-même. Elle fait produire péniblement au Nord ce qui se ferait avec facilité au Midi ; elle crée des industries et des existences précaires ; elle substitue aux forces gratuites de la nature les fatigues onéreuses du travail ; elle fomente des établissements qui ne peuvent soutenir aucune rivalité, et invoque contre leurs compétiteurs l'emploi de la force ; elle provoque les jalousies internationales, flatte les orgueils patriotiques, et invente d'ingénieuses théories, qui lui donnent pour auxiliaires ses propres dupes ; elle rend toujours imminentes les crises industrielles et les banqueroutes ; elle ébranle dans les citoyens toute confiance en l'avenir, toute foi dans la liberté, et jusqu'à la conscience de ce qui est juste. Et quand enfin la science dévoile ses méfaits, elle ameute contre la science jusqu'à ses victimes, et s'écriant : À l'Utopie ! Bien plus, elle nie non-seulement la science qui lui fait obstacle, mais l'idée même d'une science possible, par, cette dernière sentence du scepticisme : Il n'y a pas de principes !	We thus enter the era of privilege. Plunder, ever more subtle, is enshrined in Monopoly and hidden behind Restriction. It displaces the natural flow of exchanges, it impels capital in artificial directions, with capital, labor, and with labor, the population itself. It makes the North produce with difficulty what the South would produce with ease. It creates precarious industries and existences. It substitutes the costly fatigues of effort for the free forces of nature. It sets up establishments that cannot sustain any rivalry and invokes the use of force against their competitors. It triggers international jealousy, flatters patriotic pride, and invents ingenious theories that use its own dupes as accessories. It renders crises in production as well as bankruptcies constantly likely and undermines all the citizens' confidence in the future, all faith in freedom and even the understanding of what is just. And when science at last strips the veil from its misdeeds, it whips up its victims against science by exclaiming: "Utopia!" What is worse, it denies not only the science that bars its path but the very idea of a possible science, through this final skeptical sentence: There is no such thing as principles!

The similarity to Proudhon's own rather "fiery" language about class is striking and one would have thought they should have found considerable common ground here. Yet, for some reason Bastiat held back from making these sorts of arguments in his Letters and thus allowed Proudhon to paint him as not caring about the condition of the poor and being a typical economist who was "sans entrailles" (heartless). Here we have another example of Proudhon and Bastiat talking past each other. They both used class analysis to expose the groups who benefited unjustly from access to state power at the expence of ordinary working people but there was no meeting of minds and no acknowledged agreement on these matters.

(5.) their common interest in the idea of the "mutuality of services"

See the glossary entry on "Service for Service" on Bastiat borrowing this term from Proudhon and adapting it to his own purposes.

(6.) Proudhon's very Keynesian notion of the stimulatory effects of an increase in the circulation of money

Special note should be made of the references by Proudhon to a very Keynesian notion of the stimulatory effects of an increase in the circulation of money and how the issuing of large quantities of paper money by a "central" bank (controlled by "the People") could bring this economic stimulation about. 1652

(7.) both Proudhon and Bastiat were close to developing a subjective value theory similar to that of the Austrian school

In addition, in spite of their intellectual differences, both Proudhon and Bastiat were close to developing a subjective value theory which would later become the hallmark of the Austrian school of economic thought. In L13 there is a very interesting passage where Proudhon argues that the value placed on products by different people is "purely subjective for individuals" but unfortunately does not develop it further:

Puisque la valeur n'est autre chose qu'une proportion, et que tous les produits sont nécessairement proportionnels entre eux, il s'ensuit qu'au point de vue social les produits sont toujours valeurs et valeurs faites : la différence, pour la société, entre capital et produit, n'existe pas. Cette différence est toute subjective aux individus : elle vient de l'impuissance où ils se trouvent d'exprimer la proportionnalité des produits en nombre exact et de leurs efforts pour arriver à une approximation.

Since value is nothing more than a proportion, and that all products are necessarily proportional to each other, it follows that from the social point of view products are always values and created values. The difference between capital and product, as far as society is concerned, does not exist. (There is no difference ...) This difference is purely subjective for individuals . It comes from their inability to express the proportionality (between) products in an exact number and from their efforts to arrive at an approximation. (Emphasis added.)

Bastiat's most detailed remarks about value can be found in Chapter V "On Value" in EH, and scattered remarks in his pamphlet Capital and Rent (Feb. 1849) and some of the early chapters of EH which were published in the JDE in late 1848. For example, in "Economic Harmonies IV" he states the essence of subjectivist value theory. His insight was to reject the objectivity of this "value" and to see that it was the subjective valuations, the "appréciation comparée" (comparative evaluation or judgement), of the two parties to the exchange which made exchange both possible and worth while for both parties:

Economic science, therefore, unlike the so-called exact sciences, does not (have) the advantage of a yardstick, an absolute standard to which it can refer everything, a graduated measure that it can use to calibrate the intensity of desires, efforts, and satisfactions. … 1653

With regard to needs and desires, we have said that no two men are alike. This is also true of our satisfactions. They are not equally appreciated by all, and this boils down to the trite saying: tastes differ. Well, it is the acuteness of desires and the variety of tastes that determine the direction of (our) efforts. … 1654

(V)alue therefore consists in the comparative evaluation of the reciprocal services, and (thus) it may also be said that political economy is the theory of value. … 1655

(8.) Proudhon's notorious habit of inventing new words which complicates the understanding of what he was trying to say

Proudhon was notorious for inventing new words. His creative use of neologisms is shown throughout his writings which make understanding quite hard for the reader, not to mention the translator. We indicate in the footnotes when Proudhon is making up new words as he goes along. Some examples include, "le produit fait valeur" (the product made or transformed into something of value), "les non-valeurs" (things of no value), "la société consommatrice et reproductrice" (the consumer and producer firm or business), "la société capitaliste et propriétaire" (the capitalist and landowning firm or business), "propriétaire-capitaliste-entrepreneur" (a landowner-capitalist entrepreneur), that is a capitalist-minded landowner who acts as a businessman or entrepreneur, "le producteur-consommateur" (the producer-consumer), and "la spoliation bancocratique" (bankocratic plunder, or plunder by a ruling elite of bankers). One of his most widely used neologisms in these letters was the idea of "la valeur faite" (created, made, or produced value).

(9.) Bastiat's quite lyrical reflection on the importance of leisure and the role capital plays in making this increasingly possible for ordinary people

At the end of L4 Bastiat has some quite lyrical reflections on the importance of leisure in which he argues that there is more to life than just working. This would seem quite unusual for an economist regularly accused of being "heartless (sans entrailles) by the socialists. He goes on to argue that it is only by increasing wealth and capital accumulation that leisure is made possible for an increasing number of people, and how this in turn is so important for the development of a person's affections, mind, and sense of the beautiful. See the glossary entry on "The Importance of Leisure" for more information about Bastiat's thoughts on leisure.

(10.) Bastiat's understanding of the importance of time (an early notion of time preference) versus Proudhon's lack of understanding of this

Jean-Baptiste Say, who greatly influenced Bastiat's thinking on economics, had a much broader understanding than other economists of the period of what constituted productive activity. In addition to recognising the importance of "non-material goods" (or what we would call today "services") Say also thought transport was a productive activity in that it got needed goods and services into the hands of consumers. An interesting complexity he added was to see that "transport" could be both "geographical" (the movement of goods across physical space, such as the importation of grain) as well as "temporal" (entrepreneurs buying goods and storing them for use at a later time when they might be in greater demand, or what he called "speculation"). As he put it it: "Ce commerce tend, comme on voit, à transporter, pour ainsi dire, la marchandise d'un temps dans un autre, au lieu de la transporter d'un endroit dans un autre." (As one can see, this type of commerce is designed to transport merchandise from one time to another, so to speak, instead of transporting it from one place to another.) Molinari and Bastiat would take this notion of "transport through time" to another level with the realisation that granting a loan to somebody at interest meant that people placed different "evaluations" on the worth of present goods over later goods and thus "time" was also a valuable commodity and had to be paid for. 1656

Three Final Things to Notes

Bastiat may have "won" the debate, at least in the sense of winning the moral support of some of the working class readers of Proudhon's journal. Paillottet relates the following in a note: 1657

"A few people found Bastiat's patience during this discussion excessive. This and the preceding paragraphs explain his attitude clearly. He set great store by succeeding in instilling a few salutary truths in the workers, with the help of La Voix du Peuple itself. He was shortly to feel entitled to congratulate himself for having pursued such an outcome. One morning, a few days before the closure of the debate, he was visited by three workers, the delegates of a certain number of their fellow workers who had rallied to the banner of Free Credit . These workers came to thank him for his good intentions and for his efforts to enlighten them on an important question. They were not converted to the legitimacy and usefulness of interest, but their faith in the opposing thesis had been badly shaken and were held only by the strength of their support for Mr. Proudhon. "Mr. Proudhon is very concerned for our well-being", they said, "and we owe him much gratitude. It is a shame that he often uses words and sentences that are so difficult to understand." Finally, they expressed the wish that Messrs. Bastiat and Proudhon might come to an agreement and declared themselves ready to accept without comment any solution whatever put forward jointly by the two men."

In his last Letter 14 Bastiat managed to deliver a final parting shot across Proudhon's bows which Proudhon must have found very irritating. After repeatedly chastising Bastiat for not understanding the slightest thing about Kantian antinomies and Hegelian contradictions Bastiat returns the favour by wittily and intentionally returning to what he did best in the Economic Sophisms , namely the use of fables, stories, and "Robinsonian" thought experiments to make his points understandable to the ordinary reader. He ends his part of the conversation with a fable of the Flood (on capital accumulation) and the blind and the sighted who lived together in a Hospice (about how mutual jealousy between them prevents them from mutually benefiting from cooperation and exchange). Perhaps in the end Bastiat had the last laugh in what had had been at times a very bitter debate.

The editor of La Voix du peuple provided a summary of each Letter's content at the head of the piece, and this is something which we have retained.

Letter No. 1: F. C. Chevé to F. Bastiat (22 October 1849)

F. C. Chevé, 1658

One of the editors of La Voix du Peuple

To Frédéric Bastiat

Adhesion to the formula: A loan is a service that has to be exchanged for another service. - Distinction between the different types of services. - The service that consists in handing over the temporary use of an item of property does not have to be paid for ultimately by the handing over of some other property. - The disastrous consequences of interest for the borrower, the lender himself and for society as a whole.

22 October 1849

All the principles of social economy that you have propagated with such remarkable talent lead surely and inevitably to the abolition of interest and rent. Since I am curious to know by what strange contradiction your logic, always so lively and so sure, drew back in the face of this final conclusion, I looked at the arguments of your pamphlet entitled Capital and Rent 1659 and noted, with a mixture of surprise and joy, that there was no longer any difference between you and us more substantial than a simple ambiguity.

This ambiguity rests entirely on the confusion of two things, which are nevertheless quite distinct, use (of something) and ownership (of something) .

Like us, you start from the fundamental and uncontested principle of the reciprocity, mutuality, and equivalence of services. 1660 The trouble is that by confusing use and property and treating as one two things of diverse nature, such that no equivalence between them is possible, you destroy all mutuality, all reciprocity, and all genuine equivalence, thus overturning by your own hands the principle you have established.

It is this principle that has come to set you against yourself. When you yourself have invoked the argument against rent, how can you repudiate it when it calls for the latter's abolition?

You would not accuse us, Sir, of lacking courtesy. We, the first to be attacked, leave you the choice of the place, the time, and the weapons and, without complaining about the disadvantages of the terrain, we accept the discussion according to the terms you have laid down. What is more, we are content to follow all the examples and demonstrations in your pamphlet Capital and Rent , one by one, and will merely put right the misunderstanding, the unfortunate ambiguity that alone has prevented you from reaching a conclusion hostile to rent. Do the terms of this debate seem fair to you or not?

Let us now deal with the subject.

Paul exchanges ten 50 centime coins with Pierre for 100 sous. 1661 This is a barter, an an exchange of one piece of property for another. However, Pierre says to Paul: "You will give me the ten 10 sous coins right now and, for my part, I will give you the 100 sous coin in a year's time." Here is "a new service and one of a different type that Pierre is asking of Paul."

But what is the nature of this service? Is Pierre asking Paul to hand over the ownership of a new sum, whatever it is? No, but he is simply asking Paul to allow him the use of this latter for a year. Well, since any service should be paid for by an equivalent service, the service of use should therefore be exchanged for a service of use , no more no less. Pierre will say to Paul: "You give me the use of ten 10 sous coins for a year and I will therefore owe you the same service in return, that is to say, the use of ten 10 sous coins also for a year." Is this or is this not just?

A man exchanges a ship for a house; this is barter, an exchange of one piece of property for another. However, the ship owner also wants to have the use of the house for a period of one year before handing over his ship. The owner tells him "This is a new service you are asking of me. I have the right to refuse or to ask you for an equivalent service in compensation." 1662 'It is clear,' replies the ship owner, 'that, for a period of one year, you are giving me the use of something that is worth 20,000 francs; I suppose that I therefore will owe you the use of something also worth 20,000 francs in exchange. Nothing would be more just. But since I am paying for your property with that of my ship, it is not a new piece of property but its simple use that you are allowing me and therefore I just have to allow you the use of something of equal worth for an equal period of time. "Services exchanged are equal in value." To demand more would be theft.'

Mathurin lends a sack of wheat "to Jérôme who promises to return a sack of wheat of equal quality and weight in one year's time, without a single grain being short." In addition Mathurin would like five liters of wheat over and above the hectoliter for the service he is provid ing Jérôme. 'No,' replies Jérôme, 'this would be unjust and an act of plunder; you are giving me the ownership of nothing at all since in a year's time I have to hand you back the exact value of what you are giving me today. What you are allowing me is the use of your sack of wheat for a period of one year and you therefore have the right to the use of something of equal value for one year as well. Nothing more, otherwise there would no longer be any mutuality, reciprocity, or equivalence of service.'

For his part, "Mathurin, who is a bit of an accountant, calculates the matter thus": Jérôme's objection is incontestable and in effect, 'if "at the end of a year he gives me back five liters of wheat in addition to the hundred liters I have just lent him, and if some time later, I am able to lend two sacks of wheat, then three or four, when I have invested a sufficiently large number to live on the total of these repayments," I will be able to eat without doing anything and without ever spending my capital. Well, someone will have produced what I will be eating. As this someone will not be me but someone else, I will be living at the expense of someone else, which is theft. And this is understandable, since the service I will have given is just the loan or use of something of a particular value, while the service that I will have been given in exchange will be a gift or the ownership of something.' Thus, there will be justice, equality, and equivalence of services only in the sense understood by Jerome.

Valère wishes to occupy Mondor's house for a period of one year. "He will have to submit to three conditions. The first is that he will have to move out at the end of one year and give back the house in good condition except for the inevitable wear and tear that result simply from the passage of time. The second is to pay Mondor the 300 francs that he pays each year to the architect to make good this wear and tear since, given that this wear and tear occurs while the house is in Valère's service, it is only fair that he bears the consequences. The third is to provide Mondor a service equivalent to the one Valère is receiving." Now, this service lies in the use of a house for a period of one year. Valère will thus owe Mondor the use of something of the same value for the same period of time. This value will have to be freely negotiated between the two parties to the contract.

Jacques has just completed the manufacture of a plane. Guillaume says to Jacques: 1663

'I need a service from you.'

'What service?'

'Lend me this plane for a year.'

'Are you serious, Guillaume? If I do you this service, what will you do for me in exchange?

'The same, of course; and if you lend me something worth 20 francs for a year, I will have to lend you in turn something of the same value for an equal period of time.'

'First of all, in a year's time the plane will have to be scrapped, as it will no longer be good for anything. It is therefore just for you to return to me one that is exactly similar, or for you to give me enough money to have it repaired, or for you to replace the ten days that I would have to devote to rebuilding it. In one way or another, the plane has to be returned to me in good condition, just as I am handing it over to you.'

'This is only fair; I agree to this condition. I undertake to give you back either a plane that is similar or its value.'

'Apart from the total restitution already agreed upon, you have to provide me a service which we will discuss.'

'The service is very simple. In the same way as for the plane you lend me, I have to give you a similar plane or its equal value; in the same way, for the use of this value for a period of one year, I owe you the use of a similar sum also for a period of one year. In either case "services exchanged are equal in value".'

Having established this, I think what we have here is a series of consequences whose justice it is impossible to question:

1. If use pays for use, and if the purely temporary handing over by the borrower of the use of an equal value "is a natural and equitable payment, the just price for a service of use," we may conclude as a generalization, that it is CONTRARY to the nature of capital to generate interest." Indeed it is very clear that, following the reciprocal use of the two services exchanged, since each owner has merely received the exact value of what he possessed previously, there is no interest or productivity of capital for either party. And this cannot be otherwise, since the lender could draw interest from the value lent only to the extent that the borrower himself draws no interest from the value provided in return. This being so, interest on capital is the negation of itself and it exists for Paul, Mathurin, Mondor, and Jacques only on condition that it is not allowed in the case of Pierre, Jérôme, Valère, and Guillaume. Since all things are in reality the tools of production on the same basis, the former group can levy interest on the value lent only if the latter in return levy interest on the value provided in exchange, which destroys the interest on capital of itself and reduces it to a simple right of use for use. Wanting to exchange the use of something for ownership of something is to dispossess and plunder one person in favor of another, "it is to legalize, organize, and systematize injustice itself." Let us state in fact that interest is illegitimate, iniquitous, and plunderous.

2. A second consequence, no less remarkable than the first, is that interest is harmful to the borrower, to the lender himself, and to society as a whole. It is harmful to the borrower and plunders him since it is obvious that if Pierre, Jérôme, Valère, and Guillaume have to return a greater value that the one they have received there is no equivalence in service, and that since the excess value that they return is produced by them and taken by others they are plundered to this extent. It is harmful to the lender, since when he needs to take out a loan he becomes a victim of the same (kind of) plunder. It is harmful to both and to society as a whole, since as the interest or rent increases considerably the cost of all products, each consumer is plundered by this amount on everything he buys. When workers can no longer buy back their products out of their wages, they are forced to reduce their consumption, and this reduction in consumption leads to unemployment. This unemployment leads to a new reduction in consumption and requires the unproductive gift of enormous sums swallowed up by public or private assistance and the repression of crimes that are constantly on the increase and generated by the lack of work and poverty. This leads to a terrible disruption in the law of supply and demand and in all the relationships of social economy, an obstacle "to the formation, growth, and abundance of capital" that cannot be overcome, the absolute autocracy of capital, the radical servitude of workers, with oppression everywhere and freedom nowhere. Let society "then understand the harm it is inflicting on itself when it proclaims the legitimacy of interest."

3. The anecdotes we have related also put us on the right track to explain all that is monstrous in the phenomenon that we call the perennial or perpetual nature of interest. As soon as Paul, Mathurin, Mondor, and Jacques cease to adhere to the principle of the equivalence of services and wish to exchange not use for use but use for ownership, in approximately fourteen years, they will end up receiving the value of their property, 1664 in a century ten times this value and, as they lend it indefinitely in this way, they will receive a thousand, a hundred thousand or a million times its value, without ever ceasing to be its owners . In this way, the simple use of a sack of wheat, a house, a plane will be equivalent to the ownership not of one but a million, a billion, and so on, of sacks of wheat, houses, or planes. This entails the ability to sell the same object again and again and receive again and again the same price without ever handing over the ownership of what is being sold. Are the values exchanged equal? Are reciprocal services equal in value? For note this well: the tools of production are a service for the lenders just as they are for borrowers and if Pierre, Jérôme, Valère, and Guillaume have received a service that consists of the use of a hundred sou coin, a sack of wheat, a house, or a plane, they have provide d in exchange a service which consists in the ownership of a billion hundred sou coins, sacks of wheat, houses, and planes. Well, unless you can demonstrate that the use of 5 francs equals the ownership of 5 billion, it has to be acknowledged that interest on capital is theft.

As soon as an individual or succession of individuals are able, by means of interest or rent, to exchange 5 francs, a sack of wheat, a house, or a plane for a billion or more 5 franc coins, sacks of wheat, houses, or planes, there is someone in the world who is receiving a billion times more than he has produced. Well, this billion is the subsistence of one hundred or a thousand other people and, assuming that the income that remains to these thousand plundered people is still enough to feed them as they labor till their last breath, it is the leisure time of one thousand individuals that a single person swallows up, that is to say, their whole moral and intellectual life. These men from whom their entire spiritual life and thought is thus removed for the benefit of a single man might perhaps have become Newtons, Fénelons, or Pascals, 1665 producing marvelous discoveries in the sciences and arts and advancing the progress of humanity by a century. But no, "thanks to rent and its monstrous perennial nature," leisure has been forbidden precisely to all those who work from the cradle to the grave and becomes the exclusive privilege of a few idlers who, thanks to interest on capital, appropriate to themselves, without lifting a finger, the fruit of the crushing labor the workers endure. Almost all "humanity is reduced to wallowing in a life that is vegetative and immobile, in eternal ignorance" because of this plundering by rent, first of all removing their subsistence and then their leisure. If there were on the contrary no rent, with everyone receiving exactly what he has produced, an immense number of men now idle or condemned to work that is unproductive and often destructive will be compelled to work, which will increase accordingly the sum of general wealth or possible leisure, and this leisure will belong forever to those who have genuinely acquired it through their own work or that of their fathers.

But, it is said that, "if capital can no longer produce interest, who will want to create the tools of production, the materials and provisions of all sorts that make it up? Each person will consume what they have and humanity will never take a step forward. Capital will no longer be built up since there will be no interest in doing this." This really is a strange contradiction. Does a farmer not have something to gain by producing as much as possible, even though he merely exchanges his harvest for an equal value once it is paid with no rent or interest on capital? Does an industrialist not have something to gain by doubling or tripling his products even though he merely sells them for a sum that is equivalent to just one payment, without any interest on capital? Do 100,000 franc pieces cease to be worth 100,000 francs because they no longer produce interest? Do 500,000 francs in land, houses, machines or other things cease to be 500,000 francs because rent is no longer drawn from them? In a word, is acquired wealth, in whatever form in might be or however it might have been acquired, no longer wealth because I cannot use it to plunder someone else? Who would want to create wealth? All those who want to be rich! Who will save their money? All those who want to live the next day on the work of the day before. What motivation will there be to establish capital? The incentive of owning 10,000 francs when you have produced 10,000 francs, of owning 100,000 when you have produced 100,000 and so on.

You say, "The law will rob us of the prospect of acquiring a certain amount of property since it will forbid us from obtaining any advantage from it." On the contrary, the law will ensure for all the prospect of acquiring as much wealth as they have produced by working, at the same time forbidding everyone from plundering his neighbor of the fruit of his labor and requiring that services exchanged should be of equal value: use for use and property for property. "It will destroy," you add, "both the incentive to save in the present and the hope of rest in the future. Even though we may drop from exhaustion, we will have to abandon the thought of handing a small inheritance down to our sons and daughters since modern economic science makes it sterile, since we will become exploiters of men if we lend at interest." Quite the contrary, the abolition of interest on capital will regenerate in you the incentive to save today and will ensure you the hope of rest in the future, since it prevents you, the workers, from being dispossessed, through the payment of rent, of the greater part of the fruit of your work and, also making you spend only the exact sum that you have earned, it makes saving even more essential for all, whether rich or poor. Not only will you be able to hand down to your sons and daughters a small inheritance, without becoming exploiters of men, but you will obtain it now with much less effort. This is because at present if you earn 10 francs a day and spend 5, the other 5 are taken from you by all the forms of rent and interest on capital and then after forty years of backbreaking work, you are left with not one obole to leave to your children. 1666 Once rent has been abolished, however, you will have more than 60,000 francs to leave to them.

All the economic sophisms 1667 relating to interest on capital insist, exclusively, that the question should be discussed from just one aspect rather than from its two related sides. They show quite admirably that the lending of something of value is a service, a means of work and production for the borrower, but forget to show that the value given in return is also a service, a means of work and production of precisely the same kind for the lender, and that since the use of the same service balances out in the same period of time, interest on capital is an absurdity as much as it is plunder. 1668 They trumpet the benefits of saving which, when multiplied indefinitely by rent, produce scandalous opulence for a few idlers, but forget that these benefits, taken by someone who does nothing from someone who works, lead to the dreadful poverty of the masses, from whom their subsistence is often taken and always at least their savings, their leisure, and the opportunity of leaving something to their children. At great expense the need for capital formation is proclaimed, and nobody sees that interest restricts this formation to an almost imperceptible number of people, whereas the abolition of rent would summon to it everyone without exception, and capital would increase to an extent that would be all the greater in that each person would have to use the interest abolished to increase the value of the capital formation. "To say that interest will be eliminated is therefore to say that there will be one more incentive to save, to deprive yourself, and to build up new capital while maintaining the capital that already exists," 1669 first of all, since any wealth acquired will always remain wealth, and secondly since each person will always be able to enrich himself to the exact extent of his work and savings, then nobody will be encouraged by excessive opulence or poverty to indulge in dissipation or improvidence. Finally, since everyone will live no longer on interest, but on the stock of capital, it will be essential for the level of capital to compensate for the amount of rent abolished.

Everyone knows that zero, although in itself without intrinsic or absolute value, nevertheless has service and use value in the calculation or multiplication of numerical values, since each number grows by ten depending on the number of zeros that follow it. To say that the natural and true rate of interest is zero is therefore simply to say that use can be exchanged only for use and never for ownership. In the same way as a pair of stockings is paid for at its value, maybe 2 francs, for example, the use of something of value should be paid for with the use of something of an equal value for the same period of time. Doubtless this prevents the plunder of property by property, but it certainly does not make it toothless.

You want the savings that makes possible the establishment of capital. Then abolish the rent that takes away the savings of workers, makes saving superfluous for the rich who will always find in revenue the wealth that they continue to spend, and impossible for the poor whose income never exceeds, if ever it equals, their subsistence needs. You want capital to be abundant? Then abolish the rent that prevents ninety-nine percent of workers from ever acquiring and retaining capital or wealth. You want the reconciliation of capital and labour? Then abolish the rent that makes the antagonism between these two entities eternal by destroying the equivalence and reciprocity of services and by leading to the exploitation of labor by capital so that, in a given period of time, labor pays capital 5 billion for the use of a single hundred sou coin, as we have shown above. You want harmony between the classes? Then abolish rent so that, with services constantly being exchanged for equal services of the same nature, each person will always remain the owner of the exact sum corresponding to his work, and thus it will no longer be possible for exploiters or the exploited, masters or slaves, to exist.

When this happens there will be security everywhere, because there will be no injustice anywhere. When this happens workers will be the first to make themselves the natural guardians of a society whose ruin they now plot to bring about because it is ensuring theirs. When this happens nobody will talk about the artificial organization of work because there will be a natural and genuine system of organization. 1670 When this happens social arrangements based on coercion will be rejected, because people will have social arrangements based on freedom. When this happens "class jealousy, ill-feeling, unfounded hatred, and unjustified mistrust" will disappear of their own accord, for the perfect equality of exchange, the unquestionable equivalence of services "will be able to be strictly and mathematically demonstrated" and the absolute justice it will consecrate "will be no less sublime because it will satisfy both intellect and sentiment."

As you see, Sir, I have followed step by step and I might say letter by letter, each of the examples and each of the demonstrations contained in your article entitled Capital and Rent , and it was enough for me to re-establish the distinction between use and ownership and thus avoid the ambiguity that separates us to conclude from your own thoughts and words that rent should be abolished. It is not my letter but your work itself that contains this conclusion from the very first line to the last. I have therefore merely reproduced it, often literally and by changing just the terms that have given rise to this unfortunate ambiguity. This refutation comes not from me but from you. How then can you deny your own witness?

It is the very principle of rent that you wished to justify. Your task was limited to that.

It is the very principle of the abolition of rent that I think I have mathematically demonstrated, using your own words. My work also has to be limited to that.

I have stopped where you yourself judged it necessary to stop.

Once the question of principle has been settled, if it should happen, and please God that it does, that you acknowledge as of right the injustice and illegitimacy of interest, probably all that would remain is to deal with the question of its application.

I do not want to jump to conclusions here, since it clearly steps outside the circle you yourself have drawn. However, a few words would perhaps be of some use in demonstrating not just the possibility but also the practicality of abolishing rent through freedom alone, even before the law sanctions it. Basically the entire problem can be reduced to this: Give the workers the means of acquiring, either by installments or by any other means, ownership of all the things the value of which they have to pay for eternally, in the form of interest, hire costs, farm rent, or leases, just in order to have their use . Now, these means are available.

Indeed, just suppose, and this fact is no longer a supposition but a work that is now in the full process of execution, 1671 that a kind of private bank is set up in order to issue notes that associations of workers in all the essential jobs undertake to accept for a fifth, for example, of all the purchases that will be made from them. Suppose that these notes, exchanged for cash by all those men who wish interest to be abolished and who find an immediate acceptance for them in the workers associations, generated a sum which was enough to build houses where rent would be abolished, and where the rental payments would always yield the right to an equal claim against the total value of the property itself, which would thus be acquired over twenty-five years simply by the paying of the installments.

Suppose that the operation continues in this way indefinitely through the issue either of old or new notes and that it includes, not only houses, but also all the tools for production and land, where the cost of hire and farm rental would reimburse the value of the property itself in the same way. Now we would have abolished rent in all its forms; not only for the capital on which this bank operates, which of necessity will reach a colossal figure, but very shortly for all the others, which according to the inexorable law of competition will fall to the same level, that is to say to the simple exchange of equal values for equal values, with no interest or rent paid on either side.

I will pass over the details in the interest of brevity and content myself by summarizing in two words the basic principle of its operation. You are too familiar with all the economic ideas involved, Sir, not to grasp instantly the result of this mechanism, which is simple anyway. It is enough for you to be able to see at a glance how it is possible, even perhaps easy, to kill off rent through the abolition of rent and the interest on capital by the removal of this interest, and so to lead freely, peacefully, and with no upheaval to the day when loans, hire, farm, or other rents will merely be among the forms of exchange of which they are now a monstrous deviation, and when your own principles are realized in the full richness of their truth: the principles of mutuality, reciprocity, and the equivalence of services.

Once the principle of the means of application is set out, vary its forms, elements, conditions, and mechanisms, simplify and perfect its basis, extend its action and make it universal, replace freely and everywhere t he symbol of exchange that cannot allow interest with that of money, rid the circulation of capital of its unproductive aspects, create the solidarity of labour voluntarily; in a word, reproduce this scheme for the abolition of rent in all its possible forms: there is the domain of freedom. It is enough to show that the practical means exist; leave man's genius to act and you will see whether he is capable of making use of it or not.

Be that as it may, and disregarding any views on the practical means, equality and justice do not remain any less than what they always are, truth is not less truth, and the interest on capital, illegitimate in law, absurd and monstrous in principle, and plunder in fact, is anathema to all upright men, the curse of oppressed races, and the just indignation of whomsoever has a generous spirit of sympathy for those who suffer and weep. It is in this respect, Sir, that I condemn it to your critical blows, convinced that after having viewed it afresh in its hideous iniquity, you will find no nobler a task than to devote your talent, which is remarkably lively, lucid, picturesque, and incisive, to combating this scourge, the source of all the indescribable poverty to which the world is prey.

Allow me therefore to end this over-long epistle with the following words taken from your article which are like the stepping stone and preamble to the great work of rehabilitation to which equality, justice, and the love of the people inclines you: 1672

Here are two men. One works from morning to night, from one end of the year to the next and, if he has consumed everything he has earned, perhaps out of absolute necessity, he will remain poor. On New Year's Eve, he will be no further forward than he was on the previous New Year's Day, and his only prospect is to start all over again. The other man does not use either his hands or his brain, at least, if he does so it is for pleasure; he has the option to do nothing because he receives rent . He does not work, and yet he lives well, having everything in abundance -- fine food, sumptuous furniture, and elegant clothes. This means that every day he uses up things that workers have had to produce by the sweat of their brow, for these things are not made by themselves and, as for him, he has not turned his hands to them. It is we, the workers, who have caused this wheat to germinate, varnished this furniture, and woven these carpets; it is our wives and daughters who have woven, cut out, sewn, and embroidered these fabrics. We therefore work both for him and for us; for him in the first instance and for ourselves if anything is left over.

But here is something more striking: if the first of these two men, the worker, consumes all that has been left to him by way of profit during the year, he is therefore always at the starting point and his fate condemns him to turning endlessly in an eternal, monotonous circle of fatigue. Work is thus paid for just once. However, if the second man, the man of independent means, consumes his annual rent during the year, the following year, and the years following that for all eternity, he will have a revenue that is always the same, always inexhaustible, and perpetual . Capital is thus remunerated not once or twice, but an innumerable number of times! This means that, a hundred years later, the family that has invested 20,000 francs at 5 percent will have received 100,000 francs and this will not stop it receiving another 100,000 in the succeeding century. In other words, for 20,000 francs' worth of its own work, in two centuries the family will deduct ten times that sum from other people's work.

Is there not a monstrous vice that needs to be reformed in this type of social order?

This is still not all. If this family is willing to restrict its expenditure a little and, for example, spend only 900 francs instead of 1,000, with no work or trouble other than that of investing 100 francs per year, it can increase its Capital and its Rent to an extent that is so rapid that it will soon be in a position to consume as much as one hundred hard-working families of the toiling workers.

Does this not show that current society carries a hideous cancer within it, 1673 which has to be cut out even if this risks a little temporary suffering?

It is this hideous cancer that you, Sir, will help us to cut out. You want freedom of exchange; you should therefore want EQUALITY as well in order that fraternity , by crowning them both, will bring about the reign of justice, peace, and universal understanding over the world.

F. Chevé.

Proudhon's Preface to Bastiat's First Letter 1674

P ARIS , November 12, 1849.

We publish to-day a first article by M. Frederic Bastiat, a representative of the people, and one of the most distinguished economists of our country, upon the great question of the day, Interest or Rent of capital. We do for M. Bastiat, we will do for any serious economist who will honor us with his criticisms, a thing hitherto unknown in the annals of journalism. We open our columns to our opponent, we publish his article entire, we make no comment upon it, in order not to influence the judgment of our readers, and to equalize the advantages of the controversy between our antagonist and ourselves. It will not be our fault if the question of Interest , which, in the economic order, constitutes the whole object of the socialistic protest of the nineteenth century, is not discussed seriously before the country and before Europe, and probably ere long decided. When the writer's pen is able to effect or avert a revolution, what need of paving stones and bayonets? The abundance and multiplicity of our tasks not permitting us to reply to M. Bastiat to-morrow, we postpone our answer till next Monday, November 19, thus leaving our readers for a week under the influence of the arguments of our adversary.

Letter No. 2: F. Bastiat to the Editor (12 November 1849)

F. Bastiat

To the Editor of La Voix du Peuple

The use of an item of property constitutes a value. - Any value may be exchanged for another. - The productivity of CAPITAL. - Its contribution is not paid for at the expense of LABOR. - This payment is not exclusively linked to the conditions of the LOAN.

12 November 1849

The extreme enthusiasm with which the people in France have begun to examine economic problems and the scarcely credible indifference of the well-to-do classes 1675 with regard to these problems is one of the most characteristic traits of our era. While the longstanding journals, at once the voice and the mirror of upright society, stick to antagonistic and sterile party politics, the papers intended for the working classes are constantly turning over what might be labeled the fundamental question, that of "the social question." Unfortunately, I very much fear that they will lose their way as soon as they step out along this path. But can things be otherwise? At least they have the merit of seeking truth. Sooner or later they will be rewarded with its actual possession.

Since you, Sir, are willing to allow me the use of the columns of La Voix du Peuple , I will set the following two questions before your readers and endeavor to answer them:

1. Is interest on capital legitimate?

2. Is it exacted at the expense of labor and the workers?

We differ as to the solution, but there is one point on which we are certainly in agreement which is that (apart from religious problems), there are no more important questions which the human mind can confront.

If it is I who am mistaken, if (self) interest is an excessive tax levied by capital on all consumer products, I will have to criticise myself for having, through my arguments, unwittingly underpinned the oldest, most dreadful, and most universal abuse ever dreamed up by the spirit of plunder, an abuse to which in terms of the universality of its results, neither the systematic pillage of warlike nations, nor slavery, nor the despotism of the priests can be compared. 1676 This would mean that a deplorable error in economics had turned the democratic flame I feel burning in my heart, against democracy. 1677

However, if the error is on your side, if interest is not only natural, just, and legitimate, but also useful and profitable, even to those who pay it, you will agree that, in spite of your good intentions, your propaganda can only bring about immense harm. It leads workers to believe that they are the victims of an injustice, one which in fact does not exist, and to take for harmful something that is good. It sows discontent in one class of people and terror in another. It prevents those who are suffering from finding the true cause of their suffering by sending them down the wrong path. It calls their attention to an alleged act of plunder, which stops them seeing and combating real acts of plunder. It makes men's minds familiar with the disastrous view that order, justice, and union 1678 can arise again only through a universal transformation (at once as hateful as it is impossible according to my theory) of the entire system within which work and trade have been carried out since the dawn of time.

There can therefore be no more important question. I will take it up at the point where you left it.

Yes, Sir, you are right. As you say, we are separated only by a certain ambiguity concerning the words "use" and "ownership." However, this ambiguity is enough for you to believe you should stride out with the utmost confidence to the West while my beliefs propel me toward the East. Between us, at the point of departure, the distance is imperceptible, but it loses no time in becoming an immeasurable abyss.

The first thing to do is to retrace our steps until we have found the place where we agree. This terrain, which is common to both of us, is the mutual exchange of services . 1679

I had said: 1680 He who lends a house, a sack of wheat, a plane, a coin, a ship, in short, an item of VALUE, for a fixed length of time is providing a service . Therefore, he should receive, in addition to the return of this item of value at the due date, an equivalent service . 1681 You agree that he ought, in effect, to receive something . This is a major step towards a solution, for this something is what I call INTEREST.

Let us see, Sir, Do we agree on this starting point? For the whole of 1849, you lend me 1,000 francs in écus 1682 or some tool or implement estimated to be worth 1,000 francs a year, or a supply of something worth 1,000 francs, or a house whose annual rental is 1,000 francs. It is in 1849 1683 that I will receive all the advantages that this item of value , created by your work and not mine, can provide. It is in 1849 that you will, voluntarily and in my favor, deprive yourself of these advantages, which you might most legitimately retain for yourself. For us to be all square, for the services to be equivalent and reciprocal, and (or justice to be satisfied, would it be enough for me to return your écus, your tool, your wheat, or your house on the first day of 1850? Be careful, for if this is the case, I warn you that the part I would like to play in these kinds of transactions is that of the borrower: this role is convenient and totally profitable; it enables me to be housed and provided for right through my lifetime at the expense of others, on condition, however, that I find a lender, which, under this system, will be no easy task, for who will build houses to rent them gratis and be content just with simply returning them at the end of the loan period?

So, this is not what you are putting forward. You acknowledge (and this is what I want to establish clearly) that the man who has lent a house or any other item of value has provided a service , which is not repaid by the simple handing back of the keys at the end of the loan period or by the simple repayment (of the loan) at the due date. There is therefore, in your view as well as mine, something to be agreed upon in addition to the return of the item. We may fail to agree on the nature and name of this something, but something is due by the borrower. And since you accept, on the one hand, the mutual exchange of services since, on the other hand you admit that the lender has provided a service , allow me for the moment to call this thing due by the borrower a service .

Well, Sir, I think that the question has made a step and even a major step forward for this is where we are now.

According to your theory, as well as according to mine, the agreement between the lender and borrower that stipulates the following is perfectly legitimate:

1. The full return, at the due date, of the object lent;

2. A service to be provided by the borrower to the lender as compensation for the service he, the borrower, has received.

Now, what will the nature and name of this service due by the borrower be? I do not attach the scientific importance that you do to these matters. In each particular instance, they may be left to the parties to the agreement themselves. It is really their business to negotiate the nature and equivalence of the services to be exchanged as well as their specific names. Science stops when it has shown their cause, origin, and legitimacy. The borrower will pay in wheat, wine, shoes, or labor, depending on his situation. In most cases, and purely as a matter of convenience, he will pay in money, and as you acquire money only through work, it may be said that he pays with his work. Why do you forbid me to call this payment, that is just and legitimate according to you yourself, house rent, farm rent, installments, ground-rent, loan payments, or interest , depending on the circumstances?

But let us move on to the ambiguity that separates us: the alleged confusion, according to you, that I make between use and ownership , between the loan of an item and its complete transfer (of ownership).

You say: He who borrows a piece of property or an item of value and who is required to return it in full at the due date, has only been given in the end the use (of it). What he owes is not an item of property or an item of value, but the use of an equivalent item of property or item of value. To call these two things of quite different natures which have no possible equivalence , the same thing, is to destroy the mutual exchange of services .

To go to the root of the objection, I would have to turn upside down the entire foundation of social economy. 1684 You cannot expect such a project from me but I will ask you whether, according to you, the use of an item of value is not itself something of value . Can it not be evaluated ? According to what rule or principle do you prevent two parties to an agreement from comparing the use of something to a sum of money or an amount of labor, and trading on this basis if this suits them? You lend me a house worth 20,000 francs and in doing so, you provide me with a service. Do you mean that, in spite of my agreement and yours, I can pay you for this, in the name of science, only by lending you also a house of the same value? That is absurd, for if we all had houses each of us would stay in our own, and what would be the reason for making the loan? If you go so far as to claim that the mutuality of services implies that the two services exchanged have to be not only equal in value but also identical in nature , you eliminate the exchange as well as the loan. A hat maker will have to say to his customer: "What I am selling you is not money but a hat; what you owe me is a hat and not money."

If you acknowledge that services may be evaluated and exchanged precisely because they differ in nature, you will have to agree that the handing over of a use that is a service may very legitimately be valued in terms of wheat, money, or labor. Take care here, because although your theory clearly accepts the principle of interest, it tends to do nothing less than to make all transactions immobile.

You are not reforming (society). You are paralysing it.

I am a shoemaker. My trade has to provide me with a livelihood, but in order to exercise it I have to be housed and I have no house. On the one hand you have devoted your work to building one, but you do not know how to make your shoes, nor do you want to go barefoot. We might come to an agreement: you will provide me with a house and I will provide you with shoes. I will benefit from your work just as you will from mine; we will provide each other with a reciprocal service. All we need to do is to reach a fair evaluation, a genuine equivalence, and I cannot think of any other way to do this than by free negotiation.

And if under the pretext that a physical object is being transferred there is only the transfer of the use of something, the theory will tell us: "This transaction cannot take place; it is illegitimate, excessive, and an act of plunder. It involves two services which have no possible equivalence and you have neither the ability to evaluate them nor the right to exchange them"!

Do you not see, Sir, that a theory like this deals a deathblow to trade and freedom at a stroke? What authority is there, then, which can come and abolish our joint and free agreement? Is it the law? Is it the State? But I, for my part, thought that we made the law and that we paid the State to protect our rights, and not to destroy them.

So a short time ago, we were in agreement on this point that the borrower owes something in addition to just returning it. Let us agree now on this other point, that this something can be evaluated and consequently paid as it suits the parties to the agreement in any form that its value may assume.

It follows that, at the due date, the lender should recover:

1. The full value lent;

2. The value of the service provided by the loan.

I have no need to repeat here how the complete return of the object lent of necessity implies the perpetuity of the interest.

Let us now examine briefly this second question:

Is the interest on capital levied at the expense of labor?

You know as well as I do, Sir, that we would be putting forward a very limited idea of interest if we supposed that it appears only when a loan is involved. Whoever contributes capital to the creation of a product intends to be paid not only for his work, but also for his capital, in such a way that interest is one element in the price of all items which are consumed.

Perhaps it is not enough to demonstrate the legitimacy of interest to men who have no capital. They would doubtless be tempted to say: "Since interest is legitimate, we have to be subjected to it, but it is a great misfortune, for without it we would obtain everything more cheaply."

This complaint is totally erroneous; what enables human satisfactions to come ever closer to being free of charge and common to all is the intervention of capital. Capital is the democratic, philanthropic, and egalitarian power par excellence. For this reason, the man who will explain how it functions will provide the most important service to society, for he will put an end to this antagonism between classes, which is just based on error.

It is impossible for me to deal with the theory of capital 1685 in a journal article. I have to limit myself to indicating my line of thought through an example, an anecdote, or a hypothesis that typifies all human transactions. 1686

Let us go back to the beginning of the human race at the time when we can suppose that no capital existed. What then was the value, measured in terms of work, of an object of any sort, such as a pair of stockings, a sack of wheat, an item of furniture, a book, etc.; in other words, at what price (in terms of labour) (would) these things have been purchased? I am not afraid to say that the answer lies in this single word: Infinity . Objects like this were then completely unavailable to the human race.

Let us take the case of a pair of cotton stockings. No man would have managed to produce them in either a hundred or a thousand days of work.

How is it that today in France there is no worker so unfortunate that he cannot obtain a pair of cotton stockings with what he earns from a day's work? 1687 It is precisely because capital contributes to the creation of this product. The human race has invented tools which force nature to provide a contribution that is free .

It is very true that when the price of this pair of stockings is broken down you will find quite a considerable part of this price that relates to capital. The squatter 1688 who clears the land in Carolina certainly has to be paid, the sail that drives the ship from New York to Le Havre has to be paid for, and the machine that turns ten thousand spindles has to be paid for. But it is precisely because we pay for these tools that they cause nature to contribute and they substitute nature's share that is free of cost for labour's share that incurs a cost . If we eliminated successively this series of interest payments that have to be paid, we would, by this very act, eliminate the tools and the contribution of nature that they put to work; in a word, we would return to the the beginning (of the human race), to the time when a thousand days of work would not have been enough to acquire a pair of stockings. This is true for all other things.

You think that interest is levied by someone who does nothing on someone who works . Oh, Sir, before making this sorry and irritating assertion a second time before the public, examine its very basis. Ask what this assertion contains and you will ascertain that it contains just errors and angry rants. You quote my fable on the Plane; allow me to return to it. 1689

Here is a man who wants to make planks. 1690 He will not succeed in making one in a year, for he just has two hands. I lend him a saw and a plane, two tools, do not forget, that are the fruit of my work and which I might use for myself. Instead of one plank, he makes a hundred of them and gives me five. By depriving myself of my belongings, I have thus made it possible for him to have ninety-five planks instead of one and here you are, saying that I am oppressing and robbing him! What! With my saw and a plane that I have created with the sweat of my brow, a one hundred-fold increase in production out of nothing (so to speak), and society is able to enjoy a one hundred fold increase in their use; a worker who was unable to make a single plank has made one hundred of them, and because he freely and voluntarily gives me one twentieth of this surplus , you make me out to be a tyrant and a thief! The worker will see his work bear fruit, the human race will see the range of its satisfactions increase, and I, who am the author of these results, am the only person in the world who will be forbidden to be part of this, even with universal consent!

No, no, this cannot be so. Your theory is as contrary to justice, general utility, and the self interest even of the workers as it is to the experience everywhere down through the ages. Allow me to add that it is no less contrary to the reconciliation of the classes, the union of hearts, and the achievement of human fraternity, which is greater than justice but which cannot do without justice.

FRÉDÉRIC BASTIAT

Letter No. 3: P. J. Proudhon to F. Bastiat (19 November 1849)

Disavowal of the distinction introduced by Mr. Chevé. -Belief in the slogan: A loan is a service; a service is an item of value. - Paradox. - The lender does not deprive himself. - The necessity of organizing free credit. - Categorical questions.

19 November 1849

The aim of the February Revolution, both politically and economically is to establish the absolute freedom of men and citizens.

The way this Revolution works politically is via the establishment of universal suffrage or in other words the absorption of political power in society; economically, it happens via the social organisation of money and credit, again working through absorption, this time by the workers absorbing the function of the capitalists.

Doubtless, this procedure on its own does not provide a complete understanding of the system; it is just its point of departure, its aphorism . But it is enough to explain the Revolution directly and as it is; it consequently permits us to say that the Revolution is not and cannot be anything other than this.

Everything that tends to advance the Revolution as it is thus understood, everything, from wherever it comes, that encourages its development, is essentially revolutionary and we classify it under the heading of Movement .

Everything that opposes the application of this idea, everything that denies or hinders it, whether it is the result of demagogy or absolutism, we call Resistance . If the author of this resistance is the government, or if such resistance acts with the connivance of the government, it becomes Reaction .

Resistance is legitimate when it is in good faith and when it is carried out within the limits of republican freedom; which is merely the recognition of freedom of inquiry, and the consequence of universal suffrage. Reaction, on the other hand, is an infringement of freedom, as it tends to suppress the expression of ideas violently in the name of public authority and in the interests of one party; if it is expressed through laws of exile, deportation, transportation, etc., 1691 it becomes a crime against the sovereignty of the people. Such ostracism is the suicide of republics.

When we gave an account in La Voix du Peuple of the project put forward by Mr. de Girardin to impose a tax on capital, 1692 we had no hesitation in seeing in this one of the boldest manifestations of the revolutionary idea, and although the author of this project was and perhaps still is attached to the Orléans dynasty, 1693 although his personal tendencies make him a man who is eminently on the side of the government, and finally even though he has consistently sided with the "Party of Order" 1694 against the Revolutionary party, we nevertheless think that his idea is part of the movement. For this reason, we have claimed it as our own and if Mr. de Girardin were ever to abandon his own thought, we would take it over as an underpinning of our work and make it one more argument against the adversaries of the Revolution.

It is in line with this elevated and so to say, impersonal rule of criticism that we will be replying to Mr. Bastiat.

Mr. Bastiat, contrary to Mr. de Girardin, is a writer totally imbued with the democratic spirit; if we cannot yet say of him that he is a socialist, he is certainly already more than a philanthropist. The manner with which he understands and sets out political economy places him, together with Mr. Blanqui, 1695 if not very much above, at least very much ahead of other economists who are faithful and unshakeable disciples of Mr. Jean-Baptist Say. In a word, Mr. Bastiat is devoted body and soul to the Republic, to freedom, to equality, and to progress; he has proved this on many occasions brilliantly through the way he has voted in the National Assembly.

In spite of the fact that we include Mr. Bastiat among the party of Resistance, his theory of capital and interest is diametrically opposed to the most authentic trends and the most pressing needs of the Revolution; and this leads us to formulate an important principle. We hope that our readers, following our example, will always be able to distinguish between personalities and principles! Both discussion and charity would be improved by this.

Mr. Bastiat starts his reply with an observation whose accuracy is striking and which we consider to be all the more relevant to recall as it hits straight back at him:

"The extreme enthusiasm," says Mr Bastiat, "with which the people in France have begun to examine economic problems and the scarcely credible indifference of the well-to-do classes with regard to these problems is one of the most characteristic traits of our era. While the longstanding journals, at once the tools and the reflection of upright society, stick to antagonistic and sterile party politics, the papers intended for the working classes are constantly turning over what might be labeled the fundamental or social questions."

Well then! We will say to Mr. Bastiat, the following: You yourself are, unsuspectingly, an example of this scarcely credible indifference with which men of the well-to-do class examine social problems and first-rate economist though you may well call yourself, you are totally ignorant of the current state of the question of capital and interest whose defense you have taken upon yourself. For this reason, as behind the times in ideas as you are in facts, you express yourself to us exactly as would a rentier 1696 before '89. Socialism, which for the last ten years has been protesting against capital and interest, is totally unknown to you; 1697 you have not read its theses, for if you had read them, how could it be that when you prepare to refute socialism, you pass over the whole socialist case in silence?

Truly, when we see you arguing against the socialism of our age, we might take you for an Epimenides waking up with a start after eighty years of sleep. 1698 Is it really to us that you are addressing your patriarchal dissertations? Is it the proletarian of 1849 that you wish to persuade? Then start by examining his ideas; put yourself in his shoes in the current debate. Address the reasons, whether true or false, that drive him and do not give him yours, with which he has been perfectly familiar since time began. Perhaps you may be surprised to hear it said that when you, a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Science, 1699 talk of capital and interest, you are no longer familiar with the subject! This is, nevertheless, what we are now endeavoring to prove to you. After this, we will go back to the question itself if you so wish.

First of all, we deny, and you know this only too well, we deny, in line with Christianity and the Gospel, the intrinsic legitimacy of loans bearing interest; we deny this in line with Judaism and paganism, with all the philosophers and lawmakers of antiquity. For you will note this initial fact, which is valuable in itself, usury 1700 had no sooner appeared on this earth than it was repudiated. Lawmakers and moralists have never ceased to combat it and, if they have not succeeded in eliminating it, at least they have succeeded to a certain point in clipping its wings by setting a limit or a legal rate on interest.

This is therefore our initial proposition, the only one, apparently, that you have heard of: When a loan is paid back, everything that is given over and above the loan is usury and plunder: Quodcumque sorti accedit, usura est . 1701

However, what you do not know and which perhaps will surprise you is that this fundamental denial of interest, in our view, does not destroy the principle or the right, if you wish, that gives rise to interest and which, in spite of the condemnations of both secular and ecclesiastic authorities, has kept it alive to the present day; the true problem for us is not to establish whether usury in itself is illicit (in this respect, we share the opinion of the Church) or if there is a reason for its existence (in this respect, we share the opinion of the economists). The problem is to establish how the abuse might be eliminated without infringing the right; how, in a word, we might escape from from this contradiction.

Let us explain this better, if we can.

On the one hand, it is very true, as you yourself establish from the start, that a loan is a service . And, since every service has a value and since it is part of the nature of a service to be paid for, it follows that a loan ought to have its price , or, to use the technical term, it should bear interest .

However, it is also true, and this truth exists alongside the preceding one, that the person who makes a loan in accordance with the standard conditions governing the profession of lending, does not deprive himself of the capital he lends, as you say he does. On the contrary, he lends it precisely because this loan is not a hardship for him. He lends it because he has no use of it for himself as he already has enough capital for himself. In the end, he lends it because he has no intention, nor is it in his power, to add value to it personally and because, by keeping it in his own hands, this capital that is sterile by nature will remain sterile, whereas by being lent and through the interest that results, it will produce a profit which will enable a capitalist to live without working. Well, living without working is, both from the standpoint of political economy and morality, a contradictory proposition and hence impossible.

Can a landowner who has two estates, one in Tours, the other in Orléans, and who is obliged to establish residence in the one he is working and consequently abandon the other, say that he is depriving himself of anything because he, unlike God, does not possess ubiquity of action and domicile? We might just as well say that we are deprived of residence in New York because we live in Paris. Would you not agree, therefore, that the deprivation of a capitalist is like the deprivation of a master who has lost his slave, like the deprivation of a prince deposed by his subjects, or like the deprivation of a thief who, on wishing to climb into a house, finds dogs on the lookout and its inhabitants at the window?

Well, faced with this statement and this denial that are diametrically opposed, each of which is supported by reasons of equal value but which do not answer each other and cannot mutually bring each other down, what position are we to adopt? You persist in your statement and say: "Do you not wish to pay me interest? So be it! I do not wish to lend you my capital. Try working without capital!" For our part, we persist in our denial and say: "We will not pay you interest because interest, in social economy, is the price of idleness, the basic cause of the inequality of wealth, but also of poverty." As neither of us is prepared to yield, we are reduced to immobility.

This, therefore, is the point at which socialism takes up the question. On the one hand there is the commutative justice of interest, and on the other the organic impossibility and immorality of this same concept of interest. And let us tell you from the start, socialism does not have the pretension of converting anyone, whether it is the Church, which opposes interest, or political economy, which supports it, especially since socialism is convinced that both are right. Here is how it analyses the problem and what it, in turn, proposes, rising over the arguments of the old lenders, whose interest is too strong for their word to be believed, and the declarations of the Fathers of the Church, that have remained dead letters.

Since the theory of usury has succeeded in winning over Christian customs and pagan usage, since the hypothesis or the fiction of the productivity of capital has entered into the practices of nations, let us accept this economic fiction as we have, for the last thirty-three years, accepted the fiction of constitutionalism, and let us see what this fiction is capable of producing when taken to its full conclusion. Instead of rejecting the idea of the productivity of capital purely and simply as the Church has done, a position which could never lead to anything, let us make a historic and philosophical deduction from it, and since the word is more than ever in fashion let us describe the revolution this idea has undergone. After all, the idea has to correspond to something real; it has to indicate some need of the commercial mind for nations never to have hesitated to sacrifice their most lively and sacred beliefs to it.

This, therefore, is how socialism, totally convinced of the inadequacy of both the economic theory and the ecclesiastical doctrine, in turn deals with the question of usury.

First of all, it observes that the principle of the productivity of capital is no respecter of persons and does not create a privilege. This principle is true of any capitalist, with no distinction of title or dignity. What is good for Pierre is good for Paul: each has the same right to usury as he has to work. When, therefore, and I return here to the example that you used, you lend me, in exchange for interest, the plane you manufactured to smooth your planks, if for my part I lend you the saw I have assembled to cut my tree stumps into lengths, I would equally have the right to interest. The rights of capital are the same for all; all individuals, to the extent of their benefits 1702 and loans, will necessarily collect and pay interest. This is the initial consequence of your theory, which would not be a theory without the generality and reciprocity of the right it creates. This is intuitively and immediately obvious.

Let us suppose, therefore, that of all the capital I employ, either in the form of working tools or of raw material, half is lent to me by you. At the same time, let us suppose that of all the capital you put into operation, half of it is lent to you by me; it is clear that the interest that we have to pay each other mutually will cancel out, and if on both sides the capital put forward is equal and the interest payments balance, the remainder, or debt, will be nil. 1703

In society, doubtless, things do not happen exactly like this. The benefits that producers provide to each other are far from being equal and on this basis the interest they have to pay each other are not equal either. This leads to the inequality of condition and wealth.

But the question is to establish whether there is a equilibrium in the benefits provided by capital, work, and talent; consequently whether the equality of income for all citizens, which is perfectly admissible in theory, can be achieved in practice; whether society is tending toward this result; and finally whether against all expectations this is not the fatal conclusion of the theory of usury itself.

Well, this is what socialism states now that it has succeeded in understanding itself, in this case no longer seeing any difference between itself and an economic science which it has examined both through the experience it has acquired and the power of its deductions. In fact, what do the history of civilization and the history of political economy tell us about this major question of interest?

It is that the mutual provision of benefits, whether material or non-material, by means of capital increasingly tend to reach equilibrium for a variety of reasons which we list below, and which the most backward of economists cannot fail to recognize:

1. The division of labour, or the specialisation of industry, which, as it infinitely increases the scale of its tools and machinery and its raw materials, increases the lending of capital to the same extent;

2. The accumulation of capital, which results from the variety of industries and whose effect is to produce competition between capitalists similar to that between merchants, and consequently to produce, imperceptibly, a decrease in the cost of capital and a reduction in the rate of interest;

3. The ever-increasing facility with which capital circulates, by means of cash and bills of exchange;

4. Finally, public security.

These are the general causes that, for centuries past, have led to a reciprocity of benefits which are increasingly in equilibrium between producers, followed by an increasingly equal compensation in the rate of interest, and a constant decrease in the cost of capital.

These facts cannot be denied; you acknowledge them yourself. The only thing is that you do not understand the principle behind them or their significance when you credit capital with the progress achieved in the domain of industry and wealth, when in reality the cause of this progress is not capital but the CIRCULATION of capital. 1704

With the facts analyzed and classified in this way, socialism asks itself whether, in order to stimulate this equilibrium between credit and income, it might not be possible to act directly, not on capital, and note this clearly, but on its circulation; whether it might not be possible to organize this circulation so as to produce simultaneously between capitalists and producers, two entities currently in opposition to one another, but which theory shows ought to be synonymous, the equivalence of benefits, that is to say, the equality of wealth.

To this question socialism also gives this answer: Yes, that is possible, and it can happen in several ways.

First of all, in order to remain within the present situation of credit, which is carried out on the basis of cash, let us suppose that all the producers in the Republic, more than ten million of them, each pays a sum that represents only one percent of their capital. This payment of one percent of the entire fixed and moveable capital of the country would constitute an amount of ONE BILLION francs.

Let us suppose that with the help of this sum a bank was founded to compete with the mis-named Bank of France, 1705 one which discounts and makes loans for mortgages at half of one percent.

It is obvious, in the first place, that if the discount on commercial paper were at half of one percent, the loan on mortgages also at half of one percent, and loans to business firms too kept at half of one percent, 1706 money capital in the hands of all usurers and moneylenders would immediately become totally unproductive; interest would be nil, and credit would be free.

If commercial and mortgage credit, in other words, capital in cash, the capital whose sole function is to circulate, were free, capital in business firms would soon become free as well. Business firms would no longer be capital in reality, they would become goods priced on the Stock Exchange like spirits and cheeses, and rented or sold, two terms that in these circumstances would become synonymous, at COST.

If capital in firms were free in the same way as money capital, which is the same as saying that if the use of it were paid as an exchange and not as a loan, the capital in the form of land would soon in turn become free, that is to say, that farm rent, instead of being the payment made to the owner who did not operate the land, would be the compensation for the difference in value between products from high quality or lower quality land or, to express it better, there would no longer in real terms be any tenants or landowners but just farmers and wine producers, just as there are joiners and mechanics.

Do you want another proof of the possibility of making all forms of capital free by developing economic institutions?

Let us suppose that, instead of this system of taxation that is so complicated, burdensome, and vexatious, bequeathed to us by the feudal nobility, a single tax 1707 was established, no longer on production, circulation, consumption, lodging etc. but, as justice demands and as economic science requires, on the net capital belonging to each individual. Capitalists, who will lose through tax as much or more than they gain through rent and interest, will be obliged either to produce something of economic value themselves or to sell: economic equilibrium would once more be re-established through this intervention by the Fisc (the tax authorities ) at once so simple, and what is more, inevitable.

This, in sum, is the theory of socialism with regard to capital and interest.

Not only do we state that, in accordance with this theory, which incidentally we share with economists, and given our faith in industrial development, that this is the trend and scope of lending at interest, in addition we prove, by citing the destructive consequences of today's economy and by making clear the causes of poverty, that this trend is necessary and the end of usury is inevitable.

In fact, since, as has been said, the cost of lending, the cost of capital, interest on money, in a word, usury, is an integral part of the cost of products, and since this usury is not equal for all, it follows that the price of products, composed as it is of wages and interest, cannot be paid by those who have only their wages and no interest with which to pay for it. The outcome is that because of usury, labor is condemned to unemployment and capital to bankruptcy.

This argument, one of the genre which mathematicians call reductio ad absurdum , which shows the organic impossibility of lending at interest, has been reproduced a hundred times in socialism. Why do economists not mention it?

Do you seriously wish to refute socialist ideas on lending at interest? These are the questions you will have to answer:

1. Is it true that if in outward appearance the benefits provided by capital is a service with a value that consequently ought to be paid for, in one's heart of hearts this benefit does not result in genuine deprivation for the capitalist, and consequently that it does not confer the right to demand something for the cost of the loan?

2. Is it true that, if it is to be above criticism, usury has to be equal, that the trend in society leads to this equalization, so that usury is beyond reproach only when it has become equal for all, that is to say, nil?

3. Is it true that a national bank that provides credit and discounts free of charge is possible?

4. Is it true that through the effect of this free credit and free discount, similar to that of taxation which has been simplified and restored to its true form, rent on property would disappear, together with interest on money?

5. Is it true that there is a contradiction and mathematical impossibility in the old system?

6. Is it true that, after having contradicted several thousand years of theology, philosophy and legislation on usury, political economy will achieve the same result through its own theory?

7. Finally, is it true that usury, as a providential institution, has merely been an instrument of equality and progress as absolutely as, in the realm of politics, the absolute monarchy has been an instrument of freedom and progress, and as, in the field of law, the ordeals of boiling water, dueling, and torture were in their turn instruments of belief and progress?

This is what our opponents will have to examine before they accuse us of scientific and intellectual weakness; these, Mr. Bastiat, are the points that your argument will have to address in the future if you wish it to prevail. The question is clearly and categorically set out; allow us to believe that, once you have read it, you will acknowledge that in nineteenth century socialism there is something that goes beyond the range of your outdated political economy.

P. J. PROUDHON

Letter No. 4: F. Bastiat to P. J. Proudhon (26 November 1849)

The logical boundaries of the debate. Saying yes and no is not an answer. Futility of an objection based on the fact that a capitalist is not depriving himself of anything. The natural and essential productivity of CAPITAL demonstrated using examples. Considerations on leisure.

26 November 1849

Sir, you have asked me seven questions. Please remember that right now there is just one question between us:

Is interest on capital legitimate?

This is a very stormy question. It needs clearing up. In accepting the straightforward hospitality of your columns, my aim has not been to analyze all the possible combinations of credit that the fertile genius of socialists is capable of bringing forth. I have asked myself if interest, which forms part of the price of everything, is plunder, and if consequently the world is divided into capitalists who rob and workers who are robbed. I do not believe this, but others do. Depending on whether truth is on my side or theirs, the future reserved for our beloved country is one of peace or a bloody and inevitable conflict. For this reason, it is worth examining the question seriously.

Why are we not in agreement on this point of departure? Our work would be limited to eliminating disastrous errors and dangerous prejudices in the minds of the masses. We would show people that capital is not a greedy parasite but a friendly and fruitful power. We would show them capital, and here I am almost quoting you verbatim, being accumulated through activity, order, thrift, foresight, the division of labour, peace, and public security; capital being distributed as a result of freedom, among all classes; capital coming within reach of all as its payments become increasingly affordable; capital in short relieving humanity of the weight of fatigue and the yoke of need.

But how can we address different views of the social problem when your answer to this initial question: is interest on capital legitimate? is YES and NO?

YES, for "It is very true that a loan is a service and since every service has a value , consequently since it is part of the nature of a service to be paid for, it follows that a loan ought to have its price, it ought to bear interest ."

NO, for "Loans, through the interest they generate, produce a profit that enables capitalists to live without working. Now, living without working is, both in terms of political economy and in moral terms, a contradictory proposition, and thus something that is impossible."

YES, for "The fundamental denial of interest in our view does not destroy the principle or the right that gives rise to interest. The true problem for us is not to establish whether there is a reason for usury to exist, we share, in this respect, the opinion of the economists."

NO, for "Along with Christianity and the Gospels, we deny the intrinsic legitimacy of loans bearing interest."

YES, for "In its role as a providential institution, usury has been nothing more than an instrument serving both utility and progress."

NO, for "When a loan is repaid, everything paid back in addition to the loan is usury and plunder".

YES and NO finally, for "Socialism does not claim to convert anyone, neither the Church, which denies interest, nor political economy that supports it, and all the more since it is convinced that both of them are right."

Some people say that these contradictory solutions are an intellectual amusement with which Mr. Proudhon is indulging. Others say that these solutions have to be seen as pistol shots that Mr. Proudhon is firing in the street to bring the public to the windows. For my part, since I know that you apply them to all subjects: freedom, property, competition, machines, and religion, I hold them to be a sincere and serious application of your mind.

However, Sir, do you think that the people are able to follow you for any length of time in the labyrinth of your Antimonies ? 1708 Their genius has not been fashioned on the moth-eaten benches of the Sorbonne. The famous words " Quidquid dixeris, argumentabor " or " Ego vero contra, " "Whatever you say, I will contest" or "I will say the opposite," do not go down too well with them. The people want to get to the bottom of things and instinctively feel that at the bottom of things there is a Yes and a No but that there cannot be a Yes and a No that have been blended together. So as not to stray from the subject that we are considering, the people will tell you "Interest nevertheless has to be either legitimate or illegitimate, just or unjust, providential or satanic, property or plunder."

You may be certain that acceptance of contradiction is what is most difficult to achieve, even by subtle minds, and even more so by the people.

If I stop at the first half, and I venture to say at the good half of your thesis , how do you differ from the economists?

You agree that to advance capital is to provide a service , which gives the right to an equivalent service , which can be measured and is known as interest .

You agree that the only way to determine the equivalence of these two services is to allow them to be freely exchanged, since you reject State intervention and proclaim the freedom of men and citizens at the very start of your article.

You agree that, in its role as a providential institution, interest has been an instrument of equality and progress.

You agree that with the accumulation of capital (which certainly would not accumulate if it were denied any return). Interest tends to decrease thus making the tools of labour, raw materials, and supplies ever easier to obtain by an increasing number of classes.

You agree that the obstacles that hinder this desirable spread of capital are artificial and go by the names of privileges, restrictions, and monopolies; that they cannot be the inevitable consequences of freedom, since you appeal to freedom.

This is a doctrine that, by its simplicity, grandeur, consistency, and the sense of justice that it encapsulates, becomes part of our beliefs, wins over our hearts, and permeates the depths of the mind with the feeling of certitude. Why, then, are you cricitising political economy? Is it that it has rejected the various slogans of socialism, and consequently refused to take the name itself? 1709 Yes, it has fought against Saint-Simonism 1710 and Fourierism 1711 and you have fought alongside it against these. Yes, it has criticized the theories of the Luxembourg Palace 1712 and you have criticized them too. Yes, it has fought against Communism and you have done more, you have crushed it. 1713

You are in agreement with political economy on capital, its origin, its mission, its rights, and its direction; you are in agreement with it on the principle to be promoted, freedom; you are in agreement with it on the enemy to be fought against, the illegitimate intervention of the State in honest transactions; you are in agreement with it in its conflicts with previous manifestations of socialism; how is it then that you are turning against it? It is because you have found in socialism a new slogan: contradiction , 1714 or if you prefer, antinomy . For this reason you denounce political economy, saying to it:

"You are a century old. You are no longer up to date with current problems. You see the question from one point of view only. You base yourself on the legitimacy and usefulness of interest and you are right, for it is useful and legitimate, but what you do not understand is that it is at the same time harmful and illegitimate. This contradiction astonishes you; the glory of neo-socialism is that it has discovered this, and this is why that it goes beyond your grasp."

Before seeking to make these contradictory premises yield a solution, as you invite me to do, we must ascertain whether the contradiction exists, and we are thus brought back to examining in ever greater detail the following problem:

Is interest on capital legitimate?

But what can I say? My eyes are fixed on the sword of Damocles 1715 that you are holding over my head. The more conclusive my reasons are, the more you rub your hands and say: No better proof of my thesis could be found. If from the depths of communism a plausible refutation of my arguments is produced, you will also rub your hands and say: Here is support for my antithesis . Oh Antimony! You are genuinely an impregnable citadel. You are the spitting image of skepticism . How shall we persuade Pyrrho 1716 when he tells you: I doubt whether you are speaking to me or whether I am speaking to you; I doubt whether you exist or whether I exist; I doubt whether you are making a statement; I doubt whether I doubt?

In spite of this, let us see on what foundation you base the second half of the antimony.

First of all, you quote the Fathers of the Church, along with Judaism and paganism. Allow me to challenge them in matters of economy. 1717 You yourself admit that Jews and gentiles have said one thing and done another. When it is a question of examining the general laws that society obeys, the way men behave universally carries more weight than a few utterances.

You say: "The person who makes a loan does not deprive himself of the capital he is lending. On the contrary, he lends it precisely because he has no use of it for himself, as he has enough capital for himself otherwise. In the end he lends it because he has no intention, nor is it in his power, to add value to it personally." 1718

Well, what does it matter, if he has created it through his work precisely in order to lend it? In this there is just one ambiguity on the inevitable effect of the division of labour. Your argument attacks sales as well as loans . Do you want proof of this? I will quote your sentence, substituting the word Sale for Loan and Hat maker for Capitalist .

"The person who sells", say I, "does not deprive himself of the hat he is selling. On the contrary, he sells it because this sale does not constitute a deprivation for him. He sells it because he has no use for it himself, as he has enough hats for himself in any case. In the end, he sells it because he has no intention, nor is it in his power, to make use of it personally."

You still claim compensation in support of your antithesis .

"You lend me, at interest, the plane you manufactured to smooth your planks. If, for my part, I lend you the saw I have assembled to cut my tree stumps into lengths, I would equally have the right to interest … If on either side the capital advanced is equal, as the interest payments balance each other out, the outstanding amount would be zero."

Doubtless, and if the capital advanced was unequal, a legitimate outstanding amount will appear. This is precisely how things happen. Here again, what you say about loans may be said about exchanges and even about labor. Since the labor exchanged balances each other out, do you conclude that the labor has been destroyed?

Modern socialism, you say, aspires to achieving this mutual benefit from capital in order that interest, an essential part of the price of everything, would be the same for everyone and consequently cancel itself out. That it should cancel itself out is not ideally impossible and I do not ask for more. However, that requires other things than a newly invented Bank. Let socialism make activity, skill, honesty, saving, foresight, needs, tastes, virtues, vices, and even luck equal for all men and it will have succeeded. But in that case it would not matter whether interest is quoted at half of one percent or at fifty percent.

You accuse us of failing to recognize the significance of socialism because we do not attach much hope to its dreams of Free Credit . You tell us: "You give capital credit for the progress achieved in the fields of production and wealth, whereas the cause of this progress is not capital but the CIRCULATION of capital."

I believe it is you who are taking the effect for the cause here. In order for capital to circulate it has first of all to exist, and for that its emergence has to be stimulated by the prospect of a reward attached to the virtues that give rise to it. It is not because it circulates that capital is useful; it is because it is useful that it circulates. Its intrinsic usefulness makes some people demand it and others offer it; this gives rise to circulation that needs just one thing: TO BE FREE.

But above all, what I deplore is to see capitalists and workers divided into two antagonistic classes, as though there were a single worker in the world who was not to some extent a capitalist and as though capital and work were not the same thing, as though paying one was not to pay the other. It is certainly not to you that this proposition has to be demonstrated. Allow me, nevertheless, to elucidate it with one example, for, as you well know, we are not writing to each other but for the general public.

Two workers present themselves who have the same energy, the same strength and the same degree of skill. One of them just has his hands, the other an axe, a saw, and an adze. I pay the first man 3 francs a day and the second 3 francs 75 centimes. The wages appear to be unequal, but if we examine the matter further we will be persuaded that this apparent inequality is genuine equality.

First of all, I have to reimburse the carpenter for the wear and tear on the tools he uses in my service and for my benefit. 1719 His additional earnings have to provide him with the money to look after his tools and maintain his position. Under this heading, I give him 5 sous extra a day more than the simple worker, without equality being infringed in the slightest.

Next, and I call the reader's attention to this for we are at the heart of the matter, why does the carpenter have tools? Apparently because he has made them with his work or paid for them by his work , which is the same thing. Let us suppose that he has made them by devoting the entire first month of the year to this production. The manual laborer, who has not taken this trouble, can let me hire his services for 300 days, whereas the capitalist-carpenter 1720 will have only 270 days when he can work and earn. So 270 days with tools, therefore, have to produce as much for him as 300 days without tools, in other words, 270 days have to be paid at 5 sous more.

This is still not all. When the carpenter took the decision to make his tools, he had the aim, clearly totally legitimate, of improving his condition. The following words cannot be put into his mouth: "I am going to accumulate provisions and impose privations on myself in order to be able to work for an entire month for no pay. I will devote this month to making tools that will enable me to produce much more work for my customer's benefit. I will then ask him to pay my salary for the next eleven months so that I earn just as much overall as if I had remained a manual laborer." No, this cannot be so. It is obvious that what has stimulated insight, skill, foresight, and sacrifice in this artisan is the hope, the very fair hope, of obtaining a better rate of pay for his work.

In this way, we arrive at the following breakdown of the carpenter's wages:

1. 3 francs 0 centimes gross pay

2. 25c. wear on tools

3. 25.c compensation for the time spent on making the tools

4. 25c. fair payment for skill, foresight, and sacrifice

______________

3 francs75 centimes

Where can you see injustice, iniquity, and plunder in this? What do all these cries mean that have so absurdly been raised against our carpenter who has become a capitalist?

And note clearly that the extra pay he receives is not obtained at the expense of anyone; I who pay him have less reason than anyone to complain. Because of his tools, additional production has, so to say, been drawn from nothing. This extra utility is shared between the capitalist and me, who as a consumer, here represents the community and the entire human race.

Another example, since it seems to me that these direct analyses of the facts are more instructive than controversy.

A farmer has a field that has been made almost barren because of excess water. As he is a rather ignorant man, he takes a container and goes out to take up the water that is drowning his furrows. This is very heavy work; who ought to pay for it? Obviously the person who buys the harvest. If man had never thought of another method of drainage, wheat would be so expensive, even though there was no capital to pay (or rather because there was none ) that nobody would produce it, and this has been the fate of humanity for many centuries.

However, our farmer has the idea of digging a drain. Here capital makes its appearance. Who ought to pay for the cost of this undertaking? It is not the person who buys the first harvest. That would be unjust, since the drain will obviously benefit countless successive harvests. How then should the division be made? According to the law of interest and amortization. The farmer, like the carpenter, has to recover the four components of remuneration that I set out above, or he would not dig the drain.

And although interest is here levied on the price of wheat, it would be economic heresy to say that this interest is a loss for the consumer. Quite the contrary, it is because the consumer pays the interest on this capital, in the form of a drain, that he is not paying for the much more expensive drainage done by hand. And if you examine the matter closely, you will see that it is always work that the consumer pays for; only in the second case, there is cooperation from nature that is very useful and very productive, but which is not paid for.

Your greatest complaint against interest is that it allows capitalists to live without working. "Well, you say, living without working is, both in political and moral economic terms, a contradictory proposition and something that is impossible."

For man, as God has seen fit to make him, to live without working is, in absolute terms, no doubt impossible. But what is not impossible for man is to live for two days on the work of just one. What is not impossible for the human race, and what is even a providential consequence of its perfectible nature, is the constant increase in the ratio of the results obtained for the efforts expended. If an artisan has been able to improve his lot by making rough tools, why would he not improve it still further by creating machines that are more complicated by devoting more activity, more ingenuity and more foresight, and by subjecting himself to longer sacrifices? If talent, perseverance, order, savings, and the exercise of all virtues were practised within a family, why should this family not achieve some degree of leisure in the long run, or to put it better, to move into a higher order of production?

In order for this leisure to generate, justly, a certain irritation and jealousy in those who have not yet achieved this, it would be necessary for it to have been achieved at the expense of others, and I have proved that this was not so. In addition, it would be necessary for it not to be the eternal aspiration of all men.

I will end this letter, which is already too long, with a reflection on leisure.

Whatever sincere admiration I have for the admirable laws of social economy, whatever period of my life I have devoted to studying this science, whatever confidence is inspired in me by its solutions, I am not one of those who believe that it embraces the entire destiny of man. 1721 Production, distribution, circulation, and the consumption of wealth are not the sum of all things for man. There is nothing in nature that does not have a final aim, and man also has to have a goal other than that of providing for his material existence. Everything tells us this. Where do the sensitivity of his feelings and the ardor of his aspirations, his ability to admire and experience enchantment come from? Whence comes his ability to find in the slightest flower a subject of contemplation, or the excitement with which his senses receive and transmit to his spirit, like bees to the hive, all the treasures of beauty and harmony that nature and art have spread around him? How shall we explain the tears that moisten his eyes when he hears about the slightest act of devotion? What is the origin of that ebb and flow of feeling which his heart fashions, much as it directs his life-blood? Where does his love of humanity and his reaching out for the infinite come from? These are the marks of a noble destiny, which is not limited by the narrow bounds of industrial production. There is a purpose to man's existence. What is it? This is not the place to raise this question. But, whatever it is, what we can say is that he cannot achieve it if, bowed under the yoke of inexorable and constant work, he has no leisure to develop his senses, his affections, his mind, his sense of the beautiful, and what is purest and most elevated in his nature; the germ of which is in all men but in a latent and inert form because of a lack of leisure in all too many of them.

What is the power that, to a certain extent, will lighten the burden of hardship for all? What will shorten working hours? What will loosen the bonds of the heavy yoke, which bows not only men but also women and children down to material things when they appear not to be destined for this? It is capital; the capital which, in the form of wheels, gears, rails, waterfalls, weights, sails, oars, or ploughs takes over such a great portion of the work originally carried out at the expense of our sinews and muscles; the capital that increasingly causes the free forces of nature to make a contribution for the benefit of all. Capital is therefore a friend, a benefactor to all men, and particularly to the long suffering classes. What they ought to want is that it accumulates, increases, and is spread around beyond reckoning or measure. And if there is one sad sight in the world, a sight that can be defined only by these words: material, moral, and collective suicide, it is to see these classes, in their misguidedness, wage relentless war on capital. It would not be more absurd nor sadder to see all the capitalists in the world join forces to paralyze arms and legs and kill labour.

To sum up, Mr. Proudhon, I will say this to you: the day on which we agree on this initial item, that interest on capital, agreed upon by free negotiation, is legitimate, I will make it my pleasure and duty to discuss with you fairly the other questions you put to me.

FREDERIC BASTIAT

Letter No. 5: P. J. Proudhon to F. Bastiat (3 December 1849)

Complaint about the limits set on the debate. Interest has been but is no longer legitimate. Inferences drawn from history. Illegitimacy succeeds legitimacy. The incapacity and ill will of society. It is the circulation of CAPITAL and not CAPITAL itself that gives rise to the progress of social wealth.

3 December 1849

Sir, your latest letter ends with the following words:

"The day on which we agree on this initial item, that the interest on capital is legitimate, I will make it my pleasure and duty to discuss with you fairly the other questions you put to me."

I will, Sir, endeavor to give you satisfaction.

But first of all allow me to ask you this question, which I just wish I could make less tersely : What have you come to La Voix du Peuple to do? To refute the theoretical case for free credit, that is, the abolition of all forms of interest on capital, and all rent on property.

Why then do you refuse to enter the theoretical grounds of this argument immediately, to pursue it at the level of its principles, its method, and its development, and to examine its contents, the proofs of truth that it provides, and the meaning of the facts it quotes, which spectacularly contradict and nullify the facts or rather the fiction that you endeavor to support with regard to the productivity of capital? Is this a serious and fair discussion? Since when have we seen philosophers answer a philosophical system with such a flat refusal? Can we not first of all come to an agreement on the system in vogue, before we examine a new one? Since when has it been accepted in science that any fact, idea, or theory that contradicts the generally accepted theory has to be rejected mercilessly by prior definition?

What! Are you endeavoring to refute me and convince me and then, instead of grappling with my theory in a straightforward manner, you present me with yours? In answer to me you begin by demanding that I reach agreement with you on what I positively deny! Truly, would I not have the right to say to you immediately at this point: "Keep your theory on interest bearing loans since it pleases you and leave me my theory of free loans, which I find more advantageous, moral, useful, and much more practical? Instead of debating, as we hoped to do, we would be free to speak ill of each other and criticize each other mutually. May the better man win! …

This, Sir, is how the discussion would end if, unfortunately for your theory, it were not obliged to overturn mine in order to maintain its position. This is what I will have the honor of demonstrating to you by following your letter point by point.

You begin with a joke, doubtless very witty, about the law of contradiction that I used to trace the progress of socialist theory. Believe me, Sir, there is always little glory to be gained by an intelligent man laughing at things he does not understand, especially when these things are based on authority as respectable as the law of contradiction. Dialectics, established by Kant 1722 and his successors, 1723 is now understood and used by half of Europe, and when our neighbors have taken philosophical speculation so far it is certainly not a title of honor for our country to remain at the level of Proclus 1724 and Saint Thomas. 1725 Through eclecticism and materialism we have even lost an understanding of our traditions; we do not even understand Descartes, 1726 since if we understood Descartes he would lead us to Kant, Fichte, 1727 Hegel, 1728 and beyond.

However, let us leave contradiction, since it puts you out of sorts, and return to the old method. You know what is understood in ordinary logic by distinction. Not having a teacher of philosophy, Diafoirus 1729 the younger would have taught you this. It is the process that is most familiar to you and which gives the best example of the subtlety of your mind. To answer your question, therefore I will make use of the distinguo : 1730 perhaps then it will no longer be possible for you to say that you do not understand me.

You ask: Is interest on capital legitimate, yes or no ? Answer this question without antimony or antithesis.

My answer is: L et us make some distinctions , please. Yes, Interest on capital could be considered legitimate at one time; no, it can no longer be so considered in another. Does this present you with some confusion or ambiguity? I will endeavor to shine some light into all the shadows.

Absolute monarchy was legitimate at one time: it was one of the conditions of political development. It ceased to be legitimate at a different time because it became an obstacle to progress. The same has been true of constitutional monarchy; in '89 and up to 1830, is was the sole political form that suited our country but today it would be a cause of upheaval and decay.

Polygamy was legitimate at one time; it was the first step made out of communal promiscuity. In our time it is condemned as being contrary to the dignity of women, and we send people to the galleys for it.

Judicial combat, the ordeal of boiling water, and torture itself, if you read Mr. Rossi, 1731 also had their period of legitimacy. They were the first forms given to justice. We reject them now, and any magistrate who had recourse to them would be guilty of assault.

Under Saint Louis, 1732 arts and trades were feudalized, organized on a corporate basis, and riddled with privileges. This regulation was at that time useful and legitimate; its aim was to establish work on a feudal basis comparable to the feudalism of land and nobility. It has been abandoned since and rightly so: since '89 industry is free of it. 1733

I therefore say once more to you, and in all conscience I believe that I am speaking clearly: Yes, interest-bearing loans were at one time legitimate, when any kind of democratic centralization of credit and circulation of money was impossible. It is no longer so now that this centralization has become a necessity of the age and hence a duty of society and a right of its citizens. It is for this reason that I am rising up against usury: I say that society owes me credit and discount without interest; I call interest THEFT. 1734

Willy-nilly, you will have to come out onto the grounds to which I am calling you, for if you refuse to do so, if you shroud yourself in the good faith of your former authority, I will then accuse you of bad faith and will shout everywhere, like Molière's Mascarille 1735 : Stop thief! Stop thief! Stop thief!

To put an end finally to antinomy, I will now, with the help of the previously quoted examples, tell you in a few words what antinomy adds to the of making distinctions. This is germane to our argument.

You understand, therefore, that something can be true, just, and legitimate at one time and wrong, iniquitous, and criminal in another. You cannot fail to understand this, since this is how things are. 1736

Well, the philosopher asks himself, how can a thing that is true one day fail to be so on the next? Can truth be changed in this way? Is truth not truth? Ought we to believe that it is just a fantasy, a mirage, and a mere presumption? In short, is there or is there not a reason for this change? Above truth that changes, is there, by chance, a truth that does not change, a truth that is absolute and immutable?

In short, philosophy does not stop at facts as revealed by experience and history; it seeks to explain them.

Well then! Philosophy has found or, if you prefer, it thinks it has seen that this change in social institutions, this turnaround that these institutions have experienced after a certain number of centuries, results from the fact that the ideas of which it is the expression have in themselves an evolutionary power, a principle of perpetual motion arising from their contradictory essence.

Thus it is that interest on capital, legitimate when the loan is a service provided by one citizen to another but which ceases to be so when society has acquired the power of organizing credit free of charge for everyone, this credit, I say, is in essence contradictory, since on the one hand the service provided by the lender is entitled to remuneration and on the other hand all income implies that something is produced or gone without, which is not the case with a loan. The revolution that has occurred relating to the legitimacy of loans arises from this. This is how socialism formulates the question; this is also the ground on which the defenders of the old regime ought to be putting themselves.

Wrapping yourself up in tradition, limiting yourself to saying: A loan is a service provided and therefore it ought to be paid for, without being willing to go into the considerations that tend to annul interest is not answering the question. Socialism, redoubling its energy, protests and tells you: I have no use for your service, which is a service for you but plunder for me, when society is in a position to allow me to enjoy free of charge the same benefits that you are offering me. Imposing a service like this on me whether I like it or not by refusing to (socially) organize the circulation of capital is making me bear an unjust levy and robbing me.

Thus, your entire argument in favor of interest consists in mixing up the eras; 1737 I mean mixing up that which, in loans, is legitimate with what is not, whereas I, on the contrary, am making a careful distinction between them. This is what I will succeed in making intelligible to you through an analysis of your letter.

I will address all your arguments, one by one.

In my first reply, I pointed out to you that the person who lends does not deprive himself of his capital. Your answer is: What does it matter, if he has created his capital precisely in order to lend it?

And when you say this, you betray your own cause. With these words, you agree with my antithesis , which consists in saying: The secret reason interest-bearing loans, which were legitimate yesterday, are no longer so today, is that loans in themselves do not lead to anything done without. I take note of this admission.

However, you hang on to the intention: What does that matter, you say, if the lender has created this capital precisely in order to lend it?

To which I reply: And what in turn is your intention towards me, if I do not really need your service, and if the alleged service you wish to provide me has become necessary to me only because of the ill-will and incompetence of society? Your credit resembles the credit provided by the Corsair 1738 to the slave when he gives him his freedom in return for a ransom. I protest at your credit at 5 percent, since society has the power and duty to give it to me at zero percent, and if it refuses to do so I will accuse it as well as you of theft. I will say that it is a partner, trouble-maker, and organiser of theft.

Likening loans to sales, you say: your argument attacks sales as much as it does loans. In effect, a hat maker who sells hats does not deprive himself of them.

No, for he receives for his hats, or at least he is supposed to receive, their value, neither more or less , immediately. However, a capitalist lender not only does not forego anything, since he recovers his capital entirely, he receives more than his capital, more than he contributes to the exchange; he receives, in addition to the capital, interest that does not represent any positive product on his part. Well, a service that does not exact some work from the person providing it, is a service that is liable to become free: this is what you yourself were telling us a moment ago.

After having acknowledged that the loan involves nothing foregone, you nevertheless agree " that it is theoretically possible for interest , which is today an integral part of the price of things, may be offset for everyone and consequently cancel itself out . "But", you add, "other things are needed than a newly invented Bank. Let socialism make activity, skill, honesty, savings, foresight, needs, tastes, virtues, vices, and even luck equal for all men and it will have succeeded."

In this way, you go into the question merely to avoid answering it immediately. Socialism, at the point it has reached, claims precisely that it is with the assistance of bank and tax reform that it is possible to achieve this mutual compensation (or balancing out). Instead of passing over this claim by socialism, as you do, stop awhile and refute it; you will have put an end to all the Utopias in the world. For socialism states, and without this claim socialism would not exist, it would be nothing, that it is not by making "activity, skill, honesty, savings, providence, need, tastes, virtues, vices, and even luck" equal for all men that we will succeed in compensating for interest and making net income equal; socialism asserts, on the contrary, that it is necessary to start by centralizing credit and abolishing interest in order to equalize abilities, needs, and chances. If there were no more thieves among us, we would all be upright and happy! This is socialism's statement of principles! I feel the keenest regret at telling you this, but you have such little knowledge of socialism that you bump into it without seeing it.

You persist in attributing to capital all the progress made by social wealth, which I myself attribute to the circulation of capital, and you tell me with reference to this, that I am mistaking the effect for the cause.

But by supporting a proposition like this you are unwittingly undermining your own thesis. J. B. Say demonstrated, and you are fully aware of this, that the transport of something of value, whether this value is in money or goods, constitutes itself a value; 1739 that it is a product that is as real as wheat or wine, and that consequently the service provided by the shopkeeper or banker is as worthy of payment as the services provided by farmers and wine producers. It is on this principle that you yourself rely when you claim payment for capitalists who, by providing the benefit of their capital, whose return is guaranteed to them, carry out the functions of transport and circulation. For the sole reason that I make a loan, you said in your first letter, I am providing a service and creating a value. These were your words, which we have accepted: in this we were both in agreement with the master.

I am thus quite right to say that it is not the capital itself, but the circulation of capital, it is this aspect of the service, product, merchandise, object of value, or economic reality that is known as movement or circulation in political economy and which basically constitutes the entire subject matter of economic science, that is the cause of wealth. We pay all those who provide this service for it but we hold that, with regard to capital itself, or money, it is up to society itself to enable us to enjoy it free of charge. If it does not do so, there is fraud and plunder. Do you now understand where the true point of the social question lies? …

After having deplored the sight of capitalists and workers divided into two antagonistic classes, which certainly is not the fault of socialism, you take the perfectly useless trouble of demonstrating to me, using examples, that every worker is to some extent a capitalist and puts his capital to work, that is to say, (to engage in) usury. Who has ever considered denying this? Who has told you that what we acknowledge to be legitimate in capitalists at a particular time we condemn at the same time in workers?

Yes, we know that the price of goods and services is currently broken down into:

1. Raw materials;

2. Amortization of tools of work and expenses;

3. Payment for work;

4. Interest on capital.

This is true for all employment, for agriculture, industry, commerce, and transport. These are the Caudine Forks 1740 of all that is not parasitical, whether in the case of capitalist or worker. You do not need to give us lengthy details on this matter, interesting though they may be, as well as illuminating as to what your imagination delights in.

I repeat: the question as far as socialism is concerned, is to ensure that this fourth element which enters into the structure of the price of things, that is to say, interest on capital, is off set between all producers and consequently cancels itself out. We maintain that this is possible and that, if it is possible, it is society's duty to provide free credit for all, otherwise society would not be a proper society but a capitalist plot against the workers, a pact for pillage and murder.

Please understand therefore for once that it is not a question of your endeavoring to explain to us how capital is formed, how it increases with interest, how interest forms part of the price of products, and how all workers are themselves guilty of the sin of usury: we have known all this for a long time, just as we are likewise convinced of the good faith of rentiers and landowners.

We say: An economic system based on the fiction of the productivity of capital, which could be justified at one time, is now illegitimate. Its impotence and harmful nature have been proved; it is this which is the cause of all current poverty, it is this which still supports the old fiction of representative government, the latest formula for tyranny among men.

I will not follow you in the quite religious ideas with which you end your letter. Allow me to tell you that religion has nothing to do with political economy. 1741 True science is self-sufficient; if it does not fulfill this condition, it is not true science. If political economy requires religious sanction to make up for the powerlessness of its theories and if, for its part, religion pleads the imperatives of political economy to excuse the sterility of its dogma, the result will be that political economy and religion will indict one another instead of giving each other mutual support, and both will perish.

Let us begin by establishing justice and, in addition, we will have freedom, fraternity, and wealth: the happiness of the other life itself will be all the more assured. Is the inequality of capitalist income the prime cause of the physical, moral, and intellectual misery that today afflicts society or is it not? Should we make income more evenly balanced for all men and make the circulation of capital free of charge by integrating it with the exchange of products and cancelling interest? This is what socialism is asking for and what requires an answer.

In its more positive conclusions, socialism provides a solution in he democratic and free centralisation of credit, combined with a single tax system that replaces all the other taxes and is based on capital.

Let this solution be put to the test; let us attempt to put it into practice. It is the only way socialism can be refuted; other than this, we will sound our war cry ever louder: Property is theft! 1742

P. J. PROUDHON

Letter No. 6: F. Bastiat to P. J. Proudhon (10 December 1849)

Is it true that lending is no longer the provision of a service today? Is society a capitalist obliged to lend free of charge? Explanation of the circulation of capital. Illusions given their rightful name. What is true is that interest frees people from paying a higher price.

10 December 1849

I wish to remain on my own ground; you wish to entice me on to yours and you tell me: "What have you come to La Voix du Peuple to do, if not to refute the theory of free credit, etc.?

We have a misunderstanding. I did not go to La Voix du Peuple; La Voix du Peuple came to me. Free credit was being discussed everywhere, and each day witnessed the birth of a new plan for achieving this idea.

I then said to myself: It is pointless to combat these plans one after the other. Proving that capital has a legitimate and eternal right to be paid for would bring all these plans down at the same time and overturn their common base.

So I published Capital and Rent .

Since La Voix du Peuple did not find my demonstration conclusive, it refuted it. I requested the opportunity to justify it and you very decently agreed to this. It is therefore on my ground that the discussion should be continued.

Moreover, society has always and everywhere developed according to the principle that I invoke. It is up to those who want it to develop according to an opposing principle from now on to prove that society has been in error. The burden of proof is on their shoulders.

And after all, how important really is this introductory debate? Is not the proof that interest is legitimate, just, useful, beneficial, and eternal, proof that free credit is an illusion?

Allow me then, Sir, to come back to this dominant question: Is interest legitimate and useful?

Taking pity on me for my ignorance of German philosophy in which you see me languish (as do a good number of our readers), you happily proceed to substitute the law of distinction for that of contradiction by metamorphosing Kant into Diafoirus.

Thank you for this gracious kindness. It puts me at my ease. I must admit that my mind categorically refuses to accept that two contradictory assertions can be true at the same time. I respect Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, as I am bound to, in good faith of course. But if their books lead the mind of the reader to accept such propositions as: Theft is property; Property is theft; day is night ; I thank Heaven every day of my life for not having placed these books before my eyes. Your intelligence has been honed on these sublime subtleties; mine would inevitably have succumbed and far from making myself understood by others, I would no longer be able to understand myself.

Finally, to the question: Is interest legitimate? You reply, no longer in German: Yes and no , but in Latin: Distinguo . "Let us make a distinction: yes, interest on capital could be considered legitimate at one time; no, it can no longer be so considered at another."

Well then, your kindness, it appears, is hastening the conclusion of this debate. Above all, it proves that I had chosen my ground well, for what are you claiming? You say that, at a given time, returns on capital go from being legitimate to illegitimate, that is to say divests itself of one nature to clad itself in an opposite one. Now assuredly the presumption is not in your favor. It is up to the person who wishes to overturn universal practice on the strength of such a strange statement to prove it.

I had drawn the legitimacy of interest from the fact that a loan is a service , which can be evaluated, and consequently has a value and may be exchanged for anything of equal value. I even believed that you were convinced of the truth of this doctrine in these words:

"It is very true, as you yourself establish at the same time, that a loan is a service. And, since any service has a value and since it is in the nature of any service to be paid for, it follows that loans must have their price or, to use the technical term, that they have to bear interest ."

This is what you were saying two weeks ago. Today you say: Let us make a distinction. In the past, lending provided a service but now it does not provide a service.

Well, if lending no longer provides a service, it goes without saying that interest is, I will not say illegitimate, merely impossible.

Your new line of argument implies the following dialogue:

BORROWER: Sir, I wish to set up a shop and need ten thousand francs. Please would you lend them to me?

LENDER: Yes, indeed, let us discuss the conditions.

BORROWER: Sir, I will not accept conditions. I will keep your money for one year, two years, twenty years, after which I will purely and simply return it to you, bearing in mind that with regard to the repayment of a loan, everything that is paid over and above the loan is usury and plunder .

LENDER: But since you have come to request a service from me, it is only natural that I should ask you for one in return.

BORROWER: Sir, I have no use for your service .

LENDER: In that case, I will keep my capital even if I have to eat it.

BORROWER: Sir, I am a socialist and socialism, redoubling its efforts, protests and tells you, through me that: I have no use for your service, which is a service for you but plunder for me, given that society has made it possible for me to enjoy the same benefits you are offering me, free of charge. Imposing a service like this on me whether I like it or not by refusing to (socially) organise the circulation of capital, is making me bear an unfair levy and robbing me.

LENDER: I am imposing nothing on you against your will. Since you do not consider a loan to be a service, refrain from borrowing money, as I will from lending it. If society offers you benefits for no payment , go and talk to it, because that is much more convenient; and as for socially organising the circulation of capital , which you demand that I do, if what you mean by that is that you will have access to my capital free of charge through the agency of society, I have exactly the same objections to this indirect process which have led me to refuse to give you a direct loan free of charge.

Society! I must admit I was surprised to see this new character, a compliant capitalist, appearing in an article from your pen.

What is this! Sir, you who, in the very paper in which you address your letter to me, have rebutted with such unbridled energy the systems produced by Louis Blanc 1743 and Pierre Leroux, 1744 have you not dissipated the fiction of the State 1745 only to put in its place the fiction of Society ?

What is society then, as distinct from anyone who lends or borrows, and receives or pays the interest inherent in the cost of all things? What is this Deus ex machina that you introduce so unexpectedly to pronounce the last word on the problem? Is there on the one hand the whole mass of workers, merchants, artisans, and capitalists and on the other Society, a quite separate entity with such plentiful capital that it is able to lend to everyone without care or limit and totally free of any payment ?

This is not what you mean; and the only proof I need is your article on the State. 1746 You know very well that society has no capital other than that in the hands of capitalists, both great and small. Should Society be forced to seize this capital and circulate it free of charge on the pretext of organising it (along socialist lines)? In truth I am all at sea here, and I think that, under the influence of your pen, the dividing line between property and theft as perceived in the public mind is constantly being erased.

In seeking to get to the root of the error I am combating here, I think I have found it in the confusion you make between the costs of the circulation of capital and the interest on capital . You believe that the circulation of capital free of charge can be achieved, and you conclude from this that loans will be free. It is as though we were saying that when transport costs from Bordeaux and Paris are abolished, Bordeaux wine will be obtainable for nothing in Paris. You are not the first person to suffer from this illusion. Law said: "The law of circulation is the only one that can save empires." 1747 He acted on this principle, and instead of saving France he lost her.

I say: The circulation of capital and the costs it incurs is one thing; interest on capital is another. A nation's capital consists of material of all sorts, provisions, tools, goods, and cash, and these things are not lent free of charge. Depending on the level of development of society, it is more or less easy to transfer a given amount of capital, or what it costs, from one place to another or from one hand to another, but this has nothing to do with the abolition of interest. Take a man in Paris who wishes to lend and a man from Bayonne who wishes to borrow. However, the Parisian does not have what the Bayonnais wants. What is more, neither is aware of the other's intentions, so they cannot get in touch with one another, reach an agreement, and finalize (the deal). These are the obstacles to circulation . These obstacles are steadily decreasing, first of all through the intervention of cash and then through bills of exchange, successively from the private bankers, the National Bank, and the free banks. 1748

It is fortunate for the consumers of capital, as it is for the consumers of wine, that the means of transport are constantly improving. However, on the one hand circulation costs can never decrease as far as zero, since there is always an intermediary who provides a service , and on the other hand even if these costs were totally obliterated there would still be Interest, which would not be noticeably affected by this. There are free banks; 1749 these are under the control of the workers themselves, who are their shareholders. What is more, because of their number, they are always within reach; each day, some deposit their savings while others obtain from them the advances they require. Circulation is as easy and rapid as possible. Does this mean that credit there is free of charge, that capital does not produce interest for those who lend it and costs nothing to those that borrow it? No, it means only that lenders and borrowers are able to come together more easily there than elsewhere.

Thus, circulation that is totally free of charge is an illusion.

Free credit is an illusion.

To imagine that the first of these free services, if it were possible, involves the second being free is the third illusion.

You see that I have allowed myself to be drawn on to your ground and, since I have taken three steps on to it, I will take a further two.

You want to (socially) organize circulation in such a way that each person receives as much interest as he pays, and this, you say, is what will achieve the equality of wealth.

Well, I say:

The universal cancelling out of interest payments is an illusion.

The total equality of wealth resulting from this illusion is another illusion.

Anything of value is made up of two elements, payment for the work involved and payment for the capital. In order for these two elements to be in identical proportion in all things of equal value, every item of human work would have to require the same use of machines, the same consumption of raw materials, and the same amount of present and accumulated (past) labor.

Would your bank ever make available to the local street messenger, whose sole job is to hire out his time and legs, as much capital for his services as a printer or a manufacturer of stockings? Note that, in order for a pair of cotton stockings to reach this errand boy, intermediary contributors have been required: the use of land, which is capital, of a ship, which is capital, and of a spinning mill, which is also capital. Will you say that when the street messenger trades his service, valued at 3 francs, for a book, valued at 3 francs, he is misled in that the element of present labour is dominant in the service and the element of accumulated labour (is) dominant in the book? What does that matter if the two objects traded are worth the same , and their equal value is determined by free negotiation? Provided that what is worth one hundred is traded for something else worth one hundred, what does it matter what the proportion is of the two elements that make up each of these equal prices? Would you deny the legitimacy of the payment relating to capital? This would be calling into question a point that is already accepted in the debate. Besides, on what basis would past labour rather than present labour be excluded from any payment?

Work is divided into two quite distinct categories:

Either it is exclusively devoted to the production of an object, as when a farmer sows, hoes, harvests, and threshes his wheat, or when a tailor cuts out and sews a suit, etc.

Or it is used to produce an undetermined series of similar objects, as when a farmer fences, improves, and drains his field, or when a tailor furnishes his workshop.

In the first case, all the costs of production have to be paid for by the person who buys the harvest or the suit; in the second, production has to be financed by an undetermined number of harvests or suits. And it would quite clearly be absurd to say that the work of the second category should not be paid for at all because it is now called capital.

Well, how does our second producer manage to spread the payment due to him over an undefined number of successive purchasers? Through combinations of the amortization of debt and interest that the human race has invented from the outset, ingenious combinations that socialists would find it extremely difficult to replace. For this reason, all their ingenuity has limited itself to abolishing them, and they do not notice that this is quite simply eliminating the human race.

But when everything that has just been shown to be illusionary is regarded as realizable, that is to say, costless circulation, costless loans, and the cancelling out of interest payments, I say that we would still not achieve the absolute equality of wealth. And the reason for this is simple. Does the People's Bank intend to the change the human heart? Will it take steps to make all men are equally strong, active, intelligent, well organized, thrifty, or farsighted? Will it make sure that tastes, preferences, aptitudes, and ideas do not vary infinitely? Will it ensure that some do not prefer to sleep in the sun while others exhaust themselves working? That there are no spendthrifts and misers, people keen to pursue the assets of this world while others are more preoccupied with the life hereafter? It is clear that absolute equality of wealth can be the result only of all these impossible equalities, and many others.

But if the absolute equality of wealth is illusionary, what is not is the constant, ever growing closeness of all men to the same physical, intellectual, and moral level under a regime of freedom. Among all the forms of energy that contribute to this great leveling out, one of the most powerful is capital. And since you have offered me the use of your magazine, allow me to draw the attention of your readers for a moment to this subject. It is not enough to demonstrate that interest is legitimate; it also has to be proved that it is useful, even to those that bear its costs. You have said that interest in past times was "an instrument of equality and progress." 1750 What it was, it still is, and always will be. Its development does not change its nature.

Workers will perhaps be surprised to hear me state the following:

Of all the elements that enter into the price of things, the one they ought to pay most joyfully is precisely interest or the remuneration of capital, since this payment always saves them one that is even greater.

Pierre is an artisan in Paris. He needs to have a load transported to Lille: a present he wishes to give to his mother. If no capital existed in the world (and there would be none if all payment for it were denied), this transportation would cost Pierre at least two months of hard labor, either by himself or by someone else he got to do it for him, since he could carry out the task himself only if he carried the load up hill and down dale and no one could do it for him except in the same way.

Why does Pierre meet with entrepreneurs who ask him for just one day's work in order to save him sixty? Because capital has intervened in the form of carts, horses, rails, railcars, and locomotives. Doubtless Pierre has to pay something for this capital, but it is precisely for this reason that he does or has done for him in one day what would have taken him two months to do.

Jean is a blacksmith, a very upright man but one often heard to speak out against property. He earns 3 francs a day; 1751 this is not much, it is too little, but in the end, since wheat costs about 18 francs a hectoliter, Jean is able to say that he causes a hectoliter of wheat or its value to flow from his anvil each week, or 52 hectoliters a year. I am supposing now that capital did not exist and that our blacksmith is faced with 1,000 hectares of land and told: "Make use of this land which is very fertile; all the wheat you grow is yours." Jean would doubtless reply: "Without horses, a plough, an axe, or tools of any sort, how do you expect me to strip the land of the trees, roots, grass, stones, and stagnant pools of water that obstruct it? I will not be able to grow one stem of wheat in ten years." Jean should therefore say to himself: "What I would not be able to do in ten years, others are doing on my behalf, and they are asking me for just one week of work. It is clear that it is beneficial to me to pay capital, for if I did not pay for it there would be none, and others would be in as much difficulty faced with this land as I am myself."

Every morning, Jacques buys La Voix du Peuple for one sou. As he earns 100 sous a day, or 50 centimes an hour, he is exchanging six minutes of work for the price of one issue, a price that includes two elements of payment, one for labour and one for capital. Why doesn't Jacques say to himself on occasion: "If no capital was used in the printing of La Voix du Peuple, I would not be able to have it either for one sou or a hundred francs."

I could list all the objects that meet workers' needs, and the same consideration would crop up constantly. Capital is therefore not the tyrant it is made out to be. It provides services, considerable services, and it is only fair that it should be paid for. This payment decreases constantly as capital increases in volume. In order for its volume to increase people have to have an interest in its formation, and in order for people to be interested, it has to be sustained by the hope of payment. What artisan or worker would take his savings to the Savings Bank or even make savings at all if he were told at the outset that interest is theft and has to be abolished?

No, no, this is insane propaganda; it runs counter to reason, morality, economic science, the interest of the poor, and the unanimous beliefs of the human race as revealed through universal practice. It is true that you do not preach the tyranny of capital but you preach free credit , which is the same thing. To say that any payment given to capital is theft is to say that capital ought to disappear from the face of the globe, and that Pierre, Jean, and Jacques ought to carry out their own transport or produce their own wheat or books with as much work as they would need to produce these things directly and with no other resources than their hands.

Allow me, Sir, in closing to make one criticism of you. At the beginning of your letter, you promised me to abandon antinomies for today; however, you end with the antinomy that you call your war cry : Property is theft .

Yes, you have characterized it well; it is in fact a mournful tocsin, a sinister war cry. However I have the hope that, viewed from this angle, it will have lost some of its power. There is in the minds of the masses a fund of common sense that has not lost its rights and will in the end revolt against these strange paradoxes advanced like so many magnificent discoveries. Oh, why did you not base propaganda on this other axiom, certainly more enduring than yours: Theft is the opposite of property ! Then, with your indomitable energy, popular style, and invincible dialectic, I would find it impossible to measure the good you would have been able to do in our beloved country and for the human race.

FREDERIC BASTIAT

Letter No. 7: P. J. Proudhon to F. Bastiat (17 December 1849)

Some Criticism. Commission agents for road transport and railways. A retrospective excursion to the lands of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. Nescheck, Tokos, Foenus, and Interesse. 1752 Interest arising from the contracts for small private cargo. 1753 The intervention of cash and its consequences. Moses, Solon, and Lycurgus. Force alone maintains interest. Two fables.

17 December 1849

Our discussions are getting nowhere, and the fault is entirely yours. Because of your systematic refusal to take a stand on the ground on to which I summon you and your obstinate determination to attract me onto yours, you are failing to recognize the right owed to any innovator like myself to be examined; you are failing in the duty imposed by the appearance of new ideas on all economists who are the natural defenders of established tradition and usage; in sum you are compromising public charity by forcing me to attack what I have acknowledged to be, to a certain extent, irreproachable and legitimate.

You wanted this: may your wishes be fulfilled!

First of all, allow me to summarize our dispute.

In your first letter you endeavored to show, by means of theory and a number of examples, that a loan is a service and that, since all services have a value , it is entitled to be paid for , from which you deduced immediately, contrary to my position, the conclusion that free credit was an illusion and, based on this, that socialism is a movement lacking both principles and reason.

This being so, it is irrelevant whether it was you who asked La Voix du Peuple for space or whether it was I who offered you the publicity of its columns; in fact, as each of your letters shows, you had no other aim than to overturn the theory of free credit by a blunt refusal to consider it.

I therefore answered you and I had to give you the answer that, without entering into an examination of your theory on interest, if you wished to combat socialism usefully and seriously, you had to attack it in itself and on the basis of its own doctrines and that socialism, without absolutely denying the legitimacy of interest, considered from a certain point of view and at a certain period of history, affirms that it is possible, with the help of the workers and in the current state of social economy, to organize a system of free loans, and consequently to give guaranteed credit and work to all. Finally, I said that this was what you had to examine if you wanted the discussion to lead somewhere.

In your second letter, you peremptorily and imperiously refused to follow this path, claiming that in your view and following my admission, since there was no crime nor misdemeanor in the principle of interest, it was impossible to accept that loans could be made without interest, and that it was inconceivable that something could be true and false simultaneously; in short that, as long as the criminality of interest was not proved to you, you would consider the theory of free credit as null and void. All this spiced with many jokes about the law of contradiction, of which you have no understanding and flanked with examples which, I must admit, are very good at making people understand the mechanism of interest but which prove nothing at all against free credit.

In my reply, I believe that I proved to you, using your own method, that nothing is more common in society than to see an institution or a custom that is initially liberal and legitimate become with time a hindrance to liberty and an infringement of justice, that this was true for loans bearing interest on the day it was demonstrated that credit could be given to all without payment and that, from now onward, to refuse to examine the possibility of free credit constituted a denial of justice, an offence against public faith, and a challenge to the proletariat. I therefore reiterated my earnest statements and said to you: Either you examine the various propositions put forward by socialism, or I declare that interest on money, rent from land, and income from houses and capital are forms of plunder, and that property thus constituted is theft.

On the way, I briefly indicated the causes that, in my opinion, change the moral status of interest and the means of abolishing it.

It certainly appeared that, in order to justify your theory, which henceforward is accused of theft and larceny, you could no longer exonerate yourself from finally having to deal with the new doctrine, which claims to exclude interest. I am bold enough to say that this is what all our readers expected. By avoiding any criticism of interest, I showed myself to be conciliatory and a lover of peace. I was loathe to incriminate the good faith of capitalists and throw suspicion on landowners. Above all, I wanted to cut short a wearying dispute and hasten the final conclusion. Whether it is true or false, legitimate or illegitimate, moral or immoral, I said to you, I accept usury, I approve of it, I will even praise it; I will renounce all the illusions of socialism and make myself a Christian once more if you prove to me that the benefit provided by capital, as well as the circulation of financial assets, cannot under any circumstances be free of charge. As we say, this was to tackle the problem head-on and cut short a great deal of quite pointless discussion in a journal, discussion if you will allow me to say so, which is very dangerous at this time. 1754

Is it possible, yes or no, to abolish interest on money and consequently rent for land, rent for houses, or the income from capital, on the one hand, by simplifying and cutting taxes and on the other by organizing a circulation and credit bank in the name of and on behalf of the People? This is how, in my opinion, the question between us should be set. Both of us made a law out of a love of the human race, a love of truth, and a love of peace. What have the People been doing since February? What has the Constitutive Assembly been doing? What is the Legislative Assembly 1755 doing at the present time, if not seeking for the means of improving the lot of the workers without alarming legitimate interests or infringing the rights of landowners? Let us seek to ascertain, therefore, whether free credit might not by chance be one of these means.

These were my words. I dared to believe that they would be heard. Instead of replying to them, as I hoped, you take shelter behind your refusal. To my question: " Isn't proving that free credit is possible, easy, and practical also proving that interest on credit is henceforward something that is harmful and illegitimate?" you reply by rephrasing my question: "Is proving that interest is (or has been) legitimate, just, useful, beneficial, and irreplaceable not also proof that free credit is an illusion?" You reason exactly like road transport entrepreneurs 1756 with regard to the railways.

See them, in fact, putting forward their complaints to the public, which is abandoning them and rushing to the competition. Are carts and wagons not institutions that are useful, legitimate, beneficial, and irreplaceable? Is not the transport of your persons and products a service provided by us? Has this service no value? Should not all things of value be paid for? Are we thieves because we charge 25 centimes per ton and kilometer for transport, while it is true that locomotives do this for 10 centimes? Hasn't commerce always and everywhere grown by using wagons, beasts of burden, or vessels powered by sail or oars? What does steam, atmospheric pressure, and electricity matter to us? Is proving the reality and legitimacy of four-wheeled vehicles not proving that the invention of railways is an illusion?

Here, Sir is where your line of argument is leading you. Like its predecessors, your last letter, from beginning to end, has no other meaning. To retain for capital the interest I refuse to accept, you answer me with a preliminary question and oppose my innovative idea with your routine assertions. You are protesting against rail and the steam engine. I would be sorry to say something wounding to you, but truly, Sir, I consider that I would have the right from now on to break off here and turn my back on you.

This I will not do. I want to give you satisfaction to the bitter end by showing you how, to quote your own words: the remuneration of capital moves from being legitimate to being illegitimate and how free credit is the final conclusion of the practice of charging interest. This discussion in itself does not lack importance; I will endeavor above all to keep it peaceful.

What makes interest on capital, which is excusable and even just at the beginning of the economic life of society, becomes true plunder and theft with the development of industrial institutions, is that this interest has no other principle or raison d'être than necessity or force. Necessity is what explains the requirement of the lender; force is what explains the resignation of the borrower. However, as necessity gives way to liberty in human relations and right succeeds force, capitalists lose their justification, and the way is opened for workers to express their claims against landowners.

At the beginning, land was undivided; each family lived from hunting, fishing, gathering, or grazing. Industry is totally domestic; farming, if we call it this, is nomadic. There is neither commerce nor property.

Later, as tribes gathered together, nations began to be formed. Castes appeared, arising from war and the patriarchal system. Property was gradually established but, according to the laws established during the heroic period, when masters did not cultivate with their own hands, they operated using their slaves, as lords later did with their serfs. Tenant farming did not yet exist and rent, a manifestation of this relationship, was unknown.

At that time, commerce was conducted mainly through the exchange of goods. If gold and silver appeared in transactions, it was more as merchandise than as a means of payment or units of value. They were weighed and not counted. Trade and the money-changing it leads to, interest-bearing loans and limited partnerships, all these operations in advanced commerce that give rise to cash, were unknown. These primitive customs have lasted for a long time in farming populations. My mother, a simple countrywoman, told us that before '89 she hired herself out during the winter to spin flax and, in return for six weeks of work and her board, received as pay one pair of clogs and a loaf of rye bread.

It is in maritime trade that the origin of lending at interest should be sought. The practice of "bottomry" or whole ship cargo contracts, which was a type of contract used for private cargo, was its original form, in the same way as farm or cattle leases were analogous to limited partnerships. 1757

What is a contract for private cargo? A binding arrangement in which an manufacturer and a shipowner agree to pool, for purposes of foreign trade, the former, a certain quantity of goods that he is responsible for procuring, the latter his navigation skills. The resulting profit from the sale has to be shared in equal portions or according to agreed proportions, with the risks and damage being the responsibility of the company.

Is the profit thus provided for, however large it may be, legitimate? This cannot be called into question. Profit at this early era of commercial relationships is none other than the uncertainty that reigns between the people trading with regard to the value of their respective goods; it is an advantage that exists more in the mind than in fact and that both parties often attribute to themselves, not without reason. How many pounds of tin is one ounce of gold worth? What relationship in price terms is there between purple cloth from Tyre 1758 and the pelt of a sable? Nobody knows and nobody can know. A Phoenician who, for a roll of furs, hands over ten lengths of his fabric, applauds his trade; the northern hunter, for his part, proud of his brown furs, thinks the same. And this is still the practice of Europeans with Australian natives who are happy to give a pig for an axe, a chicken for a nail, or a glass bead.

The incommensurability of values is, at the outset, 1759 the source of the profit from trade. Gold and silver therefore are traded, initially as goods and shortly afterward, because of their considerable ease of exchange, as terms of comparison, as money. In both cases, gold and silver bring profit to the trade, in the first place through the very fact of the trade and then for the risk incurred. Insurance contracts appear at this point as twin brothers of whole ship contracts; the premium stipulated in insurance contracts depends upon, and is even identical to, the share of profit agreed in the whole ship contracts.

This share of the profit, which expresses the participation of the capitalist or the producer who commits his products or his funds which are one and the same in commerce, has been given the Latin name of interesse , 1760 that is to say, "taking part in" or interest .

At this time, therefore, in the circumstances I have just defined, who could have accused the practice of interest of being harmful? Interest is the throw of the dice, 1761 the winnings obtained in the face of chance; it is the unpredictable profit of trade, a profit that cannot be criticised as long as no comparison of values has supplied the related notions of what is expensive and what cheap , of proportion, and PRICE. The same analogy, the same identity that political economy has constantly pointed out, and rightly so, between interest on money and the rent on land, existed at the start of commercial relationships between this same interest and the profit from trade. In essence, exchange is the common form, the starting point of all these transactions.

You see, Sir, that the fierce opposition I make to capital does not stop me in the slightest from acknowledging the justice of the initial good faith of its operations. It is not I who will ever play games with the truth. I have said that there was a good, honest, and legitimate aspect to interest-bearing loans and I have just established this in a way that I consider to be more valid than yours in that it sacrifices nothing to selfishness and takes nothing away from charity. It is the impossibility of evaluating objects accurately which, at the outset, formed the basis of the legitimacy of interest just as, later, it is the search for precious metals that sustains it. There had to have been a positive and essential reason for interest-bearing loans for them to have developed and become as generalized as we have seen; this was necessary, I say, on pain of condemning, along with the theologians, the entire human race, which for my part I profess to consider infallible and sacred.

But who does not already see that the trader's profit ought to decrease progressively with the risk incurred and with the arbitrary nature of prices until finally it is merely the fair price of the service provided by him, the price paid for his work? Who does not also see that interest ought to decrease with the risks incurred by capital and the deprivation experienced by capitalists, so that, if payment by the debtor is guaranteed and the creditor's inconvenience is zero, interest ought to become zero?

Another cause, which should not be overlooked here since it marks the point of transition or separation between the share of profit, interesse , due to capitalists in whole ship contracts and usury as such, another quite accidental cause, I repeat, made a significant contribution to generalizing the fiction of the productivity of capital and consequently, the practice of interest. This was the requirements of accounting in commercial businesses and the need to make payments received or reimbursements faster. What more potent stimulus, I ask you, could you imagine with respect to lazy and late-paying debtors, than this aggravation, foenus , 1762 this constant rebirth, tokos, 1763 of the principal? What bailiff is more inflexible than this serpent of usury as the Hebrew designates it? Usury, said the ancient rabbis, is called a serpent, neschek, 1764 because the creditor BITES the debtor when he claims more from him than he has given him. And it is this instrument of policy, this sort of commercial guard dog set by the creditor at the throat of his debtor that people have wanted to make a principle of commutative justice and a law of social economy! You have to have never set foot inside a trading establishment to fail to recognize the extent to which the spirit and aim of this truly diabolical invention of the mercantile genius now exists.

Let us now follow the progress of the institution, for we are reaching the time at which the neschek, tokos, foenus , in a word usury , now distinguished from the random profit, or interesse , of the trader is on the point of becoming an institution, and let us see first of all how the practice became generalized. We will subsequently endeavor to determine the reasons that ought to lead to its abolition.

We have just seen that it was among maritime nations which carried out brokerage and warehousing for others and who dealt above all with valuable goods and metals that mercantile speculation first developed, and with it the speculation of interesse or whole ship contracts. It is from this that usury, like the plague, spread in all its forms to farming nations.

The operation of interesse , which is irreproachable in itself, had created a precedent; the method used was foenus , which might be regarded as an appeal against coercion and the lack of security; the progressive deterioration of capital, provided the means. The preponderance acquired by gold and silver over other forms of merchandise, the privilege they received by universal consent to represent wealth and serve as a common means of determining value for all products, provided the opportunity. When gold became the king of exchange, the symbol of power, and the key to all happiness, everyone wanted to have gold, and since it was impossible to have enough for everyone, it could be obtained only at a premium and its use had a price. It was lent out by the day, by the week, and by the year, like so many flute players or prostitutes. One consequence of the invention of cash was the valuing of all other goods very cheaply compared to gold and the establishment of all genuine wealth, like savings, in écus. Capitalist exploitation, condemned by all antiquity, an era certainly better informed about it than ours, since it had its origins there, was thus established: to our century was reserved the privilege of furnishing it with learned men and legal advocacy.

As long as usury, having become confused with the insurance premium or the share of profit in maritime contracts, was confined to maritime speculation and had an effect only internationally; it appeared innocuous to legislators. It was only when it began to be practiced among fellow citizens and fellow countrymen that the divine and human laws fulminated against it. You shall not invest your money for interest with your brother, said the law of Moses, but yes indeed with foreigners: Non foenerabis proximo tuo, sed alieno (Lend not to your neighbour, but to the stranger) . 1765 It is as though the legislator had said: Between nations, the profit from trade and the increase in capital express a relationship only between opinions about values, valuations which balance each other as a result. Between citizens, with products having to be exchanged for other products, work for other work, and with the lending of money just an anticipation of this exchange, interest constitutes a difference which breaks commercial equality, enriches one to the detriment of the other, and in the long run leads to the subversion of society.

It was therefore in line with this principle that the same Moses wanted all debts to be cancelled and cease to be due every fifty years, which meant that fifty years of interest or fifty annual payments, assuming that the loan as made in the first year of the fifty year period, would reimburse the capital.

It was for this reason that Solon, 1766 called upon to be President of the republic by his fellow citizens and made responsible for calming the troubles agitating the city, began by canceling debts, that is to say, liquidating all usury. Free credit was in his view the sole solution to the revolutionary problem faced in his time, the condition sine qua non of a democratic and social republic. 1767

Finally it was for this that Lycurgus, 1768 a mind little versed in questions of credit and finance, pushing his apprehensions to the extreme, banished trade and money from Sparta, unable as he was to find any other remedy than this Icarian solution 1769 to the demotion of citizens to a subaltern status, and the exploitation of one man by another.

However, all these efforts of moralists and legislators in antiquity, which were badly coordinated and even more badly supported, had to remain powerless. The growth of usury, constantly stimulated by luxury and war and very soon by the analogy drawn from property itself, overwhelmed them. On the one hand, the state of antagonism between nations that maintained the dangers to the movement of goods constantly provided new pretexts for usury; on the other, the selfishness of the ruling classes was bound to stifle the principles of egalitarian organization. In Tyre, Carthage, Athens, and Rome, everywhere in the ancient world as in the world of today, it was free men, patricians, and bourgeois who took usury under their protection and exploited the common people and freedmen by means of capital.

Eventually Christianity made its appearance, and after four centuries of struggle initiated the abolition of slavery. It is at this time that we have to situate the general establishment of interest-bearing loans in the form of farm and house rental leases.

I said above that, in ancient times, when the landowner did not himself or with his family's help improve the value of the land, as was the case in Roman times in the early days of the Republic, he did it using his slaves. This was the general practice in patrician houses. At that time the land and the slaves were bound to one another; those who worked the land were described as adscriptus glebae , bound to the soil: the ownership of man and thing were indivisible. The price of a sharecropping farm reflected at once the area and quality of the land, the number of cattle, and the number of slaves.

When the emancipation of slaves was proclaimed, the owner lost the men but kept the land; as today, when the blacks are emancipated, we reserve the ownership of the land and equipment for their master. However, from the point of view of ancient jurisprudence, as in natural and Christian law, man, who is born to work, cannot do without tools of work. The principle of emancipation implied an agrarian law, which would have guaranteed and sanctioned this. Without this, the alleged emancipation was nothing other than an act of odious cruelty, an infamous piece of hypocrisy. And if, according to Moses, interest or the annual payment on capital reimbursed capital, might it not be said that slavery reimburses property? Theologians and lawmakers of the time did not understand this. Through an inexplicable contradiction, which persists today, they continued to thunder against usury but they gave absolution to farm rent and rent from housing.

The result of this was that emancipated slaves and, a few centuries later, emancipated serfs, with no means of existence had to become farmers and pay tribute. Masters simply found themselves all the richer because of this. They said: I will provide you with land; you will provide the work, and we will share the proceeds. This was a rural imitation of the customs and usages of trade: "I will lend you ten talents," said the man with the écus to the worker, "you will increase their value and then we will share the profit." Or else: "for as long as you keep my money, you will pay me one twentieth." Or last of all: "If you prefer, at the due date you will pay me back twice as much." From this arose rent for land, unknown to Russians and Arabs. The exploitation of one man by another through this metamorphosis gained the force of law: usury, condemned in interest-bearing loans, tolerated in maritime contracts, was canonized in farm rent. From that time, the progress of commerce and industry served merely to introduce it further into custom. This had to be so if light were to be shed on all the varied forms of servitude and theft and the real answers to the problems of human freedom formulated.

Once committed to the practice of interesse , so strangely understood and applied with so much abuse, society began to revolve in the circle of its misery. It was then that the inequality of conditions appeared to be a law of civilization and evil an inevitable part of our nature.

Two avenues, however, seemed to be open to workers to free themselves from capitalist exploitation; one was, as we have said previously, the gradual balancing out of values and consequently a decrease in the cost of capital, and the other, the reciprocity of interest.

However, it is obvious that the revenue from capital, represented in particular by money, cannot totally be cancelled by the decrease, for as you have said so clearly, Sir, if my capital is to bring me nothing in the future, instead of lending it, I will keep it and, for having positively refused to pay the tithe, the worker will be unemployed. As for the reciprocity of usury, we can readily imagine that it might exist between one entrepreneur and another, one capitalist and another, or one landowner and another, but between a landowner, capitalist, or entrepreneur and someone who is merely a worker, this reciprocity is impossible. It is impossible, I say, for a worker to be able to buy something he has himself produced, if the price of the product is made up of the interest on capital and his wages. To live by working is a principle that, in a system based on the charging of interest, implies a contradiction.

Once society has become mired in this impasse, the absurdity of this capitalist theory is demonstrated by the absurdity of its consequences. The intrinsic iniquity of interest results from its homicidal effects, and as long as property has rent and usury as an assumption and as a consequence, its affinity with theft will be established. Can it exist under different conditions? For my part I deny this, but this question is not pertinent to the question in hand right now, and I will not go down this path.

Now consider the situation in which both capitalist and worker find themselves simultaneously, following the invention of money, the preponderance of cash, and the blurring of the distinction between the lending of money and rent for land and buildings.

The former, for I am determined to justify him even in your view, being in thrall to this prejudice of money, cannot separate himself from his capital in favor of the worker free of charge. Not that this separation would cause him any hardship, since in his hands the capital is sterile. Not that he runs the risk of losing it, since he is assured of its repayment through the safeguard of mortgages. Not that this benefit costs him the slightest pain, unless you consider as a pain the counting of écus and the verification of the collateral; but, in separating himself for a period of time from his money which, because of its prerogative has been so accurately called (a form of) power, the capitalist will decrease his power and with it his security.

It would be quite another thing if gold and silver were just ordinary products, if no more consideration were paid to the possession of écus than to the possession of wheat, wine, oil, or leather and if the simple ability to work gave men the same security as the possession of money. Under this monopoly of circulation and exchange, usury becomes a necessity for the capitalist. His intention, from the point of view of justice, is not incriminating: as soon as his money leaves his coffers, it is no longer safe.

Well, this necessity that, as a result of an involuntary and universally accepted prejudice, binds the capitalist, is the most shameful plunder of the worker, akin to the most odious of tyrannies, the tyranny of force.

What in effect are the theoretical and practical consequences of interest-bearing loans and their equivalent, farm rent, on the working class, this lively, productive and moral sector of society? For the moment, I will limit myself to listing a few of these to which I draw your attention and which may, if you are willing, become the subsequent focus for our debate.

One is that, by virtue of the principle of interest or the net product, an individual may genuinely and legitimately live without working; this is the conclusion of your letter before last 1770 and in fact, this is the status to which everyone now aspires.

A second is that if the principle of the net product is true for individuals, it must be so for nations as well; in this way, since the movable and fixed assets of France, for example, are valued at 132 billion, 1771 at 5 percent per year of interest, this gives 6 billion six hundred million on which at least half of the French nation could, if it wished, live without working. In England, where accumulated capital is much greater than in France, and the population much smaller, the entire nation, from Queen Victoria to the most junior joiner of yarn in Liverpool, might, if it wished, live on unearned income, walking around with elegant walking sticks or complaining in meetings. Which leads to the obviously absurd proposition that, because of its capital, a nation has more income than its work provides.

A third is that since the annual sum of wages in France is about 6 billion and the sum of income from capital is also 6 billion, making a total annual sales value for production of 12 billion, the people who produce, who are at the same time the people who consume, can and ought to buy with the 6 billion of wages allocated to them the 12 billion that commerce asks of them as the price of their goods, without which capitalists would find themselves with no income.

A fourth is that, since interest is by nature perpetual and under no circumstances, in accordance with Moses' wishes, can it be used to reimburse capital, and what is more, as each year of interest can be reinvested at usurious rates and form a new loan consequently giving rise to new interest, the smallest amount of capital can, in time, produce prodigious sums that would not even be represented by a mass of gold as large as the globe which we inhabit. Price has demonstrated this in his theory of amortization. 1772

A fifth is that, since the productivity of capital is the immediate and single cause of the inequality of wealth and the incessant accumulation of capital in a small number of hands, it has to be admitted that in spite of the progress in enlightenment, Christian revelation, and the expansion of public freedoms, society is naturally and necessarily divided into two castes, a caste of exploiting capitalists and a caste of exploited workers. 1773

A sixth is that, since this caste of capitalists controls like a sovereign (lord) the tools of production and its products by means of the benefits from the interest provided by its capital, it has the right, whenever it suits it, to stop work and circulation as we have seen it do for the last two years, 1774 at the risk of causing the people to die. It can change the natural direction of things, as is seen in the Papal States where farmland has been devoted from time immemorial to idle pasture because it suits the owners and where the people live only on alms and the curiosity of foreigners. It can say to a large group of citizens: " You are superfluous on this earth, at the banquet of life; there is no room for you " 1775 as the Countess of Strafford 1776 did when she expelled 17,000 country folk at a stroke from her domains, and as the French government did last year when it transported 4,000 families with hungry mouths to Algeria. 1777

I ask you now, if the prejudice in favor of gold or the inevitability of monetary institutions excuse and justify capitalists, is it not true that these institutions create a regime of brutal force for workers which is distinguishable from slavery in ancient times only by its deeper and more criminal hypocrisy.

FORCE, Sir, that is the first and last word of a society organized on the principle of interest and which, for the last 3,000 years has struggled against interest. You note this yourself, without restraint or scruple, when you acknowledge with me that capitalists do not deprive themselves in the slightest and with J. B. Say, that their function is to do nothing , 1778 when you put the following brazen words that any humane conscience would condemn into their mouths:

"I impose nothing on you against your will. Since you do not consider a loan to be a service, refrain from borrowing money, as I will from lending it. If society offers you benefits for no payment , accept them as that is much more convenient, and as for organizing the circulation of capital , which you demand that I do, if what you mean by that is that you will obtain mine free of charge through the agency of society, I have exactly the same objections to this indirect process which have led me to refuse you a direct loan free of charge."

Take care, Sir, the people are only too ready to believe that it is solely through a love of its privileges that the capitalist caste, at this crucial time, is rejecting the organization of credit that they are demanding, and the day on which the ill-will of this caste is revealed to them, all excuses will be void in their eyes and their vengeance will know no bounds.

Do you want to know what dreadful demoralization you are creating in workers with your theory of capital, which is none other, as I have just told you, than the theory of the right of FORCE? It is enough for me to quote your own arguments. You like fables: to put my thoughts into concrete form, I will offer you a few.

A millionaire falls into the river. A member of the proletariat happens to pass by and the capitalist gestures to him. The following conversation takes place:

THE MILLIONAIRE: Save me or I will die.

THE PROLETARIAN: I am at your service, but I want a million for my trouble.

THE MILLIONAIRE: A million for extending a hand to your brother who is drowning! What will that cost you? An hour's delay! I will pay you a quarter day's work for I am generous.

THE PROLETARIAN: Tell me, am I not providing you with a service by pulling you out?

THE MILLIONAIRE: Yes.

THE PROLETARIAN: Has not every service the right to a reward?

THE MILLIONAIRE: Yes.

THE PROLETARIAN: Am I not free?

THE MILLIONAIRE: Yes.

THE PROLETARIAN: Then I want a million: that is my last word. I am not forcing you and am imposing nothing on you against your will. I am not preventing you in the slightest from shouting " Man the boats !" and calling someone. If the fisherman I see over there, a league from here, wants to give you this benefit for no return, call on him, it is more convenient."

THE MILLIONAIRE: Miserable man! You are taking advantage of my position. What about religion, morality, or humanity?

THE PROLETARIAN: That is a matter for my conscience. Besides, time is calling, let us put an end to this. Life as a proletarian or death as a millionaire, which do you prefer?

Doubtless, Sir, you will tell me that religion, morality, or humanity that command us to help our fellow-men in trouble has nothing to do with (self) interest. I agree with you in this, but what do you have to say in reply to the following example?

An English missionary, off to convert the infidel, is shipwrecked on the way and reaches the island of … 1779 in a lifeboat with his wife and four children. Robinson, 1780 the owner of this island by right of first occupation, by right of conquest, and by right of working (the land), aims his shotgun at the castaway and forbids him to infringe his property. However, since Robinson is humane and has a Christian soul, he is willing to show this unfortunate family a neighboring rock that is isolated in the middle of the sea, a place where they may dry themselves and rest without fear of the ocean.

Since the rock does not grow anything, the castaway begs Robinson to lend him his spade and a small bag of seed.

"I will agree", said Robinson, "on one condition and that is that you will give me back 99 bushels of wheat out of every 100 that you reap."

THE CASTAWAY: That is an insult! I will give you back what you have lent me but on condition that you let me do the same for you some other time.

ROBINSON: Have you found one grain of wheat on your rock?

THE CASTAWAY: No.

ROBINSON: Am I doing you a service by giving you the means of cultivating your island and living by working?

THE CASTAWAY: Yes.

ROBINSON CRUSOE: Doesn't all service require payment?

THE CASTAWAY: Yes.

ROBINSON: Well then! The payment I ask for is 99 percent. That is my price.

THE CASTAWAY: Let us meet half way. I will give you back the sack of wheat and the spade with 5 percent interest. That is the legal rate.

ROBINSON: Yes, it is the legal rate where there is competition and when there is an abundance of goods, just as the legal price of bread is 30 centimes per kilogram when there is no shortage.

THE CASTAWAY: 99 percent of my harvest! That is theft and daylight robbery!

ROBINSON: Am I being violent towards you? Am I forcing you to take my spade and wheat? Are we not both free to act?

THE CASTAWAY: We have to be. I will die of work, but I have my wife and children! … I agree to everything and will sign for this. Lend me in addition your saw and axe so that I may build myself a hut.

ROBINSON: Just a minute! I need my axe and saw. It took me a week of work to make them. Nevertheless, I will lend them to you but on condition that you will give me 99 planks out of every 100 that you make.

THE CASTAWAY: Good heavens! I will give you back your axe and saw and present you with five of my planks in recognition of your trouble.

ROBINSON: In that case, I will keep my saw and my axe. I do not wish to force you. I am a free man.

THE CASTAWAY: But don't you believe at all in God? You are an exploiter of the human race, a Malthusian, a Jew! 1781

ROBINSON: Religion, Father, teaches us that 1782 "man has a noble destiny which is not limited to the narrow domain of industrial production. What is this purpose? This is not now the place to raise this question. But, whatever it is, what I can tell you is that we will not be able to achieve it if, bent under the yoke of inexorable and incessant work, we have no leisure to develop our bodies, affections, minds, our sense of beauty, what there is in our nature that is most pure and elevated. What then is the power that will give us this beneficial leisure, an image and foretaste of eternal happiness? It is capital." I worked once upon a time; I saved precisely in order to make you a loan: One day you will do the same as me.

THE CASTAWAY: Hypocrite!

ROBINSON: You are insulting me, farewell! You can just cut down the trees with your teeth and saw your planks with your nails.

THE CASTAWAY: I will yield to force. But at least, give me as charity a few herbs for my daughter who is ill. That will not cause you any trouble; I will go to pick them myself on your property.

ROBINSON CRUSOE: Just a minute! My property is sacred. I forbid you to set foot on it or you will have my gun to deal with. However, I am a good man; I will allow you to pick my herbs, but you will bring me your other daughter whom I think is very pretty …

THE CASTAWAY: Rogue! You dare to say such things to a father!

ROBINSON: Am I providi ng you all, you, and your daughters, a service by saving your life through my remedies? Yes or no?

THE CASTAWAY: Certainly, but look at the price you are asking.

ROBINSON CRUSOE: Am I taking your daughter by force? Is she not free? Are you yourself not free? And besides, would she not be happy to share my leisure with me? Would she not have her share of the income you are paying me? By making her my companion, am I not becoming your benefactor? Go away, you are just an ungrateful wretch!

THE CASTAWAY: Stop, landowner! I would prefer to see my daughter dead than dishonored. However, I will sacrifice her to save her sister. I only ask one thing of you, which is to lend me your fishing tackle, for it is impossible for us to live on the wheat you are leaving us. One of my sons will obtain extra food for us by fishing.

ROBINSON CRUSOE: So be it. I will provide you this additional service. I will do even more; I will take your other son off your hands and will take charge of his food and education. I will have to teach him to shoot, handle a sword, and live like me, without working. For, because I mistrust you all and you may well not pay me anything, I will be glad to have some assistance, should the need arise. Rascally paupers who demand loans with no interest! Impious people who do not want one man to exploit another!

One day, Robinson over exerts himself while hunting, catches a chill, and falls ill. His mistress, who is disgusted with him and is having an affair with his young companion, says to him: I will take care of you and cure you, but on one condition: You must give me all your property. Otherwise, I will leave you.

ROBINSON: Oh you whom I have loved so dearly and for whom I have sacrificed honor, conscience, and humanity, are you willing to leave me on my sick bed?

THE SERVANT: I never loved you and so I owe you nothing. If you kept me, I also gave you my body; we are quits. Am I not free? And, after having been your mistress, am I obliged now to be your nurse?

ROBINSON: My child, my dear child, I beg you to calm yourself! Be kind, be gentle, and be nice. I will make my will in your favor.

THE SERVANT: I want to be paid or I am leaving.

ROBINSON: You are killing me! Both God and Men are abandoning me. A curse on the universe! Let me be struck by a thunderbolt and may hell engulf me!

He dies in despair. 1783

P. J. PROUDHON

Letter No. 8 : F. Bastiat to P. J. Proudhon (24 December 1849)

Proof of impossibility makes it unnecessary to examine possibility. - A protest against fatalism. - Immutable truths. - A judgment on travels through the fields of history. - Fables turned against their author. The laws of capital summarized in five propositions.

24 December 1849

Is free credit possible?

Is free credit impossible?

It is clear that to answer one of these questions is to answer the other.

You criticise me for a lack of charity because I am upholding the case for the second.

This is my reason for this:

Seeking to ascertain whether free credit is possible would have been to allow myself to be drawn into a discussion on the People's Bank, the tax on capital, the national workshops, and the organization of work , in a word, the thousands of ways in which each school of opinion claims to have achieved free credit. 1784 Whereas, in order for one to be sure that it is impossible , it was enough to analyze the essential nature of capital, which achieves my purpose and, in my view, yours.

Galileo was faced with fifty arguments against the earth's rotation. Did he have to refute them all? No, he proved that it turned and that said it all: E pur si muove (But nevertheless it moves).

You say that, as an innovator, you have the right to an examination. Doubtless, but above all society, as the defendant, has the right to have the charge against it proved. You bring capital and interest before the court of public opinion, accusing them of injustice and plunder. It is up to you to prove their guilt, and up to capital and interest to prove their innocence. You say that you have several ways of bringing them back to lawfulness. We must first of all find out whether they have strayed from this. The examination of your findings can come only later, assuming as it does that the accusation is well founded, which capital and interest deny.

This procedure is so logical that you agree to it in these words:

"Whether it is true or false, legitimate or illegitimate, moral or immoral, I said to you, I accept usury, I approve of it, I will even praise it; I will renounce all the illusions of socialism and make myself a Christian once more if you prove to me that the benefit provided by capital, as well as the circulation of financial assets, cannot under any circumstances be free of charge." 1785

Well, am I doing anything else? This is indeed my ground, to prove that capital bears within itself the unchallengeable right to be remunerated.

First of all, you combated this doctrine by using the theory of contradictions and then that of distinctions . Interest, you said, had a raison d'être in previous ages, but no longer has any today. It was an instrument of equality and progress, but is now only theft and oppression. And, on this theme, you quoted several institutions and customs that were initially legitimate and liberal and later became unjust and disastrous, such as torture, the ordeal by boiling water, slavery etc.

For my part I reject this cruel fatalism that consists in justifying all excesses as having served the cause of civilization. Slavery, torture, and judicial ordeals have not advanced, but have delayed the progress of the human race. This would have been true of interest if it had been, as you say, merely an abuse of force.

What is more, while some things change, others do not. Since the Creation, it has been true that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, and this will continue to be true until the Day of Judgment and beyond. In the same way, it has always been true and will always be so that accumulated labour , or capital, is worthy of reward.

You compare my logic with that of an entrepreneur who says: "What does steam, atmospheric pressure, and electricity matter to us? Is proving the reality and legitimacy of four-wheeled vehicles not proving that the invention of railways is an illusion?"

I accept the analogy but with the following proviso:

I acknowledge that the railway is an advance. I am happy that it lowers transport costs, but if anyone wished to conclude from this that transport should be free , if it were said that any transport cost was legitimate in former times but that the time had come for transport to be carried out free of charge, I would say that the conclusion was wrong. As progress continues, this cost should decrease constantly, but it cannot reach zero because there will always be some human work involved, a human service , which carries within itself the right to be remunerated..

S imilarly, I acknowledge that the cost of capital will decrease in accordance with its abundance. I acknowledge this and am happy about it, since capital will thus increasingly reach all classes and lighten the burden of work for them whatever utility is yielded. However, I cannot conclude that this constant decrease in interest will lead to its total disappearance, because capital will never generate spontaneously and always be a service that is more or less great, thus carrying within itself, just like transport, the right to be remunerated.

Thus, Sir, I do not see any reason to rule this debate out of court just when it is being concluded and it seems to me that there is not one of our readers who would not consider my task fulfilled if I proved the following propositions:

All capital (whether this is in the form of harvests, tools, machines, houses, etc.) is the result of previous work, and generates work subsequently.

Because capital is the result of previous work, the person providing it receives payment for it.

Because it generates work that comes later, the person borrowing it owes payment for it.

And you yourself say: "If the effort required of the creditor is zero, interest ought to become zero."

So, what have we to find out? This:

Is it possible for capital to be formed without any effort involved?

If it is possible, I am wrong, and credit ought to be free.

If it is not possible, it is you who are wrong, and capital has to be paid for. Whatever you do, the question can be summed up in these words: Has the time come, will it ever come, when capital develops spontaneously without the input of any human effort?

However, in an historical survey full of vigor that carries you off to Palestine, Athens, Sparta, Tyre, Rome, and Carthage, you go off on a tangent which I cannot permit. Well then! Before returning to the matter at hand, I will endeavor, if not to follow you, at least to take a few steps in your direction.

You begin thus:

"What makes interest on capital, which is excusable and even just at the beginning of the economic life of society, becomes true plunder and theft with the development of industrial institutions, is that this interest has no other principle or raison d'être than necessity or force. Necessity is what explains the requirement of the lender; force is what explains the resignation of the borrower. However, as necessity gives way to liberty in human relations and right succeeds force, capitalists lose their justification."

They lose more than that; they lose the only status you accord them. If, under the reign of liberty and law, interest continues to exist, it is probably because it possesses, whatever you say, another raison d'être than force .

In truth, I no longer understand your distinction . You said: "Interest was just in former times, it is no longer so." And what reason do you give for this? This one: "In former times, force held sway, now right does so." Far from concluding from this that interest has moved from legitimacy to illegitimacy, is it not the contrary that is to be deduced from your premises?

Certainly the factual record would confirm this deduction, for usury may very well have been odious when people became capitalists through pillage, while interest is justified once they became capitalists through work.

"It is in maritime trade that the origin of lending at interest should be sought. The practice of "bottomry" or whole ship cargo contracts, which was a type of contract used for private cargo, was its original form."

I believe that capital has a nature that is proper to it and that is perfectly independent of the method by which men transport their goods. Whether they travel and have their goods carried overland, by sea, or by air, in wagons, ships, or balloons, this neither grants nor takes away any rights to capital.

What is more, it is permissible to think that the practice of charging interest preceded the use of maritime trade. It is very probable that the patriarch Abraham did not lend flocks without keeping for himself a share in their increase and those who, after the flood, built the first houses in Babylon doubtless did not hand over the use of them without payment.

What then, Sir! Are these transactions which existed and were carried out voluntarily since the dawn of time under the names of rentals, interest, farm rent, leases, or rent for housing, not the products of the very essence of the human race! They are deemed by you to arise from contracts on private cargo!

Next, with regard to maritime contracts, you develop a theory of profit that I truly believe to be inadmissible. However, to discuss it here would be to stray from our subject.

Finally, you reach the root of all economic errors, that is to say, confusion between capital and cash; confusion that makes it easy to muddle the question. But you yourself do not believe this, and the only proof I need is what you once said to Mr. Louis Blanc: "Money is not wealth for society: it is quite simply a means of circulation which might be replaced to great advantage by paper, by a substance with no value ." 1786

Please believe therefore that when I talk about the productivity of capital (tools, implements, etc.) produced by work, I do not mean to attribute a miraculous power of reproduction to money. 1787

Shall I follow you, Sir, to Palestine, Athens, and Sparta? That is really not necessary. Just a word, however, on Moses' Non foenerabis . 1788

I admire the devotion that has gripped certain socialists (with whom I do not confuse you) since they have discovered a few texts in the Old and New Testaments, the Councils of the Church, and the Fathers of the Church to support their thesis. 1789 I will take the liberty of asking them this question: Do they mean to quote these authorities as being infallible with regard to science and social economy? 1790

They will certainly not go so far as to reply to me: We take to be infallible the texts that suit us and fallible those that do not. When sacred books are referred to in this connection and as being the depositories of the indisputable will of God, we have to accept it all or risk being accused of childish play-acting. Well then! Apart from a host of phrases in the Old Testament, which cannot safely be taken literally, there are in the Gospels other texts than the well-known Mutuum date (lend hoping for nothing thereby), 1791 from which they want to deduce free credit, including the following:

Blessed are those that weep.

Blessed are those that suffer.

The poor will always be with you.

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's.

Obey those in power.

Do not concern yourself with tomorrow.

Do as the lilies that neither spin nor weave.

Do as the birds, which neither plough nor sow.

If someone strikes you on the left cheek, turn the other one.

If someone steals your coat, offer him your robe as well. 1792

What would these Socialist gentlemen say if we based policy and social economy on one of these texts?

We are allowed to believe that when the Founder of Christianity said to his disciples: Mutuum date (lend hoping for nothing thereby), he meant to give them a piece of advice on charity, and not a lecture on political economy. Jesus was a carpenter and worked for a living. This being so, he could not make giving an absolute rule. I believe that I may add without being irreverent, that he was paid quite legitimately, not only for his work devoted to making planks but also for his work devoted to making saws and planes, that is to say, for his capital.

Finally, I cannot pass over the two fables with which you end your letter without commenting that, far from invalidating my doctrine, they condemn yours, for we can conclude that there should be free credit only if we can also conclude that work should also be unpaid. Your second tale struck me like a great sword thrust, but your first charitably equipped me with a breastplate capable of withstanding anything.

In fact, by what trick will you try to get me to admit that there are circumstances in which people are conscience bound to lend free of charge? You conjure up one of those extraordinary situations that silence all personal instincts and call into play principles resting on sympathy, such as pity, commiseration, devotion, or sacrifice. You conceive of an island dweller, well provided with everything. He encounters castaways cast up by the sea naked on the shore. You ask me if this island dweller may legitimately in his own interest take all possible advantage from his position, pushing his demands to the absolute limit, insisting on a thousand percent return on his capital, and even hiring it out to the ruination of their honor!

I can see the trap. If I reply: Oh, in this case, you have to fly to the assistance of your fellow man unconditionally and share everything up to the last crumb of bread with him. You would say triumphantly: At last my opponent has admitted that there are conditions in which credit ought to be free.

Fortunately, you have yourself supplied me with the reply to the first fable, which I would have invented if you had not done so first.

A man was walking along the banks of a river. He saw one of his brothers drowning and had only to extend his hand to save him. Could he in all conscience take advantage of the situation to demand the most extreme conditions and say to the unfortunate man struggling in the torrent: I am a free being and I am absolute master of my work. Die or give me your entire fortune!

I consider, Sir, that if an upright worker were to be in these circumstances, he would jump into the water without hesitation, without any calculation, and without speculating on payment or even thinking about it.

But here, please note, there is no question of capital; it is just a matter of work. It is work that, in all conscience, has to be sacrificed. Can you deduce from that that work should be free , as the normal rule governing human transactions and as a law of political economy? 1793 And because in an extreme case, the service ought to be free, will you abandon at the theoretical level your axiom of the mutuality of services ?

And yet, if from your second fable you conclude that people are always bound to make loans at no charge, from the first you ought to conclude that people are always obliged to work for no pay.

The truth is that, in order to elucidate one question of political economy, you have thought up two examples in which all the laws of political economy are suspended. Who has ever thought of denying that, in certain circumstances, we are obliged to sacrifice capital, interest, work, life, reputation, affections, health, etc.? But is this the law that governs ordinary transactions? And is not resorting to examples like this in order to establish the necessity for free credit or free work, also an acknowledgement of the impossibility of making such unpaid activities part of the ordinary course of things?

You, Sir, are trying to find what the consequences of interest-bearing loans are on the working class and you list a few, inviting me to make them a future topic for this debate.

I do not deny that, among your objections, some are quite plausible and even very serious. It is even impossible to tackle them one by one in a letter; I will endeavor to refute all of them at once simply by setting out the law governing, in my view, the division of the products of the co-operation between capital and labor, and it is by this route that I will return to my modest world of economics.

Allow me to establish five propositions, which I consider to be mathematically provable;

1. Capital makes work more productive .

It is very clear that greater results are obtained with a plough than without one, with a saw than without one; with a road than without one; with basic supplies than without them, etc., from which we can conclude that the intervention of capital increases the the total quantity of products to be shared.

2. Capital is work

Ploughs, saws, roads, and supplies do not make themselves unaided, and the work to which we owe them has the right to be paid for.

I am obliged to remind you here of what I said in my last letter on the difference in the method of payment when applied to capital or work. 1794

The effort made by a water carrier every day has to be paid for by those who benefit from this daily undertaking. However, the trouble he has gone to in order to manufacture his wheelbarrow and barrel has to be paid for by an indeterminate number of consumers.

In the same way, sowing, ploughing, hoeing, and harvesting concern only the current harvest. However, the fences, land clearing work, drainage, and buildings form part of the cost price of an undefined series of successive harvests.

A different example is the current work by a shoemaker who makes shoes, a tailor who makes suits, a carpenter who makes beams, or a lawyer who drafts legal documents; a further example is the accumulated work required by lasts, 1795 workbenches, saws, and the study of law.

For this reason, the work done by the first category is paid for by a wage and that done by the second category by a combination of interest and amortization which is nothing other than wages ingeniously spread over a host of consumers.

3. As capital increases, interest decreases, but in such a way that the total income of the capitalist increases .

This happens with no injustice and without prejudicing labor because, as we shall see, this extra income of the capitalist is taken from the additional product that results from capital.

What I am stating here is that, although interest decreases, the total income of capitalists is bound to increase, and this is how:

Take a capital amount of 100 and an interest rate of 5 percent. I say that the interest rate cannot fall to 4 percent without capital increasing to at least 120. The fact is that no one would be motivated to increase capital if the result were bound to be a decrease or even a stagnation of income. It is absurd to say that if capital was 100 and income 5 percent, capital could be raised to 200 with the rate decreasing to 2, for in the first case people would have 5 francs of rent 1796 and in the second only 4. The appropriate course of action would be too easy and too convenient: people would consume half of their capital to achieve the same income.

Thus, when interest is decreased from 5 percent to 4, from 4 to 3 and from 3 to 2, this means that capital has increased from 100 to 200, from 200 to 400 and from 400 to 800, and that capitalists receive respectively as income 5, 8 and 12. And labor loses nothing thereby, far from it, for it had available to it a productive force equal only to 100, then one equal to 200 and finally equal to 800, within a context in which it pays less and less for a given quantity of this productive force.

It follows from this that the calculators who say that "Interest is decreasing, therefore it is bound to end" are quite inept. Goodness! It is decreasing with regard to each 100 francs, but it is precisely because the number of 100 franc amounts is increasing that interest is decreasing. Yes, the multiplier is decreasing, but this is the result of the very reason that increases the multiplicand, and I defy the God of Arithmetic himself to conclude from this that the product will thus reach zero. 1797

4. As capital increases (and with it, output), the ABSOLUTE SHARE due to capital increases and its PROPORTIONAL SHARE decreases .

This needs no further demonstration. Capital draws respectively 5, 4, and 3 percent for each 100 francs it contributes to the business association; 1798 thus its relative share decreases. But as it contributes successively 100 francs, 200 francs, and 400 francs to the business, it is seen to draw as its total share initially 5 francs, then 8, 12 and so on; thus its absolute share increases.

5. As capital increases (and with it, output), the proportional share and the absolute share received by labor both increase.

How can it be otherwise? Since capital sees its absolute share increasing while it receives respectively just 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 ,and 1/5 of the total output, labor, which gains 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, and 4/5 obviously gains a gradually increasing share, both proportionally and absolutely.

The law governing this distribution may be illustrated to readers through the following figures, which do not pretend to be accurate, but which I am producing to clarify my thought:

	Total product	Share due to capital	Share due to labor
1 st period	1000	1/2, or 500	1/2, or 500
2 nd period	1,800	1/3, or 600	2/3, or 1200
3 rd period	2,800	1/4, or 700	3/4, or 2100
4 th period	4,000	1/5, or 800	4/5, or 3200

From these figures we can see how the progressive increase in output that corresponds to the progressive increase in capital explains this twin phenomenon, that is to say, that the absolute share due to capital increases whereas its proportional share decreases, while the share due to labour increases simultaneously in both aspects.

The result of all the preceding is as follows:

In order for the lot of the masses to improve, the return to capital has to decrease.

In order for interest to decrease, capital has to increase.

In order for capital to increase, five things are needed: activity, savings , freedom, peace ,and security .

And these benefits, which are important for everyone, are even more important for the working class.

It is not that I deny the sufferings of workers, but I say that they are on the wrong track when they attribute this suffering to infamous capital. 1799

This is my theory. I am setting it out with confidence in the readers' good faith. It has been said that I had set myself up as the advocate of capitalist privilege . It is not up to me, but up to my theory to reply.

I am bold enough to say that this theory is consoling and consistent. It encourages unity between the classes; it shows that there is agreement between our principles, it destroys the antagonism between people and ideas, and satisfies both the mind and the heart.

Is this also true of the theory that acts as the new fulcrum for socialism? The theory that denies capital any right to a reward? which sees only contradiction, antagonism, and plunder everywhere? which sets one class against the other and depicts injustice as a universal plague of which all men are to some extent both guilty and a victim?

If, in spite of this, free credit is true, it has to be accepted: Fiat justicia, ruat coelum (Let justice be done though the heavens fall). But what if it is false?

For my part I hold it to be false and in ending this letter, I thank you for having honestly given me the opportunity of combating it.

FRÉDÉRIC BASTIAT

Long footnote from Letter 8

This law of decrease or divisibility, 1800 that an infinite number of divisions will never reaches zero, is well known to mathematicians and governs a host of economic phenomena and has not been sufficiently observed.

Let us quote a familiar example:

Everyone knows that in a wealthy and highly populated district in a large town, you can increase revenue while reducing sales prices. This is what is familiarly spoken of as: " Making up for it on quantity ".

Let us take four knife sellers, one in a village, another in Bayonne, a third in Bordeaux, and the fourth in Paris.

We might have the following table:

	Number of knives sold	Profit per knife	Total profit
Village	100	1 fr.	100 fr.
Bayonne	200	75	150
Bordeaux	400	50	200
Paris	1,000	25	250

Here we can see the multiplier (the second column) decreasing constantly because the multiplicand (the first column) increases constantly; the constant increase in the total product (the third column) rules out the idea that the multiplier will ever reach zero even if you moved from Paris to London and to towns that are increasingly large and wealthy.

What has to be observed here is that buyers cannot complain about the gradual increase in the total profit achieved by the merchant, for what interests them as buyers is the profit levied proportionally on them as payment for the service provided and this profit decreases constantly. Thus, from different points of view, the seller and buyer both progress simultaneously.

This is the law of capital. It is well known and also reveals the harmony of interest between capitalists and the proletariat and their simultaneous advance.

Letter No. 9: P. J. Proudhon to F. Bastiat (31 December 1849)

A serious accusation. - The refutation of five propositions. -Arguments drawn from operations carried out by the Bank of France. - The misdeeds of this Bank.

31 December 1849

You have misled me.

I expected a serious dispute with you, but your letters are just repeated and boring hoaxes. If you had made a pact with usury to obfuscate the question and prevent our debate from reaching a conclusion by loading it with extraneous incidentals, trivialities, and mere quibbles, you could not have done better!

Please tell me, what is the question we are discussing? It is to establish whether interest on money should be abolished or not. I myself have told you that this is the fulcrum of socialism and the mainspring of the Revolution.

A vital preliminary question therefore arises, that of knowing whether it is in reality possible to abolish this interest. You say no, I say yes; which of us should be believed? Obviously, neither. The matter has to be examined, as common sense dictates and the most elementary notion of equity prescribes. You, on the contrary, reject such an examination. For the two months during which we have opened these solemn proceedings in which capital was to be judged and usury condemned or acquitted in La Voix du Peuple , you have not ceased to reiterate to me in a variety of tones the same old story:

"Capital, as I understand it and as its essential nature appears to me, is productive. This conviction is enough for me; I do not wish to know any more. Besides, you acknowledge that by making interest-bearing loans I am providing a service and not acting as a thief; why then do I need to listen to you? When I have proved that free credit is impossible according to my system and you have agreed that an honest man may, with a perfectly clear conscience, draw an income from his funds, you ought to also accept the fact that free credit is impossible. What is demonstrated to be true in one system cannot become false in another. Otherwise we would have to say that a thing can be true and false simultaneously, which is something my mind absolutely refuses to understand. I will not abandon this position." 1801

Where, Sir, did you learn, I do not say to reason, since it appears from the outset of this polemic that reasoning in your case is reduced to stating and confirming your proposition constantly without invalidating that of your opponent, but to engage in debate? The most junior lawyer's clerk will tell you that in any debate the propositions of each party have to be examined successively and with full discussion on both sides and, since we have taken the general public to be our judge, it is obvious that, once your argument has been set out and debated, mine has to be dealt with.

With you, things do not happen in this way. Satisfied as you are with the concession I made to you, that is to say, that in the current state of affairs interest-bearing loans cannot be considered as illicit acts, you take it as demonstrated that interest is necessary and thereupon, on the pretext that you do not know the least thing about antimonies, you contrive to rule the debate out of court, forcing me to shut up. Is this a discussion, I ask you?

Obliged to do this by such strange conduct, I made one step toward you. My method of demonstration seemed to cause you some trouble: I therefore abandoned this method and showed you, using the standard form of reasoning, that everything changes in society, that what at one time signified progress at another became a fetter, such that if we disregard the given time, the same idea or fact changes its character completely depending on the aspect under which it is considered. Nothing contradicts the belief that interest is exactly in this situation. Consequently your plea of inadmissibility cannot be accepted and you most decidedly do have to examine with me the hypothesis of free credit and the abolition of interest.

What is your answer to this? I scarcely dare to remind you of it. Because out of regard for you I thought it my duty to change my method, you first of all accuse me of prevarication and then of fatalism ! I have done with you, if I may be allowed the comparison, what mathematics teachers do with their pupils when a proof causes difficulty; they substitute another, more within their grasp. For, and you Sir should note this well, Hegelian dialectic, while it is not the whole of logic, is to syllogism and inference what differential calculus is to standard geometry. You may laugh at this, since human minds have the right to laugh at anything once they have understood and worked it out, but it does have to be understood, otherwise laughter is just a grimace by the foolish. And you, as a prize for my readiness to cooperate, reward me with sarcasm: to listen to you, I am just a sophist. Is this serious argument?

I will go even further. You said, and I quote your own words, " Show me how interest becomes illegitimate after being legitimate and I will agree to discuss the theory of free credit ." 1802

To satisfy this desire, which incidentally is very reasonable, I gave the history of interest and wrote a biography of usury. I showed that the cause of this practice lay in a concourse of political and economic circumstances beyond the control of the contracting parties and inevitable at the dawn of society, that is to say: 1. The incommensurability of values resulting from the fact that industries are not independent entities and from the absence of any terms of comparison; 2. The risks attending trade; 3. The custom, introduced at an early time among traders and which gradually became regular and generalized, of imposing a proportional extra sum as a fine or indemnity ( damages and interest ) on any debtors in arrears; 4. The preponderance of precious metals and coinage over other forms of goods; 5. The combined use of private cargo contracts, insurance, and whole ship contracts , and finally 6. The establishment of land rent based upon the idea of interest on cash, and which once accepted without demur by the sophists, was later employed to justify this very same interest.

To complete the demonstration, I then proved, through a simple arithmetic calculation, that interest, excusable as an accident in the conditions in which it first arose and where it subsequently developed, becomes absurd and an act of plunder as soon as attempts are made to generalize it and make it a RULE of public economic life; that it is in clear contradiction with economic principles, that in society, net product is equal to gross product so that any levy taken by capital from production constitutes an accounting error and an impossibility in terms of social equilibrium. Finally, I showed that although in another age interest was a stimulus to the circulation of capital, it is now, like the tax on salt, wine, sugar, meat, and even the Customs Service itself, just a hindrance to this circulation. It must now be linked with the stagnation of business, with unemployment in industry, distress in agriculture, and the increasing imminence of universal bankruptcy.

All this was a matter of history, theory, and practice, as much as a matter of calculation. You yourself noted that at no time did I call upon fraternity, philanthropy, the authority of the Gospels, and the Fathers of the Church against interest. I have very little faith in philanthropy; as for the Church, it has never understood anything about this subject and its casuistry, from Christ to Pius IX, 1803 is quite simply absurd. I repeat, absurd, both when it condemns interest with no consideration for the circumstances that excuse and require it and when it limits its anathema to usury on money and accepts, so to speak, usury on land.

What is your reply to this exposition, whose interest you yourself appreciated? What is your reply in your fourth letter? Nothing.

Do you deny history? You do not.

Do you question my calculations? No.

What, therefore, are you saying? You utter your constant refrain: He who lends is providing a service: this proves that capital carries within itself the unchallengeable right to be remunerated . After which, you give me, as an expression of the wisdom of centuries, five or six aphorisms that are excellent for anaesthetizing uneasy consciences but which, as I will prove to you in a moment, are everything that the most brutish habit has ever caused to be uttered as flagrant absurdities. Then, making your sign of the cross, you declare the discussion closed. Amen !

Mr. Bastiat, you are an economist and a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, 1804 a member of the Chamber's Finance Committee, 1805 a member of the Peace Congress, 1806 a member of the Anglo-French League for Free Trade, 1807 and what is better than all these, an upright man and a man of intelligence. Well then! To safeguard your intellect and honesty, I am obliged to prove to you, by A plus B, that you do not know the first thing about the things you have undertaken to speak of, neither about capital, nor interest, prices, value, circulation, finance, or political economy as a whole, any more than you do about German metaphysics.

Have you ever in your life heard of the Bank of France? Do me the honor, some time, of entering it; it is not far from the Institute. 1808 You will find Mr. d'Argout 1809 there who, with regard to capital and interest, knows more than you and all the economists at Guillaumin. 1810 The Bank of France is a company made up of capitalists, formed about fifty years ago following the solicitation of the state, and by a privilege awarded by the State, in order to practice usury across the entire territory of France. 1811 Since its foundation, it has never ceased to grow constantly: by adding the departmental banks to it, the February Revolution has made it the leading power in the Republic. The principle on which this company was formed is exactly yours. They said: "We have acquired our capital through our work or by the work of our fathers. Why then, by making one of its tasks to ensure the circulation of credit and putting it at the service of our country, should we not draw from it a legitimate revenue when landowners draw income from their land, when house builders draw rent from their houses, when businessmen gain from their goods profit that is larger than their management expenses, or when workers who assemble our parquet floors include in the price of their day's work a quantum (an amount) for the wear and tear of their tools, a quantum which will surely exceed what is necessary to amortize the sum they have cost them?

As you see, this line of argument is extremely plausible. This is the counter argument that was used in all ages, and quite rightly so, against the Church, when it wanted to confine its condemnation exclusively to interest and not to rent; this is the theme that runs through each of your letters.

Well, do you know where this fine line of reasoning has led the shareholders of the Bank of France, all of whom I hold, along with Mr. d'Argout to be highly upright men? To theft, yes Sir, the most incontrovertible, shameless, and detestable theft. For it is this theft, alone, that has since February brought production to a stop, prevented business from functioning, caused people to die of cholera, 1812 hunger and cold, and, with the secret aim of restoring the monarchy, instilled despair in the working classes.

Above all, it is here that I propose to show you how interest turns from being legitimate to being illegitimate and, what will surprise you even more, how credit that is paid for, from the instant it ceases to engage in theft and claims only the amount legitimately due to it, becomes free credit.

What is the capital of the Bank of France?

90 million, according to the latest inventory. 1813

What is the legal interest rate agreed upon between the Bank and the State? 4 percent per year.

Therefore the annual legal and legitimate product of the Bank of France, the fair price for its services is 4 percent per year on a capital of 90 million, or 3 million 600 thousand francs of revenue.

3,600,000 francs, this is what, in line with the fiction of the productivity of capital, commerce in France owes the Bank of France each year in payment for its capital of 90 million.

In these circumstances, the shares of the Bank of France are like buildings that regularly yield 40 francs of income; they were issued at 1,000 francs and are worth 1,000 francs.

Well, do you know what happens?

Consult the same inventory: you will see that the said shares, instead of being quoted at 1,000 francs are quoted at 2,400. Last week, they were 2,445 and if the portfolio expands, they will increase to 2,500 and 3,000 francs. This means that the capital of the Bank, instead of earning it 4 percent, the legal, agreed rate, produces 8, 10, and 12 percent.

Has the capital of the Bank doubled or tripled then? This is, in fact, what should happen in accordance with the theory set out in your third and fourth propositions, that is to say that interest decreases as capital increases, but in such a way that the total revenue of capitalists increases .

Well, this is not so. The capital of the Bank has remained the same, 90 million. The only thing is that the Company, because of its privilege, and using its financial machinery, has found the means of operating with regard to commerce as though its capital was no longer only 90 million but 450, that is to say, five times greater.

Is this possible, you will say? This is the procedure; it is very simple and I am equipped to talk about it: this is precisely one of the procedures that the People's Bank proposed to use to achieve the elimination of interest.

To avoid the carrying about of cash and the awkward business of the handling of écus, the Bank of France uses credit vouchers called Bank Notes that represent the money it has in its vaults. It is these Notes that are normally issued to its customers against letters of credit and bills of exchange that they bring to it, the redemption of which it undertakes to manage with guarantees, however, for both drawers and drawees.

The Bank's paper thus has a double guarantee: the guarantee of the écus in the treasury and the guarantee of the commercial paper in the portfolio. The security provided by this double guarantee is so great that it is common in commerce to prefer the paper to the specie that everyone is as happy to have in the Bank as in his own chest of drawers.

It might even be conceived in the extreme case that, using this procedure, the Bank of France could do without capital resources at all and allow discounts without cash. In effect since the commercial paper that it discounts and against which it hands out notes have to be reimbursed to the Bank at their due date by an equal sum, either in money or in notes, it would be enough for the holders of notes never to entertain the idea of converting them into écus, for the operation to be conducted entirely in paper. In this case, circulation would no longer be based on the credit of the Bank, whose capital would thus be withdrawn from service, but on public credit, through the general acceptance of the notes.

In practice, things do not happen exactly as the theory indicates. We have never seen Bank paper substituted entirely for cash; there is merely a trend toward this substitution. Well, let us note what results from this trend.

Speculating in total security on public credit and, incidentally, sure of recovering its outlay, the Bank does not limit its discounts to the growth of its balances; it keeps issuing more notes than it has money, which means that, for part of its holdings, instead of depositing assets subject to a genuine valuation and operating genuine exchanges, it merely carries out a set of transfers of accounts or entries with no capital involved. What takes the place of capital in the Bank here is, I repeat, established custom, the confidence of trade, in a word, public credit.

It thus appears that the discount rate should decrease in proportion to the over-issue of notes, that if, for example the Bank's capital is 90 million and the total of notes issued 112 million, then since the fictitious capital 1814 is one quarter of the genuine capital, the discount rate of 4 percent should fall to 3 per cent. What could be fairer, in fact? Is public credit not public property? Is not the sole guarantee for the notes over-issued by the Bank the reciprocal obligations of citizens? Is acceptance of this paper with no guarantee in metal not exclusively based on their mutual trust? Is it not this trust that alone creates the likelihood of such an acceptance? In what way has the Bank's capital intervened in this? How does the guarantee seem to operate?

This simple glimpse may enable you to judge how false your proposition number 3 is, according to which a fall in interest follows from an increase in capital. Nothing is more wrong than this proposition; on the contrary, both theory and the practice of all the banks proves that a bank may well draw interest of 4 percent from its capital by setting its discount rate at 3 percent; we will shortly see that it can go very much lower.

Why therefore does the Bank that, with a capital of 90 million, issues in our hypothetical case 112 million in notes; which consequently operates, by means of public credit, as though its capital has increased from 90 million to 112, why, I say, does it not reduce its discount rate in the same proportion? Why is interest at 4 percent received by the Bank as income from loaning capital that is not its property? Can you give me one reason to justify this excess receipt of 1 percent on 112 million? As for me, Sir,

"I call a spade a spade and Rollet a rascal," 1815

And say quite plainly that the Bank is STEALING. 1816

But this is nothing.

While the Bank of France is issuing notes instead of écus, part of its receipts continues to be in cash, so that, the initial capital always remains the same, 90 million, the amount received, that is the accumulation of cash paid into the Bank is gradually raised to 100, 200, or 300 million: today it is 431 million! 1817

This accumulation of money, in which some people have a mania for indulging, is the decisive fact that nullifies the theory of interest and which demonstrates most palpably the necessity for free credit. It is easy to ascertain the truth of this.

It is admitted in theory that an exchange of products can be carried out perfectly well without the use of money; you yourself acknowledge this and all economists know this. Well, what the theory shows is exactly what practice is carrying out before our very eyes. As the circulation of fiduciary media gradually replaces the circulation of metallic currency, as paper is preferred to écus, with the public preferring to settle their accounts with cash rather than notes, and the Bank being constantly encouraged to issue new bank notes, either by the borrowing needs of the State or by those of the commercial interests who turn en masse to get their commercial paper discounted, or for any other reason, the result is that gold and silver are removed from circulation and are swallowed up by the Bank. Here we can see, when they are added to the existing holdings, the bank's ability to multiply the number of notes becomes literally infinite.

It is through this conversion that the Bank's holdings have reached the huge sum of 431 million. The result of this fact is that the Company of the Bank, in spite of the renewal of its privilege, is no longer the sole titleholder: because of the increase in its holdings, it has acquired an associate more powerful than itself. This associate is the country, one that figures each week in the balance sheet of the Bank of France to the tune of a sum that varies from 340 to 350 million. And since the interest is joint and indivisible, it can truly be said that it is no longer the company that gained its charter in 1803 that is the banker; it is no longer the State that gave it its warrant either: it is commerce, industry, all the producers, and the entire nation which, by accepting the Bank's paper and preferring it to écus, are its true guarantors, guarantors who are also founders, as a replacement for the former Bank of France with a capital of 90 million, of a National Bank with one of 431 million.

A decree from the National Assembly, whose object would be to reimburse the shares in the Bank of France and convert it into a Central Bank in which every French citizen would be a silent partner, would just be a declaration of this now accomplished fact of the absorption of the company into the nation.

This having been set out, I will return to the reasoning I put forward a short time ago.

The interest agreed upon between the Company and the State is 4 percent per year on its capital.

This capital amounts to 90 million.

Bank holdings today, on 31 December 1849, are 435 million.

The value of notes issued is 436 million.

The capital, real or notional, on which the Bank operates, having been multiplied almost five-fold, the discount rate ought to be reduced to one fifth of the interest stipulated in the founding articles of the Bank to something approaching ¾ percent.

You should note, Sir, that your propositions are very far from being as solid as Euclid's. It is not true, and the facts I have just quoted to you prove it irrefutably, that interest falls only as capital increases progressively. Between the price of goods and the interest on capital, there is not the slightest analogy; the law governing their fluctuation is not the same, and all you have been harking on about in the last six weeks with regard to capital and interest is entirely devoid of reason. The universal practice of banks and the spontaneous reasoning of the people show you to be most humiliatingly wrong on all of these points.

Would you now believe, Sir, for truly you do not appear to me to be up to date on anything, that the Bank of France, a company of upright men, philanthropists, and God-fearing men who are incapable of compromising their consciences, continues to take 4 percent on all its discounts without allowing the public to benefit from the slightest relief? Would you believe that it is on this basis of 4 percent on a capital of 431 million which is not its property, that it manages the dividends of its shareholders and has its shares quoted on the Stock Exchange? Is this sort of thing theft, yes or no?

We have not reached the end of this. I have told you only the smallest part of the misdeeds of this company of speculators, set up deliberately by Napoleon with the aim encouraging state and landowner parasitism 1818 to prosper by sucking the blood of the people. It is not that a few million more or less that can affect a nation of 36 million people in any dangerous way. What I have revealed to you of the larceny of the Bank of France is just a trifle; it is its consequences that we must consider above all.

The Bank of France now holds in its hands the fortune and destiny of the nation.

If it gave a reduction in the interest rate to industry and commerce in proportion to the increase in its holdings, if in other words, the cost of its credit was reduced to ¾ percent, which it ought to do to distance itself from any hint of theft, this reduction would instantly produce incalculable results all over the Republic and around Europe. A book would not be enough to list them: I will limit myself to pointing just a few of them out to you.

If, the rate of interest at the Bank of France, renamed the National Bank, was ¾ percent instead of 4, ordinary bankers, notaries, capitalists, and even the shareholders of the Bank itself would shortly be obliged through competition to reduce their rates of interest, discounts, and dividends to a maximum of 1 percent, including transaction costs and commission. What harm do you think would this reduction do to unsecured debtors or commerce and industry, whose annual charge under this heading alone is at least two billion?

If the circulation of money was carried out at a discount rate that represented merely the administrative and drafting costs, registration, etc., the interest on future sales and purchases made with term loans (on credit) would fall in its turn from 6 percent to zero, which would mean that business would then be carried out at cost and there would be no more debts. How far do you also think the shameful figure for suspended payments, insolvencies, and bankruptcies would fall?

However, in the same way as in society net product is indistinguishable from gross product, so in the overall make-up of economic reality capital is indistinguishable from output. These two terms in fact do not designate two distinct things; they distinguish only relationships. Output is capital, capital is output; the only difference between them lies in domestic economics; it is nil in political economy. If therefore interest, once it has fallen to ¾ percent for cash, that is to say zero since ¾ percent no longer represents any more than the Bank's service, fell again to zero for goods, through the analogy of principles and facts, it would fall again to zero for buildings. Farm rents and house rents would end up being merged in amortization. Do you believe, Sir, that that would prevent people living in houses and tilling the earth?

If, thanks to this essential reform of the system of circulation, labor no longer had to pay capital any more than a rate of interest that represented a fair price for the service provide d by capitalists, since money and buildings no longer had any reproductive value and would be regarded merely as products , as things that were consumable and fungible, the favor which now attaches to money and capital would be directed entirely toward products; each person, instead of limiting his consumption would think only of extending it. Whereas today, thanks to the ban laid on consumer products by interest, markets for consumption remain permanently and gravely inadequate, production in its turn would no longer suffice, and labor would be guaranteed employment both de facto and de jure.

As the labouring class would gain at one fell swoop about 3 billion in interest that is taken from it out of the 10 it produces, plus 5 billion that this same system of interest payments causes it to lose through unemployment, plus 5 billion that the parasitic class, 1819 cut off from its customary revenue, would then be forced to produce, national production would be doubled, and the well-being of workers quadrupled. And you, Sir, whom the cult of interest does not prevent in the slightest from raising your thoughts to another world, what have you to say of this change in the world here below? Is it clear now that it is not the multiplication of capital that decreases interest but on the contrary the decrease in interest that multiplies capital?

But all this does not please our Capitalists friends, and it is not at all to the taste of the Bank. The Bank holds the horn of plenty entrusted to it by the nation in its hand: this is the 341 million in cash accumulated in its vaults, which is such a great testimony of the power of public credit. To revive production and spread wealth everywhere, the Bank would have to do just one thing: reduce its discount rate to the figure required for the production of interest at 4 percent on 90 million. It does not want to do this. For a few million more to distribute to its shareholders, money which it steals, it prefers to have the country lose 10 billion on what is produced each year. In order to pay for this parasitism, to put vice in its pay, to satisfy the profligacy of two million functionaries, speculators, usurers, prostitutes, and informers and keep this leprosy of a government going, it will cause thirty-four million souls 1820 to rot in poverty if necessary. Once again, is this not theft? Is it not pillage, armed robbery, premeditated murder, and ambush?

Have I said everything? No, for I would need ten volumes, but I must put an end to this. I will end with a reference, which I for my part consider to be the very masterpiece of its kind, to which I draw your undivided attention. Advocate of capital that you are, you do not know all its machinations.

The sum total of cash, I will not say that exists but that circulates in France, including the receipts of the Bank, does not exceed 1 billion, according to the most common estimate. 1821

At 4 percent interest (I always calculate on the hypothesis of credit paid), the people who work owe a total of 40 million each year to service this capital.

Could you, Sir, tell me why, instead of 40 million, we pay 1,600 million, I repeat, sixteen hundred million , as payment for this said capital?

1,600 million, 160 percent, you say! Impossible!

Did I not tell you, Sir, that you know nothing about political economy. Here is the factual case that is still an enigma to you, I am sure.

The total of mortgaged debt, according to the best informed writers, is 12 billion, and some put it at as much as 16 billion, so:	12 billion.
Capital invested by unsecured creditors, at least:	6 billion
Partnerships, about:	6 billion
To which should be added the public debt:	8 billion
Total:	28 billion

[fn 12 billion in table] 1822

A debt that farming, industry, commerce, in a word, the whole work-force, which produces everything, and the State that produces nothing and for which the work-force pays, owe to capital.

All these debts, and note this point, arise from money lent or supposed to have been lent, sometimes at 4 percent, sometimes at 5, 6, 8, 12, and up to 15 percent.

I will take an average of 6 percent interest for the first three categories, that is to say, 1,200 million on 20 billion. Add the interest on the public debt, approximately 400 million: 1823 a total of 1,600 million in annual interest on a capital of 1 billion.

Well, tell me, is it also the scarcity of money that is the cause of the exorbitant multiplication of this usury? No, since all these sums have been lent, as we have just said, at an average rate of 6 percent. How then does interest stipulated to be 6 percent become interest at 160 percent? I am about to tell you.

You will know, Sir, you who believe that all capital is naturally and of necessity productive, that this productivity does not happen equally for all, that it is habitually exercised under two kinds only, the kind known as fixed (land and houses) when this investment is to be found, which is neither always easy nor always safe, and the kind known as money. Money, above all, money! This is capital par excellence, capital that is lent, that is to say that is hired out, is to be paid for, and produces all these financial marvels that we see developed in detail at the Bank, in the Stock Exchange, and in all the workshops 1824 of usury and interest.

However, money is not at all something that can be exploited like land, nor that can be consumed by use like a house or a suit. It is nothing other than a token for exchange which is accepted by all traders and producers and with which you who manufacture clogs may obtain a cap. Through the agency of the Bank, paper is being substituted gradually for cash with the consent of all. All this is in vain, however. Preconceived ideas are holding their own, and if bank paper is accepted with the equal status of money, it is because people flatter themselves that they can exchange it for money at will. People want only money.

When I borrow money, it is therefore basically to have the ability to exchange present or future but as yet unsold products. Money in itself is useless to me. I take it only in order to spend it; I neither consume it nor cultivate it. Once the exchange has been concluded, money becomes available again and consequently capable of giving rise to a new loan. This is consequently what takes place, and since, through the accumulation of interest, the money-as-capital 1825 always returns to its source through a succession of exchanges, it follows that its re-lending, always by the same person, always benefits that same person.

Will you say that, since money facilitates the exchange of capital and products, the interest paid is not so much for the money than for the capital which is exchanged and that in this way 1,600 million in interest paid for 1 billion of cash represents in reality the returns for 25 to 30 billion of capital? This has been said or written somewhere by an economist of your school. 1826

An allegation like this cannot be supported for a minute. How is it, pray, that houses are rented, land is rented, and that goods sold on installment bear interest? This happens precisely because of the use of money, money that intervenes, like a tax agent, in all transactions, money that prevents houses and land from being exchanged instead of being rented and goods being sold for cash. Hence with money intervening everywhere like some supplementary capital, an agent for circulation, or an instrument of guarantee, it is really money that has to be paid and really the service it provide s that has to be remunerated.

And since on the other hand we have seen from our account of the workings of the Bank of France and the consequences of the accumulation of its receipts, that a capital of 90 million in cash that ought to produce interest at 4 percent, allows, depending on the volume of the Bank's business transactions, discounts of only 3, 2, 1, and ¾ percent, it is very clear that the sole aim of the 1,600 million in interest that the people pay their usurers, bankers, property owners, notaries ,and silent partners is to pay the return on a billion in gold and money, unless you prefer to acknowledge as I do that this 1,600 million is the product of theft. …

I told you, Sir, right from the outset of this dispute and I repeat it now, that it has never entered my head to accuse the men involved. What I am incriminating are the ideas and institutions. From this point of view, throughout this discussion, I have been more just than the Church and more charitable than the Gospel itself. You have seen with what care I have separated men from institutions and knowledge of the facts from theories in dealing with the question of interest-bearing loans. Never will I accuse society: despite all the crimes of my fellow men and the vices in my own heart, I believe in the sanctity of the human race.

However, when I reflect that it is against follies like this that the Revolution is now in the throes of discussion, when I see millions of men sacrificed to such appalling utopias, I am ready to give way to my misanthropy and I no longer have the heart to continue with the refutation. This being so, I try to elevate and ennoble the poverty of my subject through the sublimation of dialectic: your merciless routine constantly brings me back to hideous reality.

Production to be doubled,

Workers' well-being to be quadrupled:

This is what, in twenty-four hours we could achieve if we wished, through a simple reform of the bank and with no dictatorship, no communism, no phalanstery, no Icarianism, and no Triad. 1827 A decree in twelve articles from the National Assembly; a simple declaration of the fact that the Bank of France, through an increase of its cash, has become the National Bank and that, as a result it will have to operate in the name of and on behalf of the nation with the discount rate reduced to ¾ percent, would achieve three-quarters of the Revolution.

But this is what we do not want and what we refuse to understand, so profoundly has our political chatter and our parliamentary exaggeration stifled both moral and common sense in us,

This is what the Bank of France, a bastion of parasitism, does not want,

This is what the government, created precisely to support, protect, and encourage parasitism, does not want,

This is what the majority of the National Assembly, made up of parasites and the abettors of parasites, does not want,

This is what the minority, their heads turned by the thought of government, who ask themselves what society would become if there were no more parasites, do not want,

This is what the socialists themselves, the so-called revolutionaries for whom freedom, equality, wealth, or work are nothing if they have to abandon or merely postpone their illusions and give up the hope of being in government, do not want,

This is what the proletariat, bewildered by social theories, toasts to love, and fraternal homilies, do not know how to ask for.

Go on then, capital; continue to exploit this destitute people! Devour the bourgeoisie in a daze, inflict pressure on the workers, hold the peasantry to ransom, swallow up childhood, prostitute womankind, and keep your favors for the cowards who denounce others, the judges who condemn, the soldiers who shoot people dead, and for the slaves who applaud. The moral code of pig traders has become that of upright people. A curse on my contemporaries!

P. J. PROUDHON

Letter No. 10: F. Bastiat to P. J. Proudhon (6 January 1850)

Who has the right to complain of being misled? - Dialogue. - Inferences drawn from a privileged establishment, the Bank of France, prove nothing in the debate. - Conciliatory overtures. - Taking freedom of credit as the judge of last resort on the question of free credit. - A reminder of antinomy.

6 January 1850

I have misled you, you say; no, it was I who was misled

Having been admitted to your home and hearth in order to have a discussion among your personal friends, on a serious question, I would have thought at least that my person would have been respected, even if you had found something to criticize in my arguments. In fact you disregard my arguments and call into doubt my person. I am the one who was misled.

Writing in your journal and specifically to your readers, I had a duty to keep strictly to the subject under discussion. I believed that, understanding the awkwardness of my position, you would have considered yourself bound to impose the same awkwardness on yourself, since you were at home and under your own roof. Again I was mistaken.

I said to myself: Mr. Proudhon has an independent mind. Nothing in the world would induce him to fail in the duty of hospitality. But Mr. Louis Blanc having shamed you for your courtesy to an economist, 1828 you were indeed ashamed. I had judged you wrongly.

I also said to myself: the discussion will be fair. Is the right to remuneration inherent in capital as it is in labor itself? This was the question to be resolved, in order that a conclusion either for or against free credit might be drawn. Without hoping to reach agreement with you on the solution, I believed at least that we would agree on the question. But here we are, and this is strange, in a situation in which what you are criticising me for, with bitterness and almost with anger, is that I am going deeper into the question and burying myself in it. We had above all a PRINCIPLE to verify, one on which, according to you, depends the worth or otherwise of socialism and you are fearful of the light I am seeking to shine on this principle. You are uneasy with the direction the debate has taken and fly from it constantly. So it was I who was misled.

What a strange sight this debate must be for our readers, and without any of the fault being mine! It may be summed up as follows:

It is daytime.

It is nighttime.

Look, the sun is shining above the horizon. All the men all over the country are coming, going, walking, and acting in a way that indicates that there is light.

That proves that it is daytime . However, I state that at the same time it is nighttime .

How can this be so?

Because of the splendid law of Contradictions . 1829 Have you not read Kant and do you not know that the only truth in this world lies in propositions that contradict one another?

Then let us stop debating, for with this form of logic we will never agree.

Well then, since you do not understand the sublime clarity of contradictions , I will condescend to your ignorance and prove my thesis to you using the method of distinctions . Some daylight illuminates and some does not.

I am still no less in the dark.

I still have the resources of the system of digressions . Follow me and I will lead you along the way.

I do not need to follow you. I have proved that it is daytime . You agree, so everything has been said.

You are always regurgitating the same statement and the same proofs. You have proved that it is daytime , so be it. Now, prove to me that it is not nighttime .

Are you being serious?

When a man gets up and, addressing the people, says to them: the moment has come when society owes you capital free of charge, when you ought to have houses, tools, implements, materials, provisions for nothing ; I say, when a man says things like this, he should expect to meet an opponent who asks him what the essential nature of capital is. You can invoke contradictions, distinctions, or digressions till the cows come home; I will bring you back to the most important and essential subject. That is my role, and perhaps it is yours to say that I am an ignorant, pig-headed man and that I do not know how to reason.

In the end, for there to be such a profound divergence between us, it must be that we do not agree on the meaning of this word Capital.

In your letter dated 17 December, you said, "If the effort expended by creditor is zero, the interest due to the creditor must necessarily be zero." 1830

So be it. But this means that:

If the effort expended by a creditor is positive, then interest must be owed.

Prove, therefore, that the time has come in which houses, tools, and provisions are generated spontaneously. If not, you have no basis on which to say that the effort expended by a capitalist is zero, and that for this reason his remuneration ought to be zero.

Truly, I do not know what you mean by the word, Capital, for in your letter you give two quite different definitions of it.

On the one hand, you see the capital of a nation as the cash it possesses. Based on this fact, you set off to prove that the rate of interest in France is 160 percent. You calculate this as follows: the total sum of cash is one billion. The interest paid on all debt, whether mortgages, unsecured debt, limited partnerships, and public debt is 1,600 million. This means that capital is paid for at the rate of 160 percent.

The result of this is that, in your eyes, capital and cash are one and the same thing.

Working from this fact, I find your estimate of interest quite moderate. You ought to have said that capital also adds something to the price of all products and you would thus have reached an estimate of interest at 4 or 500 percent.

However, now that you have reasoned in this way on this strange definition of capital, you yourself turn it upside down in the following terms:

"Capital cannot be distinguished from production. These two words do not designate in reality two distinct things; they designate only relationships. Production is capital; capital is production." 1831

This is a foundation that is much wider that that of cash. If Capital is production or the sum of all the products (land, houses, goods, money, etc.), national capital is certainly more than one billion and your estimate of the rate of interest is nonsense.

Since I am convinced that this entire debate rests on the notion of capital, allow me, at the risk of boring you, to tell you what I think of this, not by means of a definition but by means of a description.

A joiner works for three hundred days and earns and spends 5 francs a day.

This means that he provides services to society and that society gives him back equivalent services, both estimated to be worth 1,500 francs, with one hundred sou pieces merely serving here as a means of facilitating exchanges.

Let us suppose that this artisan saves 1 franc a day. What does that mean? It means that he is providing society with services worth 1,500 francs and that he currently receives just 1,200 worth of services. He acquires the right to draw from society around him at a place and time and in a form that suits him, services that have been fairly and squarely earned up to a value of 300 francs. The sixty hundred-sou pieces he has saved are simultaneously the title and the means by which he can exercise his right. 1832 .

At the end of a year, our joiner can, then, if he sees fit, claim the right he has acquired from society. He can demand various forms of satisfaction. He can choose between going to a cabaret, a show, or a shop. He can also increase the number of his tools further, acquire better implements, and make it possible for him to work more productively in the future. It is this acquired right that I call capital .

This is the situation when his neighbor, a blacksmith, comes and says to the joiner: "Through your work, you have acquired savings, things on account , and the right to draw from the society around you services up to a value of 300 francs. Let me take over your right for one year, because I will use it to get more hammers, more iron, more coal, in a word, to improve my situation and my business."

"I am in the same situation," replies the joiner, "however, I am very happy to let you have my rights and to deprive myself of them for a year if you agree to give me a share of the additional profits you will be earning."

If this exchange, which benefits both parties, is freely concluded, who will dare to call it illegitimate?

Here, therefore, is a definition of interest, and as you have said, it must have arisen in the beginning in the form of a sharing of profit, with a share going to capital out of the additional profit it had helped to generate.

It is this part that relates to capital that I say is greater or lesser depending on whether the capital itself is scarcer or more abundant.

Later, to make things more convenient and to avoid having to watch each other, argue about accounts, etc., the contracting parties negotiate a fixed rate on this part. Just as sharecropping has been transformed into tenant farming, uncertain insurance premiums into fixed premiums, interest, instead of being a variable share of profits, has become a fixed rate of return. It has a rate, and this rate, thank Heaven, tends to decrease in proportion to the order, activity, economy, and security that prevail in society!

And certainly, if you want credit to be free of charge, you have to prove that capital is not generated by the work of the person lending it and that it does not make the work of the person borrowing it more fruitful.

Who then can say who is the loser in this arrangement! Is it the joiner, who makes a profit as a result? Is it the blacksmith, who finds it a way of increasing his production and hands over only part of his additional income? Is it some third party in society? Is it society itself, which obtains more and cheaper products from the forge?

It is true that the transactions relating to capital may give rise to cheating, abuses by force or fraud, deceit, and extortion. Have I ever denied this, and is this the subject of our debate? Are there not many transactions relating to labor in which capital plays no part and at which the same accusations can be leveled? And of these abuses, would it be more logical to conclude in favor of free credit in the first case than in favor of free labor 1833 in the second?

This leads me to say a few words about the new series of arguments that you make concerning the activities of the Bank of France. Even if I decide to go back on the resolution I had made to end this discussion, I am quite willing to seize this opportunity of protesting vigorously at an accusation that has been very improperly made against me.

It has been said that I have set myself up as a defender of capitalist privilege .

No, I defend no privilege; I defend nothing other than the rights of capital considered on its own. You will be fair enough, Sir, to acknowledge that there is no question between us of any particular facts, but rather one of science.

What I am defending is the freedom of (economic) transactions. 1834

Following your theory of contradiction , you are led into making contradictions out of things that are identical; do you also wish, through a theory of conciliation that is no less strange, to make things that are contrary, for example freedom and privilege, identical?

What therefore has the privilege of the Bank of France to do with our debate? When and where have I justified this privilege and the harm it engenders? Has this harm been contested by any of my friends? You should read the book by Mr. Charles Coquelin. 1835

But when, in order to attack the legitimate remuneration of capital, you castigate the illegitimate extortions of privilege, does not this subterfuge contain an admission that you are powerless to combat the rights of Capital exercised under the reign of freedom?

The public all want bank notes, that is notes which are redeemable upon demand. The issue of such notes is forbidden to all Frenchmen save one. This privilege enables the person in whom the monopoly is invested to make huge profits. What has that to do with the question of knowing whether capital is entitled to receive a payment freely agreed to?

Note this: capital which, as you say, is indistinguishable from production, represents labor, so much so that, since the start of this discussion, you have never struck a blow on one that does not bounce back onto the other. This is what I showed you in my last letter with regard to two fables: In order to prove that there are cases in which in all conscience people are bound to lend at no charge, you paint a picture of a rich capitalist faced with a poor shipwrecked victim. And a minute before this, you yourself confront a worker who is close to being engulfed by the waves with a capitalist. What follows from this? That there are circumstances in which capital, like labor, ought to be a gift. But we can no more infer that the one should normally be free than we can the other.

Now you are telling me about the misdeeds of capital and quoting me an example of privileged capital . I will answer you by quoting you an example of privileged labor .

I am supposing that a reformer more radical than you stands up in the midst of the people and tells them: "Labor must be free; earnings are theft. Mutuum date, nil inde sperantes (lend, hoping for nothing thereby). And in order to prove to you that the earnings of labor are illegitimate, I point the finger at the foreign exchange agent who exploits the exclusive privilege of handling commissions, the butcher with the exclusive right to feed the town, and the manufacturer who has closed down all places of production except his own. Thus you can see clearly that labor does not intrinsically contain the right of payment, that it steals everything it is paid, and that wages should be abolished."

Certainly, when you hear reformers lump together forced payments with payments that are freely given , you would be within your rights to ask them this question: Where did you learn to reason?

Well then, Sir, if you conclude from the privileges of the Bank that we should have free credit, I believe that I am entitled to turn against you the question you ask me in your last letter: Where did you learn to reason?

"In Hegel", you will say, "He provided me with infallible logic." Malebranche 1836 also had imagined a method of reasoning with which he could never make a mistake … and he was mistaken right through his life, to the point where it might be said of this philosopher:

He who sees everything in God, does not see that it is he who is crazy.

Let us therefore leave the Bank of France out of this. Whether you assess its wrong doings positively or negatively, whether you exaggerate its harmful action or not, it has a privileged status and that is enough for it not to be able to shed any light on this debate.

Nevertheless, perhaps we might find some grounds for conciliation in all this. Is there not one point on which we agree? This point is that we claim and vigorously pursue the freedom of transactions, those that relate to capital, money, and bank notes as well as all the others. I would like it to be possible quite freely to open money shops and offices for loans and borrowing 1837 just as you open shoe shops or grocery shops.

You believe in free credit; I do not. But in the end, what is the use of quarrelling if we agree on the fact that credit transactions ought to be freely entered into?

Certainly, if it is in the nature of capital to be lent free of charge, this would be under the regime of freedom, and you doubtless are not asking for this revolution to be one of coercion.

Let us therefore attack the special privileges of the Bank of France, along with all other such privileges. Let us achieve freedom and leave it to act. If you are right, if it is in the nature of credit to be free, freedom will develop this nature, and you may be sure that I, if I am still alive, 1838 would be the first to be glad of it. I would borrow at no charge and for the rest of my days, a fine house on the boulevard with furniture to go with it, and a million (in cash) to boot. My example would doubtless be contagious and there would be many borrowers around the world. Provided that there were no lack of lenders, we would all lead a happy life.

And since the subject is enthusing me, would you allow me, layman that I am, to say a word by way of conclusion on the metaphysics of antinomy? I have not studied Hegel, but I have read your work, and this is the idea I have formed about it all.

Yes, there are hundreds of things of which it can truly be said that they are good or bad , depending on whether they are considered in relation to human weakness or from the point of view of absolute perfection.

Our legs are a good thing, for they enable us to move ourselves from one place to another. They are also a bad thing, for they are evidence that we do not have the gift of being everywhere at once.

This is true for all painful and effective remedies; they are both good and bad, good because they are effective and bad because they are painful.

It is therefore true that contradictions can be seen in each of the following concepts: Capital, interest, property, competition, machines, the State, labor, etc .

Yes, if man were absolutely perfect, he would not have to make interest payments, for capital would generate spontaneously and without limit for him, or rather he would have no need for capital.

Yes, if man were absolutely perfect, he would not have to work; a simple fiat would be enough to satisfy his desires.

Yes, if man were absolutely perfect, we would need neither a government nor a State. Since there would be no court proceedings, there would be no need for judges. Since there would be no crimes or misdemeanors, there would be no need for police. Since there would be no wars, there would be no need for armies.

Yes, if man were absolutely perfect, there would be no property, for everyone, like God, would enjoy a bounty of things to enjoy, and no one could imagine the distinction between yours and mine .

Given these reflections, we could imagine a subtle form of metaphysics, going somewhat beyond the incontestable dogma of human perfectibility, which might come along and say: We are moving toward a time at which credit will be free of charge and the State eliminated. It is actually only then that society will be perfect, for the notions of interest and State exclude the concept of Perfection .

This metaphysic might have said as much about the notions of work, arms and legs, eyes, stomach, knowledge, virtue, etc .

And it would certainly fall into the most blatant sophism if it added: Since society will have reached perfection only when it no longer recongnizes the need for interest and the State, let us eliminate the State and interest and we will have a perfect form of society.

It is as though the thesis in question were saying: Since man will no longer need his legs when he has the gift of being everywhere at once, to make him able to be everywhere at once, let us cut off his legs. 1839

The sophism lies in the pretence that what in this world is regarded as bad can be a remedy; it misses the truth that it is not the cure provided by the remedy that causes perfection but on the contrary perfection that makes the remedy superfluous.

But it can be imagined how the form of metaphysics of which I am speaking can upset and mislead people's minds if it is skillfully handled by a vigorous political writer.

It would in fact be easy for him to show in turn as being good and bad such things as property, freedom, labor, machines, capital, interest, the the court system, and the State.

He might entitle his book: Economic contradictions . 1840 Everything would be alternatively attacked and defended in it. Falsehoods would always take on the colors of the truth. If the author were a great writer, he would cover the principles with an extremely solid shield at the same time as he turns against them the most dangerous of weapons.

His book would be a inexhaustible arsenal for and against all causes. Readers would reach the end without knowing where truth lies or where error is to be found. Terrified by feeling themselves pervaded by skepticism, they would implore the master, saying to him what was said to Kant: Please, reveal the unknown . 1841 But the unknown will not be revealed.

If as a bold jouster, you enter the ring, you would not know how to grasp this terrible opponent, for he has used his system of argument to arrange a whole host of escapes for himself.

Will you say to him: "I have come to defend property."? He will tell you: "I have defended it better than you." And that is true. Will you say to him: "I have come to attack property"? He will tell you: "I have attacked it before you." And that is also true. Whether you are for or against credit, the State, labor, or religion, you will always find him, book in hand, ready to approve or contradict.

And all this is the payment for having mistakenly come to the conclusion that one can achieve absolute perfection from some undefined perfection, which is certainly never achievable when you are dealing with mankind.

But what you may say, Mr. Proudhon, and what my weak voice 1842 will repeat in chorus with you is this: Let us approach perfection in order to make interest payments, the State, labor, and all burdensome and painful remedies increasingly superfluous.

Let us create order, security, and the habits of saving and temperance around us so that capital will increase and INTEREST decrease.

Let us create around us a spirit of justice, peace, and concord in order to make armies, navies, the police, magistrates, or repression, in a word, the STATE, increasingly superfluous.

And above all, let us bring about FREEDOM, through which all the civilizing powers will arise.

On this very day, 6 January 1850, La Voix du Peuple addressed La Patrie 1843 in these terms:

"Is La Patrie willing to request with us the abolition of the special privileges of banks, of the monopolies of notaries, foreign exchange agents, advocates, bailiffs, printers, and bakers; the free transport of letters, the free manufacture of salt, gun powder, and tobacco; the abolition of the law banning unions, the abolition of the Customs Service, city tolls, the tax on wine and spirits, and the tax on sugar? Is La Patrie willing to support the tax on capital, the only one that is proportional, the dismissal of the army and its replacement by the National Guard, the substitution of juries for magistrates, and the freedom of education at all levels?"

This is my program; I have never had any other. 1844 What will result from this? It is that capital should be lent not free of charge but freely .

FREDERIC BASTIAT

Letter No. 11: P. J. Proudhon to F. Bastiat (21 January 1850)

Maintaining the charge of ignorance. - Definition of CAPITAL substituted for the inaccurate definitions of economists. - An appeal to the authority of double entry bookkeeping. - Accounting for social classes. - The proof that comes from this. - A conciliatory concession on capital risk. - Political, economic, and scientific revolution.

21 January 1850

You have not misled me: The tone of good faith and extreme sincerity that shines out of every line of your last letter is proof of this to me. Therefore with joy that is very frank, I withdraw my words. 1845

I have not misled you either; I have not failed, as you say, in my duty of hospitality. All of your letters have been, as I promised religiously included in La Voix du Peuple without reservation, reflection, and comment. On my side, I have made the greatest effort to give the discussion a regular momentum, and to do this I have in turn entered the metaphysical, historical, and finally the practical and even routine realms. You alone, and our readers are the witnesses of this, have resisted any kind of (consistent) methodology. Finally, with regard to the general tone of our polemics, you have to admit that the way I have dealt with you as a defender of capital has been the envy of those of my co-religionists 1846 who are now joined against me in an cause even more unfortunate than that of interest, and who, sad to say, have something to defend in this matter other than their views; they have to avenge their pride. If in my last reply, my style was tinged with a certain bitterness, you should attribute it merely to the obviously very natural impatience I felt to see my efforts constantly dashed into pieces against this obstinacy, this force of intellectual inertia that, taking no account of either philosophy, progress, or finance, limits itself to reproducing eternally this puerile question: When I have saved one hundred écus and, while being able to use them in my own business, I lend them for interest or a share of the profits, am I committing theft?

I therefore pay homage to your fairness; I dare to say that my courtesy to you has not for one minute failed. However, today more than ever, I am obliged to insist on my most recent assessment. No, Mr. Bastiat, you do not understand political economy.

Let us set aside, please, the law of contradiction which your mind clearly rejects; let us set aside history, or rather progress, whose trend you fail to recognize and whose authority you reject; let us set aside the Bank, through which I have proved to you that, without changing anything it is possible to reduce the interest on capital to ½ percent at a stroke. Since this is your wish, I will limit myself purely to the notion of capital. I will analyze this notion; from the point of view of interest, I will deduce it theoretically and mathematically, and having established my thesis through metaphysics, history, and the Bank, I will establish it a fourth time. I will justify each of my statements through accounting procedures, that all too despised and modest science which is to society in its economic aspects what algebra is to geometry. Perhaps this time my mind will succeed in meeting yours, but what guarantee do I have that you will not criticise me for changing my method again for the fourth time?

What is capital ?

Authors do not agree on its definition; indeed they scarcely agree on what it is.

J. B. Say defined capital as the simple accumulation of products . 1847

Rossi: A product saved and intended for purposes of reproduction . 1848

J. Garnier who quoted them: Accumulated labor , which chimes with J. B. Say's definition, an accumulation of products. 1849

However, this latter gentleman is more explicit in his explanation elsewhere; "What is understood by capital," he said, "is a sum of financial resources devoted to providing advance payments for production ." 1850

Finally, according to you, capital is a surplus or the remainder of product that is not consumed and is intended for use in reproduction . 1851 This is what results from your fable on the worker who earns 1,500 francs a year, consumes 1,200, and saves the remaining 300 francs, either in order to invest them in his business or, and according to you this is the same thing, to lend them at interest.

From this uncertainty as to the definition, it is clear that the notion of capital is still somewhat suspect, and the vast majority of our readers will not be very surprised to learn that political economy, a science that is positive, genuine, and accurate, according to those whose profession it is to teach it, and that includes you, has still to sort out its definitions.

J. Garnier, despairing of finding words to express the concept of the thing, tries like you to describe it: "It is products such as goods, tools, buildings, cattle, sums of money, etc. that are the fruit of previous industry and which are used in the process of reproduction." 1852

Further on, his mind being so afflicted with hesitation, he brings to our attention that the notion of an advance enters into that of capital . "Well, what is an advance ? An advance is a resource deployed in such a way that it will prove to be retrievable subsequently." 1853 This is what Mr. Garnier says, and I think that with this explanation, readers will not be much further enlightened.

Let us try to come to the economists' assistance.

What results so far from the definitions of these writers is that all of them have the feeling that there is something called CAPITAL, but they are incapable of determining this something; they do not know what it is. Through the jumble of confusion constituting their explanations, we glimpse the idea common to all of them, but they are incapable of clarifying this idea for lack of philosophy; they cannot find the right word or formula. Well then, Sir, you are about to learn that dialectic, even Hegelian dialectic, can be good for something.

First of all, you will note that the idea of a product is implicit or explicit in all of the definitions of capital that have been attempted. This is already a first step. But under what conditions, how and when can a product be called CAPITAL? This is what needs to be determined. Let us go back to our authors, and by correcting their definitions by comparing one against the other we will perhaps succeed in having them express what they all feel implicitly but none of their intellects perceives.

What constitutes capital, according to J. B. Say, is the simple ACCUMULATION of products .

The idea of accumulation, like that of a product, thus enters into the notion of capital. This is a second step. Well, all types of product can be accumulated, therefore all types of product can become capital and therefore the list made by Mr. Joseph Garnier of the various forms taken by capital is incomplete, and thus inaccurate, in that it excludes from the notion the products that form the food supplies of the workers, such as wheat, wine, oil, grocery provisions, etc. These products can be held to be capital just as much as buildings, tools, cattle, money, and everything that is considered to be a productive instrument or raw material.

Rossi: Capital is a product saved and intended to be used in REPRODUCTION.

Reproduction , that is to say, the intended use of the product, this is a third idea contained in the notion of capital. Product, accumulation, reproduction : three ideas that already enter into the notion of capital.

Well, in the same way that all products may be accumulated they may also be used, and effectively used, when workers are the ones that consume them, for reproduction. The bread that sustains workers, the fodder that feeds cattle, the coal that produces steam, just like the land, carts, and machines, all of these are used for reproduction, all of these, when they are consumed, are capital. Everything that is consumed, in fact, is consumed or at least deemed to be consumed reproductively. What is used to maintain and to operate an tool, as well as the tool itself, that which feeds workers, as well as the actual material of work. All products therefore become capital, at one time or another; the theory that distinguishes between productive and unproductive consumption 1854 and which understands by the latter the daily consumption of wheat, wine, meat, clothing, etc. is wrong. We will see later that the only unproductive consumption is that of capitalists themselves.

Thus, capital is not something that is specific and determined with its own existence and reality, like land , which is a thing, labor which is another, and a product 1855 which is the shape given by labor to the objects of nature that become through this process a third thing. Capital does not form a fourth category with land, labor, and products, as economists teach, it simply indicates a state or relationship, as I have said. It is, as all authors admit, accumulated output intended for purposes of reproduction.

One step more and we will have our definition.

How does output become capital? For it is not enough, far from it, for product to have been accumulated and stored to be considered capital. It is not even enough for it to be intended to be part of the reproductive process; all products are intended for this. Do you not hear every day that the economy is overflowing with products while lacking capital? Well, this would not happen if the simple accumulation of products, as Say says, or the intention to use these products for the reproductive process, as Rossi would have it, were sufficient to have them considered to be capital. Each producer would then just have to take his own product and finance himself with what this product has cost him, to be in a position to produce more, endlessly and without any limit. I therefore repeat my question: What is it that makes the notion of product suddenly become transformed into the notion of capital? This is what the economists do not say, what they do not know, and I might even say, what none of them asks himself.

At this point, an intermediary point intervenes whose specific virtue is to convert product into capital, just as with the gusts of the west wind, the snow that has fallen in Paris in the last few days turns to liquid. This idea is the concept of VALUE.

This is what Garnier glimpsed when he defined capital as a sum of financial resources devoted to providing advance payments for production ; 1856 what you yourself felt when you sought the notion of capital, not simply with J. B. Say in an accumulation of products nor with Rossi in savings intended to be reproduced , but in the part of a worker's pay that is not consumed, that is to say obviously, of the value of his labor or product.

This means that in order to become capital, products have to have been subjected to a proper evaluation, to have been purchased, sold, and appraised, their price negotiated and set through a sort of legal convention. Thus the notion of capital indicates a relationship that is essentially social, a kind of contract without which the product remains a product.

Thus, leather, when it leaves the butcher's shop, is the butcher's product. When you fill a warehouse with it, it will never be anything other than leather; it will have no value, by which I mean value from its being worked on, it is not capital, but still only product. If this leather is purchased by a tanner, he immediately carries it, or to be more accurate, carries its value to his premises in the advance he pays on it, thereby deeming it capital. Through the tanner's work, this capital becomes product once again, which product, in turn acquired at an agreed price by the shoemaker, changes once more into capital, to become product yet again, through the shoemaker's work. Since this latest product is not capable of undergoing any further transformation, its consumption is held by economists to be unproductive, which is an aberration of the theory. The shoes made by the shoemaker and acquired by a worker become, through this acquisition, like the leather when it passes from the butcher to the tanner and the tanner to the shoemaker just a simple product with value 1857 ; this value is part of the advance payment made by the purchaser and is used by him, just like the other objects he consumes, the accommodation he lives in and the tools he uses, but in a different manner, to make new products. Consumption is thus always production; for this it is sufficient for the consumer to work. Once this movement has started it continues indefinitely.

This is what capital is. It is not simply an accumulation of products, as Say says, it is not even an accumulation of products made with a view to subsequent reproduction, as Rossi would have; all this does not conform to the notion of capital. In order for capital to exist, the product has to have been authenticated by exchange, if I dare to put it this way. This is what all the accountants know very well when, for example, they enter in their books the green leather purchased by the tanner as a debit to him, which means as his capital and the tanned or finished leather as a credit or asset , which means as his product. Traders and industrialists know this even better when, at the slightest upheaval in politics, they see themselves perish alongside the goods accumulated in their warehouses, without being able to use them for any form of further production; a sorry situation expressed in the saying that committed capital never breaks free.

Everything that is capital is of necessity a product, but everything that is a product, even when accumulated and even intended for reproduction, like the tools and implements of work in manufacturers' workshops, is not capital because of that. Capital, once again, supposes a prior evaluation, an act of exchange, or having been put into circulation, without which there is no capital. If in the world there was just one man, a single worker, who produced everything for himself alone, the products leaving his hands would remain products and would not become capital. 1858 His mind would not make any distinction between the following words: product, value, capital, advance, reproduction, consumption fund, working capital, etc. Such notions would never enter the mind of a solitary person.

However, in society, once the activity of exchange has been established and the value of things jointly determined by the parties involved, the product of one rapidly becomes the capital of the other and then in turn, this capital is transformed once more into product, either as raw material, a tool of production, or food supplies. In short, the notion of capital as opposed to that of product, reveals the relation of the parties to the exchange with respect to each other. As for society, that collective man, who is precisely the solitary worker I spoke about just now, there is no longer any distinction between them. Capital and product are identical, just as net and gross product are.

I was therefore right to say, and am astonished that, following the exegesis that you yourself gave on capital, you did not understand my words:

"Capital is indistinguishable from output. These two terms in fact do not designate two distinct things; they distinguish only relationships. Output is capital; capital is output."

And my friend, Duchêne, 1859 in support of the same thesis against Louis Blanc was even more correct to say:

The distinctions between capital and product , and note this well once and for all, indicate only the relationship between one individual and another: in society, there is simply production, consumption, and exchange . It can be said of all industries that they create capital or products, without distinction. A mechanic manufactures capital goods for the railways, factories, and manufacturing establishments, a draper manufactures them for tailors, an edge-tool maker for joiners, carpenters, and masons. A plough is a product for the ploughwright who sells it and capital for the farmer who buys it. All these activities need products in order to produce or what is one and the same thing, capital in order to make further capital .

Does this sound unintelligible to you, then? There is no antinomy here, however.

From the point of view of private interests, capital indicates a relationship of exchange preceded by a mutually agreed upon contractual evaluation. It is a product which is evaluated, that is to say legally evaluated, by two responsible arbitrators, the seller and the buyer, and which is declared to be the tool or the material to be reproduced following this evaluation. From the point of view of society, capital and product can no longer be distinguished. Products are exchanged for other products , or capital is exchanged for other capital are two propositions that are perfectly synonymous. What can be simpler, clearer, more positive, or in a word, more scientific than all this?

I therefore call capital anything of created value 1860 in the form of land, tools, or implements of production, goods, food products, or cash, which is used or can be used for production .

Everyday language confirms this definition. Capital is said to be free or unattached when the product, whatever it might be, has merely been evaluated by the parties. It may be considered realised , or immediately realisable, capital when it has been converted into such other products as one may desire, or is immediately amenable to such conversion. In this case, the form most readily taken by capital is cash. The capital is said to be engaged or committed , on the other hand, when the value that makes it up has finally entered into the production process: in this case, it can take any form possible.

Practice also agrees with me. In any business that is set up, the business man who, instead of money, puts tools or raw materials into production, begins by evaluating them for his own purposes, in respect of the risks and dangers, and this so to speak unilateral valuation constitutes his capital or his capital outlay: this is the first entry of which written account may be made in his account books.

We know what capital is; what has to be done now is to draw conclusions from this notion with regard to interest. This may take a little time for the graphic exposition but the reasoning is very simple.

Products are exchanged for other products, as J. B. Say has said, or capital for other capital, or again, capital for products, and vice versa; these are the unvarnished facts.

The absolute condition, the sine qua non for this exchange, what constitutes the essence of the essence and the rule of the matter, is the reciprocal and jointly determined evaluation of the products. Remove from the exchange the idea of price, and the exchange disappears. There is a rearrangement, but no transaction or exchange. Without a price, it is as though the product did not exist; as long as it has not received its authentic value by means of contracts of sale and purchase, it is considered never to have existed, a nothing. That is how the facts are understood.

Each person gives and receives, according to J. B. Say's formula 1861 that sets out the material facts, but according to the notion of capital as supplied to us by analysis, each party should receive an equal value. An unequal exchange is a contradictory notion, which by universal agreement is called fraud and theft.

Well, from this basic fact that producers are involved in a permanent relationship of exchange with each other, that they are in turn and simultaneously producers and consumers, workers and capitalists, and from the numerically equal evaluation that constitutes exchange, it follows: that the accounts of all producers and consumers should be in balance with each other; that society, considered from the point of view of economic science, is none other than this general equilibrium governing products, services, wages, consumption, and wealth; and that without this equilibrium, political economy is just an empty term and public order, the well-being of the workers, and the security of capitalists and landowners are no more than a Utopia.

Now in fact this equilibrium, from which should arise agreement between different interests and harmony in society, is lacking today. It is broken by a variety of causes, which according to me are easy to remove, and in the first rank of whose number I list usury, interest, and rent. As I have said so many times, there are errors and embezzlement in accounts and falsification in company records, from which arise the ill-gotten luxury of some and the increasing poverty of others. As a result of all this we have in modern society the inequality of wealth and all the forms of revolutionary agitation. I will, Sir, show you the proof of this and the counterarguments, in the records of commerce.

Let us first of all establish the facts.

Products are exchanged for other products or, to be more accurate, things having value are exchanged for other things of value: such is the law of exchanges.

However this exchange is not always carried out tit for tat , as we say. The handing over of the objects being exchanged does not always take place simultaneously on either side; often, and this is the more usual case, there is an interval between the two deliveries. Curious things happen during this interval, things that upset the equilibrium and falsify the equivalence. You will see how this happens.

Sometimes the people making the exchange do not have the product that suits the other person, or which amounts to the same thing, the one who is perfectly willing to sell wants to defer his right to buy. He wants to receive the price for his product, but for the time being at least, not to receive anything in exchange. In either case, the parties to the exchange have recourse to an intermediate category of goods, one that, acting as a go-between, is always acceptable and always accepted: money. And, since money is always sought by everyone and everyone is short of it, to cover his obligation, the buyer obtains some from a banker, paying a variable premium called a discount . A discount is made up of two parts: commission , which is the payment for the service provided by the banker, and interest . We will state shortly what interest is.

Sometimes the buyer has neither product nor money to give in exchange for the product or the capital he needs, but he offers to pay within a certain period and in one or more installments. In the two cases mentioned above, the sale was made for cash ; in the second it was done on credit . Here therefore the situation of the seller was less advantageous than that of the buyer and the imbalance is compensated for by making the product sold bear interest until payment is made in full. It is this compensatory interest, the very beginning of usury that I pointed out in one of my previous letters as the coercive agent of reimbursement. It lasts as long as the credit and is the payment for the credit, but its main object is, and you should note this point, to shorten the duration of this credit . This is the meaning and legitimate significance of interest.

It often happens, and this is the difficulty in which workers generally find themselves, that capital is absolutely indispensable to the producer and yet he cannot hope to put together the sum owed, in a word to pay it back, for a long time, either through work or saving and still less through the sums of money at his disposal. He would need 20, 30, 50 years or even a century sometimes and the capitalist or landowner refuses to give him such a long period. How does he solve this difficulty?

This is where usurious speculation comes in. A short time ago, we saw interest being imposed on debtors as a compensation for credit and as a means of hastening repayment; now we are going to see interest being sought for its own sake, usury for the sake of usury, just like war for war, or art for art. Through a deliberate , legal, and authentic agreement, and endorsed by all forms of jurisprudence, legislation, and religion, the buyer (of credit) undertakes to pay the lender the interest on his capital, land, items of furniture, or money in perpetuity . He and his family become vassals, in body and soul, his and all he owns, of the capitalist and his tributary for life everlasting . This is what is known as contractual rent and in certain cases, called a perpetual lease . Through this type of contract the object passes into the possession of the borrower who may no longer be dispossessed of it, who gains the use of it as its purchaser and owner but who, for evermore, is obliged to make the payments on it like some endless amortization. This is the economic origin of the feudal system.

But there is better to come.

Contract rent and perpetual leases are now almost everywhere obsolete. It was found that a product or capital exchanged for perpetual interest was too biased in favor of the capitalist and the need for improvement to the system was felt. Nowadays, capital and fixed assets are no longer invested in perpetual rent if it is not to the State; they are RENTED, that is to say, they are lent, still in return for interest but for short periods. This new type of usury is known as rent or farm rent .

Do you understand, Sir, what a short-term loan in return for interest (rent or farm rent) is? In perpetual leases and the contractual rent which I discussed above, if the rent was perpetual, the handing over of capital was perpetual too: between the payment and its use there was still a sort of parity. Here, capital never ceases to belong to the person lending it and who may require restitution at will. This means that the capitalist does not exchange capital for capital or product for product; he gives nothing, keeps everything, does not work and lives off his rent, interest, and usury in a way that 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 workers combined do not live off the things they produce.

In lending at interest, farm rent, or rent, with the right of requiring repayment of the sum loaned at will, and expelling the farmer or tenant, capitalists have dreamt up something wider than space and more durable than time. There is no infinity that equals the infinity of usurious rent; the usury that exceeds rent in perpetuity by as much as the latter itself exceeds fixed-term repayments in cash. Short-term borrowers at interest, pay and pay again and keep on paying and do not enjoy the thing for which they are paying; they have only the sight of it, and possess only its shadow. Is it not with this image of a usurer in mind that theologians have imagined their God, this atrocious God who makes sinners pay eternally and who never pardons them their sin? Always! Never! That is the God of Catholicism, that is the usurer!

Well then, I say that any exchange of products and capital may be carried out for cash;

Consequently, bankers' profits from their discounts should be reduced to administrative costs and a compensation for the metal unproductively used in making coinage;

It follows further that all interest, rent, farm rent, or leasing is only a refusal to allow repayment, a theft from the borrower or tenant, and the prime cause of all the poverty and upheavals in society.

Finally, I proved to you, through the example of the Bank of France, that it was an easy and practical thing to organize equality in the exchange or the circulation of capital and products free of charge. You wished to see in this categorical and decisive fact just a specific case of monopoly that had nothing to do with the theory of interest. "What have I to do", you replied nonchalantly, "with the Bank of France and its privilege? I am talking to you about interest and capital." As though with credit in respect of land and commerce organized everywhere at ½ percent, the charging of interest could still exist somewhere! I will now show you, as bookkeepers do, that this particular financial exaction, that constantly comes between the two parties to the exchange, this toll imposed on circulation, this duty imposed on the conversion of products into things of value and these things of value into capital, in a word, this interest, or to call it by its proper name, this go-between of commerce, this interesse , whose defense you obstinately continue to uphold, is none other than the great forger who, in order to appropriate products he has not created or services he has never provided, fraudulently and for no work, falsifies accounts, adds surcharges and inventions to the entries, destroys the equilibrium between transactions, brings disorder into business, and inevitably creates despair and misery among nations.

In what follows, you will find the graphic representation of operations carried out in society set out in turn in the two systems, the system of interest that is currently practiced and the system of free credit that I propose. Any reasoning, dialectic, or controversy will be demolished by this readily intelligible image of economic progress.

I. The System of Interest Payments

In this system, the production, circulation, and consumption of wealth operates by the intervention of two quite distinct and separate classes of citizens: landowners, capitalists, and businessmen on the one hand and wage workers on the other. Although these two classes are in an open state of antagonism, they constitute a closed organism that acts in itself, on itself, and by itself.

It thus follows that all operations arising from farming, commerce, or industry that can be carried out in a country, all the accounts for each type of manufacture, construction, banking, etc. can be summarized and represented by a single account whose parts I will give you.

I classify as A the entire class of landowners, capitalists, and businessmen whom I consider to be a single person and by B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K and L the class of workers earning wages.

ACCOUNTS

Between A, a landowner-capitalist-businessman and B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K and L, workers earning wages.

CHAPTER 1

Account and summary of the personal operations of A, a landowner-capitalist-businessman

On opening the account, A begins his investment operations with a capital that I take to be 10,000 francs. This sum forms his investment; it is with this that he is going to work and start up commercial operations. This initial investment by A is expressed as follows:

1. Sum deposited by A .

1 January, capital account ….. 10,000 francs

Once he has established his capital, what is A going to do? He will hire workers, whose products and services he will pay for from his capital of 10,000 francs, that is to say, he will convert these 10,000 francs into goods, and accountants would express this thus:

2. General Cash Expenditures

Purchase for cash, or in anticipation, of products for the present year from the workers hereinafter listed:

From B,	x (working days or products), total	1,000 fr.
From C,	—	1,000
From D,	—	1,000
From E,	—	1,000
From F,	—	1,000
From G,	—	1,000
From H,	—	1,000
From I,	—	1,000
From K,	—	1,000
From L,	—	1,000
Total…	10,000 fr.

Once the money has been converted into goods, what the landowner-capitalist-businessman, A has to do is to carry out the contrary operation and to convert his goods into money. This conversion implies a profit (speculation, interest, etc.) since, ex hypothesis and according to the theory of interest, land and houses are not lent for nothing, nor is capital, nor is the guarantee and consideration of businessmen acquired for nothing. Let us assume, in accordance with the standard rules of commerce, that the profit will be 10 percent.

To whom will A's products be sold? Of necessity to B, C, D, etc., the workers, since society as a whole is made up of people like A, landowner-capitalist-businessmen 1862 and those like B, C, D, etc, wage workers, other than which there is no one. This is how the account is made up:

3. The Following, in General Goods :

B,	my sales to him, made during the year 1,	1,100 fr.
C,	—	1,100
D,	—	1,100
E,	—	1,100
F,	—	1,100
G,	—	1,100
H,	—	1,100
I,	—	1,100
K,	—	1,100
L,	—	1,100
Total…	11,000 fr

Once the sale has been made, the sums due by the buyers remain to be paid in. A new operation, which the accountant enters into his ledger as follows:

4. Cash Deposits by the Following :

to B,	his payment in cash to close his account on 31 December	1,100 fr.
to C,	—	1,100
to D,	—	1,100
to E,	—	1,100
to F,	—	1,100
to G,	—	1,100
to H,	—	1,100
to I,	—	1,100
to K,	—	1,100
to L,	—	1,100
Sum equals…	11,000 fr.

In this way, the capital advanced by A, following conversion of this capital into products, then the sale of these products to the workers-consumers B, C, D, etc., and finally payment for the sale, is returned to him increased by one tenth, which is expressed in the inventory by the balance below:

5. Summary of the operations of A, landowner-capitalist-businessman, for his inventory on 31 December :

Owed.	General Goods	Due.

10,000 fr.	Debit to this account on 31 December	Credit to this account on 31 December	11,000 fr.
1,000	Profit to this account to be credited to A's capital account
11,000 fr.		Balance…	11,000 fr.

It can be said in passing that you can see here how and in what situations products become capital. It is not goods in shops that, at the inventory, are entered to the credit of the capital account, it is the profit . The profit, that is to say, the product sold and delivered, whose price has been received or is due to be so shortly: in short, it is the product transformed into value . 1863

Let us move to the other half of the account, the workers' account.

CHAPTER 2

Account of the dealings of B, a worker with A, a landowner-capitalist-businessman

B, an unemployed worker without property or capital is taken on by A, who gives him a job and acquires his output. The first operation that appears on B's account is:

1. Cash Debit, 1 January to B - Capital Account

Sale for cash or by anticipation of his entire production for the year to A, a landowner-capitalist-businessman - 1,000fr

[no screen snapshot needed]

In exchange for his production, the worker therefore receives 1,000 francs, a sum equal to that we have seen shown in article 2 of the preceding chapter, Cash Expenditures .

However, B lives from his earnings, that is to say, that from the money given to him by A, a landowner-capitalist-businessman, he receives from the said A all the objects that he, B, needs to consume, objects that are invoiced to him as we have seen above in article 3 of chapter 1 at 10 percent profit above the cost price. For B, therefore, the operation has the following result:

2. Owed by B, Capital Account, to A, a landowner-capitalist-businessman:

Total of the supplies of all types from A during the year - 1,100fr

3. Summary of the operations of A, for his inventory:

Owed.	CAPITAL ACCOUNT	Due.
1,100 fr.	Debit from this account on 31 December
	Credit to this account on 31 December	1,000 fr.
	Loss on this account, that B can pay only by means of a loan	100
1,100 fr.		1,100 fr.

As all the other workers are in the same situation as B, their individual accounts present the same result. To understand the fact that I wished to highlight, that is to say, the lack of equilibrium in the general circulation of capital, following the exactions, it is superfluous to reproduce all these accounts in order to understand.

The preceding table, which is much more instructive and a better demonstration than the one produced by Quesnay, 1864 is a faithful image in an algebraic presentation of society's economy at present. This is what persuades us that the proletariat and poverty are the effect, not only of accidental causes, such as floods, war, and epidemics but also of an organic cause inherent in the make-up of society.

Through the fiction of the productivity of capital and through the innumerable prerogatives taken by monopolists for themselves, one of the two following things always and ineluctably results:

Either the monopolist takes away from his employee a part of his social capital; B, C; D, E, F, G, H, I, K and L have produced 10 men's worth during the year and have consumed 9 men's worth only. In other words, the capitalist has consumed one worker. 1865 What is more, through the capitalization of interest, the position of the workers is steadily worsening each year, to the extent that if the analysis is followed through, around the seventh year we find that the entire initial contribution of the workers has passed as interest and profit into the hands of landowner-capitalist-businessmen, which means that wage workers who wish to pay off their debt have to work every seventh year for nothing.

Or else, it is the workers who, incapable of paying any more for his product than he has himself received for it, forces monopolists to reduce prices, consequently making him overdrawn for the entire amount of the interest, rent, and profit whose use and property were both a right and necessity for him.

We are thus brought back to acknowledging that the inevitable result of credit, in the system of interest, is the plunder of the workers and the no less inevitable bankruptcy of businessmen and the ruin of capitalist landowners. Interest is like a double-edged sword: it kills, whichever side it hits you with.

I have just shown you how things happen in the regime of interest. Let us now see what would happen in the regime of free credit.

II. The System of Free Credit

According to the theory of free credit, the statuses of wage workers and landowner-capitalist-businessmen are identical and equivalent to one another; they are combined under the heading of producer-consumers . 1866 The effect of this change is to bring all the current operations of credit, loans, sales at a fixed period, speculation, rent, farm rent, etc. back to a simple form of exchange, and all bank operations to a simple transfer between the parties.

Let us therefore assume that the Bank of France, the principal organ of this system, has been reorganized in accordance with the ideas of free credit and a discount rate reduced to 1 percent, a rate that we provisionally consider to be a fair payment for the specific service provided by the Bank, and consequently one that represents an interest rate of zero. And let us see the changes that will result for general accounting. From now on, all transactions will be effected through the intervention of the Bank and its subsidiaries, replacing all the varieties of usurious credit, and thus it will be with the Bank that B, C, D, etc. the workers, associates, whether in groups or individually will deal, in the first instance and directly.

CHAPTER I

1. Account of the operations carried out by B, a worker, with x, a National Bank.

Cash Debit, 1 January to x , National Bank,

Advance by the Bank on all the products on my work for the year, to be paid back to it in accordance with my sales, 1,000 francs; discount rate 1 percent deducted, 990 francs

As we have seen above, B lives exclusively from his work, that is to say that, on the guarantee of what he produces, he obtains from x , a National Bank, either notes or cash with which he buys all the objects he needs for his industry and consumption from A, a worker like himself but who, in sales or exchange operations, which we will discuss shortly, fulfills the role of a landowner-capitalist-businessman. In actual fact, B purchases all these objects for cash and is able, therefore, to negotiate their price all the more rigorously.

This purchase, carried out using the notes or cash from the Bank, gives rise to the following account in B's books:

2. Debts for General Goods in Cash

Purchase for cash from A of everything I consume during the year: 990 francs

As his manufacture progresses, B sells his products. However, production depends upon consumption and, since this production is no longer hobbled as it was by usury under the regime of interest, that is to say, by sales by installments, by rent for the tools of production and the resulting charges, especially by the preconceived ideas about money, which has become non-productive and even superfluous, it follows that B, like all the other workers, is able not only to buy back his own products to the nearest minimal fraction, but also to give full rein to his energy and productive power, without fear of creating non-values (things of no value ) 1867 and bringing prices down but on the contrary, with the legitimately founded hope of being compensated for the low payments he makes to the Bank for negotiating his assets (things of value), by this surplus production and exchange. This is what will appear in the following article in B's account.

All work should leave a surplus; this aphorism is one of the fundamental ones of political economy. It is based on the principle that, in an economic order, whatever the capital invested, all value is created from nothing by labor , in the same way as, according to Christian theology, everything in nature has been created, equally from nothing, by God. In fact, since the product is defined as: the usefulness added by labor to objects supplied by nature (J. B. Say and all economists), it is clear that products in their entirety are the creation of workers 1868 and if the object to which the new usefulness is added is itself already a product, the value reproduced is of necessity greater than the value consumed. Let us accept that, through his work, B increases the value he consumes by 10 percent and let us note the result recorded in his accounts:

3. Cash due from sale of General Goods

My sales for cash to various customers during the year, 1,089fr.

From this account, it appears that usury is one of the causes of poverty in that it prevents consumption and reproduction, first of all by raising the sales price of products far above that of the surplus obtained by reproductive work. The total of usurious charges in France, for a total product of 10 billion is 6 billion or 60 percent. This is then compounded by the hindering of circulation using all the formalities of discount, interest, rent, farm rents, etc.; all these difficulties disappear under the regime of free credit.

Here we have reached the moment when B has sold all the product of his year's work. He has to settle up with x , a National Bank, which gives rise to the following operation

4. Owed in cash to x, the National Bank,

My payment for the balance1,000fr

Now B has to produce his own account and does so as follows:

5. Summary of B's operations for his inventory

Owed.	GENERAL GOODS ACCOUNT	Due

990 fr.	Debit to this account at 31 December	Credit to this account at 31 December	1,089 fr.
99	Profit on this account
1,089 fr.	Sum equals	1,089 fr.

The following year, instead of operating with a product of 1,000 francs, B will operate with a product of 1,089, which will give him a new surplus of profit and then the same scenario will be re-enacted in years 3, 4, 5, etc. His wealth will increase as his industry increases and will grow infinitely.

As the other workers, C, D, E, F, etc. are in the same situation as B, their individual accounts will show the same result; it is therefore unnecessary to reproduce them here.

I will now move to the counterpart of the accounts opened with respect to B and first of all to that of the Bank.

CHAPTER II

We have seen above that x , a National Bank, has made B an advance on his work or production, that it has acted in a similar fashion with all the other workers and that subsequently it has covered itself and recouped its money through the money repayments that they had remitted to it and through the deduction made to its advantage of 1 percent discount. This is how these various operations are shown in the Bank's books:

Owed by the following in Cash:

B,	my advances on the output of his labor for the year against his commitment of 1,000 francs, discount deducted	990 fr.
C,	—	990
D,	—	990
E,	—	990
F,	—	990
C,	—	990
G,	—	990
H,	—	990
I,	—	990
K,	—	990
L,	—	990
	9,900 fr.

When the debtors repay it, a new operation takes place, which the accountant will enter in his books as follows:

Owed in Cash to the following:

to B,	his payment of the balance	990 fr.
to C,	—	990
to D,	—	990
to E,	—	990
to F,	—	990
to G,	—	990
to H,	—	990
to I,	—	990
to K,	—	990
to L,	—	990
To Profit and Loss, receipt of the said amounts for discount at 1 percent	100
	Total…	10,000 fr.

The credit given by x , a National Bank, after conversion of the sum advanced into products and then the sale of these products to all the members of society, who are producer-consumers, from A to L and finally payment for the sale by means of the same sum supplied by the Bank, this credit, we say, is returned to it in the form of notes or cash, increased by the discount of 1 percent, with which the Bank pays its employees and covers its costs. And if, after covering its expenses, there remained a significant net profit to the Bank, it would reduce its discount rate proportionally so that the interest on capital would always remain at zero.

Summary of the operations of x, a National Bank, for its inventory on 31 December

Owed	PROFIT AND LOSS	Due
100 francs	Profit on this account	Product of the discount rate for the year	100 francs

When you refer to the Cash account of x , a National Bank, you can see first of all that the surplus of the debit on this account over the credit is 100 francs, a sum that is equal to the profit on the discount rate recorded in the Profit and Loss Account.

CHAPTER III

Let us come finally to the account of A, a landowner-capitalist-entrepreneur, who is no different, as we have said, from those of B, C, D, etc., wage workers, and assumes this title only fictitiously following his dealings with them.

Under the regime of free credit, A no longer lends raw materials or tools of work, in a word, capital; nor does he provide it for nothing; he sells it. As soon as he has received payment for it, he is deprived of his rights to his capital; he can no longer have himself paid interest for it eternally and even beyond eternity.

This, therefore, is how A's account behaves under this new system:

First of all, since money is just an instrument of circulation that has become common property, whose use is disdained everywhere, through its accumulation at the Bank and the almost general substitution of paper for cash, it is now free; producer-consumers such as B, C, D, etc. now have no use for A's écus. What they need is raw materials, working tools, and food products which A holds.

A begins his operations with his capital, goods , which as a hypothesis we will set at 10,000 francs. This opening of A's operations will be shown in his books as follows:

1. General Goods owed to A, Capital Account:

Goods in the shop at 1 January last according to inventory - 10,000 fr

What will A do with these goods? He will sell them to the workers, B, C, D, etc. that is to say to the consumer and producer firm 1869 they represent here, just as A represents for the moment the capitalist and landowning firm. This is what A's accountant will record as follows:

2. Sale for cash to B 990fr

Sale for cash	to B…	990
—	to C…	990
—	to D…	990
—	to E…	990
—	to F…	990
—	to G…	990
—	to H…	990
—	to I…	990
—	to K…	990
—	to L…	990
Total…	9,990 fr.

However, if the workers B, C, D, etc. consume A's articles, the landowner-capitalist-entrepreneur A in his turn consumes the products of the workers, B, C, D, etc. from whom he has to purchase them, just as they themselves purchase his. Well, as we have seen in article 3 of Chapter I that the surplus given to the values consumed by B, C, D, etc. are hypothetically in a regime free from any unemployment, stagnation, decrease in prices, and 10 percent, the capital of 990 francs that B has obtained as a credit from the Bank and consumed productively has increased to a capital of 1,089 francs and therefore it is at this price that A makes his purchases from B and pays his invoices. This is shown in the entries in his accounts as follows:

3. Debit for General Goods paid in Cash:

Purchased for cash from the following workers:

to B,	for his deliveries of various articles for my consumption	1,089 fr
C,	—	1,089
D,	—	1,089
E,	—	1,089
F,	—	1,089
G,	—	1,089
H,	—	1,089
I,	—	1,089
K,	—	1,089
L,	—	1,089
	Total…	10,890 fr.

To complete the demonstration, all we have to do is to draw up A's inventory.

Summary of the operations of A, a landowner-capitalist-entrepreneur, for his inventory on 31 December:

Owed.	GENERAL GOODS ACCOUNT	Due.

10,890 fr.	Debit to this account at 31 December	Credit to this account at 31 December	9,900 fr.
		Remaining in the shop from goods on inventory on 1 January last	100
		Loss on this account	890 fr.
10,890 fr.	Balanced Sum	10,890 fr.

Now that we have established our double entry bookkeeping, let us reconcile the accounts and note the differences:

1. Under the regime of usury , the account of each worker results in a loss of 100 francs, or for the ten as a whole, 1,000 francs

At the same time, the account of A, a landowner-capitalist-entrepreneur, results in a profit of 1,000 francs, which proves that in a capitalist society (or firm), a deficit or poverty, results from the speculation.

2. Under the regime of free credit , on the other hand, each worker's account results in a profit of 99 francs, or 990 francs for all ten and the account of A, a landowner-capitalist, results in a loss of 890 francs which, with the 100 francs of goods that remain in the shop and cover the loss for the year, make up the 990 francs that have increased the wealth of the ten workers. This proves that, in a mutualist society, 1870 that is to say a society of equal exchange, the worker's wealth increases directly according to his work while the wealth of the capitalist decreases in direct proportion to his unproductive consumption a point which also destroys the criticism of me by Pierre Leroux, 1871 who for the last two months has not ceased to repeat his controversial statement that free credit, the People's Bank, and mutuality are in the end just as much examples of property-ism , bourgeois-ism , 1872 and exploitation, the very things the regime of the People's Bank intended to abolish.

In a mutualist regime , the wealth of the worker increases directly in accordance with his work, whereas the wealth of the landowner-capitalist decreases directly in accordance with his unproductive consumption : this proposition, demonstrated mathematically, answers all the outpourings of Pierre Leroux and Louis Blanc on community, fraternity, and solidarity.

Let us now turn the formula upside down:

Under the regime of usury, the wealth of the worker decreases directly in accordance with his work, whereas the wealth of the landowner-capitalist increases directly in accordance with his unproductive consumption: this proposition, demonstrated mathematically like the preceding one, answers all the outpourings of Jesuits, Malthusians, and philanthropists on the inequality of talent, compensation in the next life, etc. etc.

As a corollary to the foregoing, and continuing to use the logic of numbers as our basis, we also say:

In a capitalist society, since a worker can never buy back his production at the price he sold it for, he remains constantly in deficit. This makes it necessary for him to reduce his consumption indefinitely, and consequently makes it necessary for society as a whole to reduce its production indefinitely; this leads to the living of a normal lifestyle being forbidden and obstacles being erected to the formation of both capital and the production of food.

In a mutualist society, on the other hand, as the worker constantly exchanges one product for another or one item of value for another without restriction with just a small discount charge that is more than compensated for by the surplus left to him, at the end of a year's work he benefits exclusively from what he has produced. This leads to his ability to produce indefinitely and to an endless increase of both life and wealth for society.

Would you say that a revolution like this in economic relationships would in the end do nothing more than shift poverty, that instead of the poverty of the paid worker who is unable to buy back what he himself produces and who becomes poorer the harder he works, we would have the poverty of landowner-capitalist-entrepreneur who would be obliged to eat into his capital and because of this to destroy constantly, along with the materials used for products, the very tool of labour itself?

But who cannot see that if, as is inevitable in a regime of free credit, the two qualities of wage worker on the one hand and landowner-capitalist-entrepreneur on the other become equal and inseparable in the person of each worker, the deficit experienced by A in the operations he carries out as a capitalist would be recovered immediately by him in the profit he in turn receives as a worker, so that, while on the one hand through the elimination of interest the sum of the products of labour increases indefinitely, on the other, through the ease of circulation, these products are constantly converted into THINGS OF VALUE and these things of value into CAPITAL.

Let each person, instead of crying out "plunder" in opposition to socialism, do his own accounts. Let each person record an inventory of his wealth and industry, what he earns as a capitalist-landowner and what he can obtain as a worker and, if I am not much mistaken, out of the 10 million citizens on the electoral roll, 1873 there will not be 200,000, or 1 in 50 who have an interest in retaining the usurious regime and rejecting free credit. Anyone, once more, who earns more through his work, talent, industry, or science than through his capital, is directly and extremely interested in the instant and total abolition of usury; such a person, I say, whether he realizes it or not, is first and foremost a supporter of the Democratic and Social Republic . 1874 He is, in the widest and most conservative sense, 1875 a REVOLUTIONARY. What! Is it true, because Malthus said so, and following him, a handful of pedants want this, that 10 million workers with their wives and children have to be fodder for 200,000 parasites and that it is in order to protect this exploitation of man by man that the State exists, that it disposes of an armed force of 500,000 soldiers and one million civil servants and that we pay it two billion in taxes? 1876

But why do I need, after all that has been said during this controversy, to continue to maintain the purely artificial opposition between wage workers and capitalist-landowners ? The time has come to call a halt to all antagonism between the classes and to involve everyone up to landowners and capitalists themselves in abolishing rent and interest. Once the Revolution has assured its triumph through justice, it may, without losing any of its dignity, take on the subject of interest.

Have we not seen that interest arose from the risks of industry and commerce, that it was first seen in the more or less random contracts on private cargo and whole ship contracts ? Well, what was in the beginning the inevitable effect of the state of war, one bound to arise in a society driven by antagonisms, will also repeat itself over and over again in a harmonious and peaceful society. Progress in industry, as in science, is endless; work knows no bounds to its adventurous enterprises. However, who speaks of enterprise speaks too, always, of a thing more or less hazardous and consequently of a risk more or less great for the capital committed and thus of the need for interest to be compensated accordingly.

The accumulation of capital by means of the renting of houses and farms and other mortgage-based loans, by mercantile, and Stock Exchange dealings, and by the plunder practiced by the bankocrats 1877 will be replaced as circumstances become increasingly better, by silent partnerships. Capital, divided into shares and supplied by the mass of workers will then act productively on behalf of labor instead of plundering it. Dividends would merely be one way of enabling society as a whole to share in the profits from private speculation and would be the legitimate benefit of talent over wealth. Let existing capitalists, instead of crowding into the Stock Exchange, opposing the revolution, and putting an embargo on working hands, dare to become our foremen; let them, as in '92, 1878 become our generals in this new war waged by labor against poverty, in this great crusade of industry against nature. Is there then nothing left to discover, nothing left to dare, nothing to do to promote the development of our nation, to increase our wealth and our glory? …

I must stop; it is time to do so. In spite of myself, Sir, you have pushed me into this abstract reasoning, which is fatiguing for the general public and not very easy for the columns of a popular journal to accommodate. Was it necessary to entice me into this thorny dissertation when it would have been so easy and simple to limit ourselves to this question that is as decisive as it is positive: Can credit be free or can it not ? At the risk of turning off the readers of La Voix du Peuple, I wanted to satisfy your wish; you will tell me if you consider it adequate, what you find that requires criticism, first of all in the analysis I have made of capital, then in the definition I drew from it, and finally in the theorems and corollaries that constitute its development.

In what you have just read, you will not deny that there is quite a revolution taking place that is not only political and economic but also, and this must be much closer to your heart as it is to mine, scientific. It is up to you to see whether you accept on your own account and on behalf of those of like persuasion, the conclusion that shines out from this entire discussion, that is to say that neither you, Mr. Bastiat, nor anyone of your school, understands anything of political economy.

I am, etc.

P. J. PROUDHON

Letter No. 12: F. Bastiat to P. J. Proudhon (4 February 1850)

The system of free credit comes down to paper money. - What consequences should be drawn from the accounting established by Mr. Proudhon? - Bank notes. - The profits they provide. - J. B. Say's insights. - The real way to enable the general public to benefit from credit, for those who accept it, is freedom. - An analysis of credit and interest. - An appeal to Mr. Proudhon to change sides.

4 February 1850

You have just done society a very important service. Up to now free credit remained wrapped in philosophical, metaphysical, economic, paradoxical, and historic clouds. By subjecting it to the simple proof of accounting, you have brought it down from these lofty region; you have exposed it to the gaze of all. Everyone is able to recognize it: it is money made out of paper . 1879

Multiplying and equalizing wealth on this earth by pouring a flood of paper money on it; here is the solution in a nutshell. Here is the conclusum , the ultimatum, and the desideratum of socialism. 1880

Free credit is socialism's final word, its final slogan, and its final effort. You have said it a hundred times and rightly so. Others, it is true, have given this term a different meaning. La Démocratie Pacifique 1881 said recently that anyone who aspires to do some good is a socialist. Certainly, while the definition is vague, it is at least understandable and above all, prudent. Defined in this way, socialism is indestructible.

However, a desire does not constitute a science, any more than twenty mutually destructive dreams do. What has become of Icaria ? Where do the phalanstery , the national workshop and the triad stand? These slogans are dead letters and you have contributed not a little to killing them. If a few others have recently made their entry into the world under Sanskrit names 1882 (which I have forgotten), it can be concluded that they were not born viable. Only one has still survived: free credit . It seemed to me that it drew life from mystery. You have brought it out into broad daylight: will it survive for long?

The debasing of money, which can go as far as to make money completely false, 1883 is an invention neither new nor very democratic in origin. Up to now, however, people had tried to give or imagine a few guarantees to paper money , such as the future wealth of the Mississippi, 1884 national land, State forests, the property of émigrés, etc. 1885 It was well understood that paper has no intrinsic value, but has value only as a promise, and that this promise has to inspire some confidence in order for the paper which makes this promise to be voluntarily accepted in exchange for something real. From this we get the word credit (Latin credere , to believe, have faith in). You do not appear to have paid much attention to these necessities. An inexhaustible paper money factory: that is your solution. 1886

Allow me to turn upside down the order of the discussion you have set out for me and to examine first of all your social mechanism 1887 as expressed in the title: Free credit .

It is good to state what your definition of capital is Any created value, such as land, tools of production, goods, food supplies, or cash, which are used or can be used for production . 1888 I accept this definition. It is enough for the discussion in hand.

This having been established, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, etc. stand for both capitalists and workers.

You do the accounts for one of them, A, in his role as a capitalist, then those of B, representing all the workers, and finally you draw up the accounts for the Bank.

A is the holder of capital, created values in land, tools, food supplies , etc. B wants to appropriate them for himself, but he has nothing to give in exchange and can't borrow them without incurring the burden of paying interest.

He goes to the Bank and says: Give me one thousand francs in bank notes and I will repay you from the product of my future work as and when I sell it. The Bank does this and gives him notes for 990 francs. 1889 With these precious talismans in his hand, B goes to A and tells him: "Perhaps you hoped to lend me your capital, but here you are, reduced to selling it to me, since I am in a position to pay for it." A is quick to hand over his capital (land, goods, or food) to B for bank notes. B undertakes his work. By virtue of the aphorism: All work must produce a surplus , he adds 10 percent to the value he has just purchased, runs to the Bank to pay (doubtless in notes) the 990 francs he owes it, and finds that he has made 99 francs profit. This is true for C, D, E, F, etc., in short for all men.

Having invented these figures, you establish accounts for A, B and the Bank. This accounting, once you have accepted the figures, is beyond criticism.

But can we accept your figures? Are they in conformity with the nature of men and things? This is what we have to examine.

Will Bank notes offer any guarantees? In other words, do they inspire confidence or not? And, again putting it in alternative vocabulary, will the Bank or will it not have enough original capital and created values to meet all of its issues?

How will it gather together all its capital in created values? If it has shareholders, according to the way things are at present which is our starting point, they will want to receive interest, and how can the Bank lend for free what it has to pay to borrow?

The capital of the Bank of France will be taken over, you say, and the shareholders will be reimbursed in the form of State Bonds. This postpones the problem without solving it. It is the mass of the people, the nation, that will borrow the capital at 5 percent in order to lend it free of charge. Interest will not be eliminated, but put on the taxpayers' backs.

But let us simply assume that this capital of 10,000 francs, which you have imagined for the purposes of discussion, has indeed been gathered together, and let us set aside the vicious circle that consists in assuming free credit in order to realize it. Since you thought this capital was necessary, you will doubtless consider it essential for it to be maintained.

To this end, your reasoning follows the hypothesis that B, C, D, E, etc. will pay the Bank back annually for the notes they have taken from it. But just suppose that this hypothesis is wrong! That B is a libertine who spends his 1,000 francs in taverns! That C gives his to his mistress! That D throws them away in a ridiculous enterprise! That E has a jaunt to Belgium for a few days, etc. etc.! What would happen to the Bank? To whom would A apply to receive the compensation for the capital which has been taken from him?

Thus, the long and the short of it is that your Bank will not have the power to change our natures or reform our bad inclinations. It will prove just the opposite, and it has to be acknowledged that the extreme ease with which paper money is to be obtained on the simple promise of working to repay it at a later date, will be a powerful incentive to gambling, wild enterprises, risky ventures, rash speculation, or immoral or ill-considered expenditure. It is a very serious matter to put all men in the position of saying to themselves: "Let us tempt fate with other people's property; if I succeed, that's my good fortune, if I fail, that's their bad luck." 1890 For my part, I cannot imagine the regular pursuit of human affairs outside the law of (individual) responsibility. However, without going into the moral effects of your invention here, I suggest that it is still a fact that it removes from the National Bank any role in managing the conditions for (granting) credit and the setting of duration (of loans).

Perhaps you will tell me that before handing over its notes, the Bank will enquire carefully about the degree of trust that applicants merit. Property, morality, activity, intelligence, and foresight will all be scrutinized and weighed carefully. But be careful! If on the one hand you require the Bank to have some original capital as a guarantee and if on the other, it lends only in total security, what more will it be doing than the free Banks in the United States do? 1891 And will the poor devils of today be anything other than poor devils under your regime?

I do not think that you can escape these alternatives:

Either the Bank will have a capital on which it will pay interest, and in this case it cannot lend money interest-free without bankrupting itself;

Or it will have capital free of charge, and in this case please explain to us where it will obtain this, other than from A, B, C, D, who make up the nation?

In both situations, it will either lend with moderation and discernment, and you will then not have universal credit, or it will lend with no guarantee, and thus become bankrupt within two months.

But let us gloss over these initial difficulties.

A, whom you have put on stage, is a capitalist and therefore experienced, prudent, timorous, and even fearful. You will not deny this. After all, he is clearly allowed to be so. All that he has he has acquired through the sweat of his brow, and he does not want to risk losing it. From the point of view of society, this sentiment is eminently conservative. Before handing his capital over in return for bank notes, therefore, A will turn these notes over and over in his hands. He may perhaps end up refusing to accept them them and your system will go up in smoke. What will you do? Will you decree the notes to be legal tender ? 1892 What will then become of freedom, of which you are the champion? After turning the Bank into an inquisition, will you now make it a police station? It was not worth getting rid of the State for this.

However, I will allow your legal tender, just for the purposes of this discussion. You will not prevent A from calculating his level of risk. It is true that there are scarcely any risks that a seller will not accept, provided that he finds a satisfactory insurance premium in an increase in the price. A as a capitalist, that is to say a carpenter, shoemaker, blacksmith, tailor, etc., will therefore tell B, C and D, "Sirs, if you want my furniture, shoes, nails or clothes, things of created value , give me something of created value , that is to say, 20 francs in money." "Here are 20 francs in notes," replies B. "That is just a promise," retorts A, "and I have no confidence in it." "Legal tender has been decreed", replies B. "Very well", is A's answer, "but I want 100 francs for my goods."

How will you stop this rise in prices, which obviously destroys all the benefits you are expecting from the Bank? What will you do? Will you decree the Law of the Maximum (price controls) ? 1893

Universal high prices will also appear for another reason. You cannot have any doubt but that the Bank will attract hordes of clients once it has used all the methods of advertising to drum up business and as soon as it announces that it will lend money for nothing. All those who have debts on which they are paying interest would want to benefit from this fine opportunity of liberating themselves. And there go twenty billion francs. The State would also want to pay off the 5 billion it owes. 1894 The Bank would also be besieged by every trader who has drawn up a plan, every manufacturer who wants to establish or expand a factory, every crackpot (inventor) who has made a wonderful discovery, or every worker, journeyman, or apprentice who wants to become a master tradesman.

I do not think I am going too far when I say that if the issue of notes aspires to satisfy all forms of appetite, desires, and dreams, it will exceed 50 billion in the first six months. This will be the weight of the demand for capital which will bear down upon the market. But where will the supply come from? In six months, France will not have created sufficient created values (land; tools, and machinery, goods or food products) to satisfy this prodigious increase in demand, for created values, real things do not fall into the apron of "Lady Supply" as readily as do the imaginary values into "Lady Demand's." 1895 However, selling and buying are related terms that express two acts that are linked and, really, indeed, one and the same. What would the result be? An exorbitant rise in all prices or, to express it better, social disorganization, such as the world has never seen before. 1896 And you may be sure that if anyone escapes this, it will not be the least rascally fellow and above all, not the poor devil to whom the Bank has refused credit.

Thus, arbitrary measures to found the Bank, inquisitorial procedures if it wants to assess their confidence (in the borrower), legal tender laws, price controls, and, in the long run, bankruptcy and disorganization, of which the poorest and least cunning will be the first victims; these are the logical consequences of paper money. And that is not all.

You might say to me, "Your criticism is aimed at the means of its execution. We will attend to this later. It is a question of principle alone. Well, you cannot deny that my Bank, leaving aside the question of the means of execution, will destroy (the charging of) interest. Therefore, free credit is at least possible."

I might reply, "No, if the means of execution are not possible." But I will go right to the heart of the matter and say, "Even if your invention did not encompass all the dangers I have pointed out, it would not achieve your aim. It does not achieve free credit ."

You, Sir, know as well as I that the remuneration of capital that we call interest is not attached only to loans. It is also included in the cost price of products. And since you refer to accounting, I will refer to it in turn. Let us open the books of the first entrepreneur we find. We will see from them that he never does anything without ensuring not only a reward for his work but also a return, the amortization of and interest on his capital. This interest is included in the sale price. By reducing all the transactions to purchases and sales, the Bank thus does not resolve nor even touch the problem of the elimination of interest.

Well then, Sir, you claim to reach agreements according to which people who work using their own capital do not earn any more than those who work using the capital of others that has been borrowed for nothing! You are pursuing something that is impossible and unjust.

I will go further and say that even if you were right on everything else, you would still be mistaken in taking as your motto the words free credit . Be careful in fact; you are not aiming to make credit free but killing it (in the process). You want to reduce everything to buying and selling and (to) transfers (of debt) between parties. You think that, because of your paper money, there will be no more need to lend or borrow, that all credit will be without use, null and void, abolished and eliminated for lack of need. But can it be said of something that does not exist or has ceased to exist that it is free?

And this is not just a war of words. After all, in the end, words are the vehicles of ideas. When you announce free credit , you certainly allow it to be understood, whether or not you mean to do so, that every one will be able to enjoy the use of other people's property without paying for it for an indeterminate length of time. The unfortunate people who have no time to go to the bottom of things and ascertain the extent to which your statements are inaccurate will open their eyes wide. They will feel the most deplorable desires arising within them. Getting one's hands on other people's property without contravening justice, what an attractive prospect! For this reason, you have had and are bound to have a great many followers at the beginning.

But if your motto were to be the annihilation of credit , which expresses your genuine thought, people would have understood that, under your regime, they would get nothing for nothing. Greed, that great engine of debt, as Pascal called it, 1897 would have been neutral(ised). We would have limited ourselves to examining, quite coldly, first whether your system is an advance on the existing one and then whether it is practicable. The word free is always very attractive, but I am not afraid to say that, while it has been a lure for many of your followers, it has been a trap for your mind.

This explains the hesitations noticeable in your polemic. When I concentrated on limiting the debate to this question of free credit , you were uneasy. You were fully aware, deep down in your scientific understanding, that credit, as long as it exists , cannot be free, that the repayment of something of value (which has been) borrowed cannot be the same for something which is paid back immediately, compared to something the repayment of which is postponed indefinitely. You made honest concessions with regard to this for which some members of your own church criticised you. 1898 On the other hand, carried along by and committed to your motto, free credit , you made extraordinary efforts to extricate yourself from this unfortunate position. You referred to antimony , you went so far as to say that yes and no can be true of the same thing and at the same time. After the dialectic came the rhetoric. You denounced interest, describing it as theft, etc. etc.

And all this because you had clad your thought in an erroneous vocabulary. Our debate would have been much shorter if you had said to me, "As long as credit exists, it cannot be free, but I have found the means of ensuring that it does not exist, and from now on I will inscribe on my flag the words Annihilation of Credit instead of Free Credit ."

If the question had been set in this way, I would have had only to examine your means of execution. This is what, in your last letter, you have put me in a position to do. I have proved that these means of execution can be summarized in the expression, paper money .

In addition, I have proved:

That in order for a Bank's notes to be accepted, they have to inspire confidence;

That in order for them to inspire confidence, the Bank has to have capital;

That in order for a Bank to have capital, it has to borrow it precisely from A, B, C, D who are the people and it must pay interest for this capital at the going rate;

That if it pays interest for it, it cannot lend it interest-free;

That if it lends its capital to A, B, C and D free of charge after having taken it by force from them in the form of taxation, nothing has changed in the world, apart from there being one more form of oppression;

And finally, that in none of your hypotheses, even by reducing all transactions to sales, do you destroy the remuneration of capital which is always included in the sales price.

The implication of this is that, if your Bank is just a factory producing paper money, it will lead to social disorganization.

If, on the other hand the Bank is based on justice, prudence, and reason, it will do nothing that Free Banking 1899 cannot do better.

Is this to say, Sir, that in my view there is no truth in the ideas you support? In explaining myself on this matter I will take a step towards you. May it encourage you to make one towards me or rather towards the true solution: Free Banking.

However, in order to be understood, I need, at the risk of repeating myself, to establish a few fundamental notions on credit .

Time is precious. Time is money , as the English say. 1900 " Time is the stuff of which life is made ," 1901 as Poor Richard says. 1902

It is from this indisputable truth that the notion and practice of interest are deduced.

For to give credit is to give time.

Sacrificing time to someone else is to sacrifice to him something that is precious, and it is not possible to claim that in business a sacrifice like this should be free of charge.

A says to B: "Devote this week to making me a hat; I will employ it in making shoes for you." "Shoes and a hat are equal in value," replies B, "I agree."

A moment later B changes his mind and says to A: "I have reflected that time is precious to me; I want to devote this week and the following ones to myself. So make me the shoes immediately and I will make you the hat in a year's time." "I agree to this," replies A, "but in a year's time you must give me one week and two hours."

I ask any man of good faith, has A committed an act of piracy in adding a new condition to his profit to offset a new condition to his detriment?

This elemental fact contains the germ of the entire theory of credit.

I know that in society transactions are not as simple as the one I have just described, but they are identical in essence.

Thus, it is possible for A to sell the shoes to a third party for 10 francs and hand over this sum to B, telling him, "Give me the hat immediately or, if you want a year's delay, you can repay me one week's work plus two hours or else 10 francs plus an additional twentieth." We are in perfect agreement with the preceding hypothesis.

We agree, at least I hope so, on the legitimacy of credit, so let us now see to what arrangements it can give rise.

B may have made a verbal commitment only, and yet it is not out of the question that A will pass it on by discounting it. He may say to C: "I owe you 10 francs. B has given me his word that he will pay me 10 francs and 10 sous in a year's time. Will you accept my rights with respect to B in payment?" If C has confidence in this, if he believes it will happen, the bargain may be struck. But who will dare to say that, in order to increase the number of shoes and hats it is enough to increase the number of promises of this nature, with no reference to the confidence placed in them?

B may hand over a written title. In this documented form, the undertaking will avoid arguments and disclaimers; it will inspire more confidence and circulate more easily than a verbal promise. But neither the nature nor the effects of the credit will have changed.

Finally a third party, a Bank, may guarantee B, take over his obligation and issue its own note in its place. This will be a new opportunity for the circulation of credit. But why is this so? Precisely because the signature of the Bank inspires more confidence in the general public than B's signature. How could one believe that a Bank has a useful purpose if it were not based on confidence, and how would it gain this confidence if its notes offered less of a guarantee than those of B?

These various titles must not therefore delude us. We should not see in them something of intrinsic value, but the simple promise to hand over something of value, a promise guaranteed by someone in a position to keep it.

But what I would like to point out, for this is the reconciliation I offered you earlier between your opinion and mine, it is a straightforward transfer of the right to the interest which happens through the intervention of the Banks.

Who pays the interest in the case of a promissory note or a bill of exchange? Obviously it is the borrower, the person for whom others have sacrificed their time. And who profits from this interest? Those who have made this sacrifice. Thus, if B has borrowed 1,000 francs for a year from A and has signed a note for 1,040 francs, it is A who profits from the 40 francs. If he immediately trades this note at a discount of 4 percent, it is the bearer of the note who earns the interest, as is fair, since it is he who has made the advance or the sacrifice of time. If A trades his note at the end of six months to C, C will give him only 1,020 francs for it and the interest will be shared between A and C, since each has sacrificed six months.

However, when the Bank intervenes, things are done differently.

It is still B, the borrower who pays the interest. But it is no longer A and C who make the profit but the Bank.

Sure enough, A has just received his title. If he kept it, at whatever time he negotiated it, he would of course receive the interest for the entire time during which he has been deprived his capital. But he takes it to the Bank. He hands it an entitlement to 1,040 francs and the Bank gives him a note for 1,000 francs in exchange. It is therefore the Bank that earns the 40 francs.

What is the reason for this phenomenon? It is explained by people's preference to make sacrifices in favor of convenience. 1903 Bank notes are very convenient titles. People accept them do not plan to keep them (forever). They say to themselves, "I will not hold this for longer than eight or ten days and I am well able to forego, the interest on 1,000 francs for one week in view of the advantages the note provides me." Besides, notes have this in common with money; the money one has in a purse or safe does not earn interest, which shows, in passing, how absurd people are who constantly speak out against the productivity of money, since nothing in the world is less productive of interest than money.

Thus, if a bank note remains in circulation for a year and passes through forty hands, remaining nine days in each, forty people have renounced in the Bank's favor the rights they had to the 40 francs of interest due and paid by B. Each of them has sacrificed 1 franc.

This being so, it might have been asked whether this arrangement was just, if there was not a means of organizing a National Bank, a communal Bank, which would allow the general public to benefit from the sacrifice borne by the general public, in a word, one that did not levy interest.

If I am not mistaken, Sir, your invention is based on an observation of this phenomenon. It is not new. Ricardo conceived a plan that was less radical but similar, 1904 and I find these remarkable lines in Say's A Commentary on Storch : 1905

This ingenious idea leaves only one question unanswered. Who will benefit from the interest on this considerable sum put into circulation? Will it be the Government? This will be just one more way for it to increase abuses such as sinecures, parliamentary corruption, the number of police informers, and standing armies. Will it be a financial company, such as the Bank of England or the Bank of France? But what is the use of making a gift of the interest paid in individual transactions by the public to a financial company that is already rich? These are the questions that this subject generates. Perhaps they are not insoluble. Perhaps there are means of making the resulting savings highly profitable for the public , but I am not called upon to develop this new order of ideas here.

Since it is the public that pays all of this interest, it is for the public to benefit from it. Certainly, these premises are just one step away from the conclusion. As for the means, I believe that they are obvious; it is not a National Bank that is needed but free banking.

Let us note first of all that the Bank does not benefit from the total amount of the interest.

Apart from costs, it has capital. What is more, it needs to keep a sum of unproductive money constantly ready in its vault.

We cannot repeat too often that (the) notes from a bank are titles of trust. On the day it issues them, the Bank is proclaiming loudly that it is ready to reimburse them at its office and at any time. Strictly speaking therefore it has to keep constantly available enough created value equal to the face value represented by the notes put into circulation, in which case the interest paid by B would be lost for everyone. However, experience having taught the Bank that its notes circulate for a fixed length of time, it takes its precautionary measures with only this restriction in mind. Instead of keeping 1,000 francs, it keeps only 400 (let us say hypothetically) and puts 600 francs to work. It is the interest on these 600 francs that is borne by the public and by the successive holders of the note and which passes in revenue to the Bank.

Well, this should not happen. It should earn only its costs, the interest on any basic capital, and the just profits from all labour or financial dealings. That is what would happen if there were free banking, for competition, which tends to make rates of interest uniform, would not allow the shareholders of a bank to be treated better than the shareholders of any other similar business. In other words, rival banks would be obliged to reduce their discount rates to what is necessary to invest their capital under conditions which are common to all, and this strange phenomenon that I have pointed out, by which I mean the voluntary abandonment of interest to which the successive holders of these notes is subject, would benefit the general public in the form of a reduction in the discount rates. To be even more accurate, I will say that the interest on a 1,000 franc note put into circulation would be shared. Part would go to the Bank to cover the sum it is obliged to keep in reserve, its costs, and the rent (interest) on its original capital, while the other part would be converted by competition into a reduction in the discount rate.

And note this well, this does not mean that interest would tend to become free of charge or to be eliminated. It means only that it would tend to be received by the person who has a right to it.

But privilege has intervened to allocate it (interest) otherwise, and since the Bank of France has no competitors, instead of retaining just part, it is pocketing everything.

I would like, Sir, to show free banking in another light, but this letter is already too long. I will limit myself to outlining my thought.

What is commonly known as interest comprises three elements, which we are only too accustomed to confuse:

Interest properly speaking, which is payment for the period (of the loan), the price of time; 1906

The cost of circulation;

The insurance premium.

Free banking would act on these three elements simultaneously in a favorable manner and in the form of a reduction in price. It would maintain interest properly speaking at the lowest level for the reasons I have given, without ever eliminating it. It would reduce circulation costs to a figure that, in practice, would be close to zero. Finally it would tend to reduce and above all to level out the insurance premium, which is by far the most burdensome element that makes up the total interest, especially for the working classes.

If it is the case that the men who enjoy an abundance of credit in France, such as the Mallets, 1907 the Hottingers, 1908 or the Rothschilds, 1909 have access to capital at 3 percent, it can be said that this is the interest component and that everything others pay above this represents the cost component, and in particular the insurance component. This is no longer a question of the price of time but of the price of risk, or the difficulty and uncertainty of recovering the loan.

How will free banking improve and equalise the condition of borrowers with respect to these issues? Let the reader solve the question for himself. I prefer to leave him this wearisome task rather than give it away to him.

On this question, as on all, the true solution is thus freedom. Freedom will cause banks to spring up everywhere there is a center of (economic) activity and will cause these banks to associate with each other. It will make those two great levers of progress, savings and credit, available to every merchant and every artisan. It will hold down interest to the lowest level to which it can go. It will spread habits that most favor the formation of capital. It will make all the dividing lines between the classes disappear and achieve the mutuality of services without eliminating the price of time , which is one of the legitimate and essential elements of human transactions.

Free banking! Freedom for credit! Oh, why, Mr. Proudhon, has your fiery propaganda not taken this direction? Do you not advocate freedom in all other respects as a right, an attribute (of mankind), or a lesson for all men? Do you not demand freedom to buy and sell? And what, after all, are loans if not the sale of a use (of something), the sale of time? Why should this transaction be the only one to be regulated by the State or trapped within the confines of your ideas? Do you have faith in the human race? Work towards releasing it from its chains and not towards forging new ones (for it). Accept that the motive that impels (the human race) towards unlimited progress is inherent in itself and not in the minds of legislators. Let us achieve freedom and the human race will be fully capable of bringing forth all the progress that its nature contains. If it is possible and good for credit ever to be free or eliminated, as you believe, a free human race will accomplish this work more surely than your bank. If this is neither good nor possible, as I am convinced is the case, a free human race will avoid the abyss into which your bank is propelling it.

In the name of right, in the name of justice, in the name of your faith in human destiny, in the name of the good feeling that it is always desirable to foster among all the parties involved in (debate and) propaganda, I thus entreat you to substitute for the words Free Credit on your banner those of the Freedom of issuing Credit. 1910 But I am forgetting that it is not my place to give advice. Besides, what good would it do? Have we ever seen the leader of a school retrace his steps and face up to this unjust and terrible word, Apostasy? There are those who in their lifetimes have committed rash acts; they will not commit this one, although it is more worthy than all (the) others of gratifying the pride of a noble heart.

FREDERIC BASTIAT

Letter No. 13: P. J. Proudhon to F. Bastiat (11 February 1850)

Psychological consultation. Recapitulation. Accounting is an infallible method. Closure of the discussion.

11 February 1850

MR. BASTIAT,

Your last letter fulfills all my predictions. I was so sure of how it would turn out for me, that even before I received the 4 February issue of La Voix du Peuple , I had already written three-quarters of the reply which you are about to read and all that is left for me to do is to bring it to an end.

You are sincere Mr. Bastiat; you do not leave anyone room to doubt it. I have moreover acknowledged this and I see no grounds for retracting my acknowledgement. What I really do have to tell you that is your intelligence is asleep, or rather it has never seen the light of day. This is what I will have the honor of showing you by summarizing our debate. I hope that the sort of psychological consultation in which you will take part and whose subject will be your own mind will set you on the road to that intellectual education without which a man, no matter what dignity of character distinguishes him or whatever talent he displays, is, and never will be anything other than, an animal that talks , as Aristotle puts it. 1911

What constitutes intelligence in man is the full, harmonious, and continuous exercise of the following four faculties: Attention, Comparison, Memory, and Judgment . At least this is what I was taught in secondary school and what you will find in all schools of philosophy.

Two or more propositions linked one to another and forming a systematic whole, constitute a process of understanding . Understanding takes various forms: syllogism, induction, dilemmas, paradox, etc. All of these come under the heading of reasoning .

The art of reasoning is called logic ; strictly speaking, it is intellectual mechanics. All the faculties taken together constitute REASON.

Plato's induction, Aristotle's syllogism, the contradiction which we associate with the sophists, Condillac's notion of identity 1912 and those antimonies we find in Kant and Hegel, are all merely so many forms of reasoning and particular applications of logic; in the same way as the use of steam as a driving force led to the invention of all sorts of machines, locomotives, steam boats, fixed machinery, high or low pressure machinery, etc., but all of which stem from the same principle: steam.

All the sciences without exception are based on logic, that is to say, on the exercise of the four prime faculties, attention, comparison, memory, and judgment. This is why science is essentially a matter of demonstration; spontaneity, intuition, and imagination have no scientific authority. It is for that reason also, that is to say because of their rational faculties, that men become capable of communicating their thoughts to one another and conversing with one another; if you take away their attention, comparison, memory, and judgment, they talk one after the other or all at once. They do not answer each other and no longer understand one another.

Let us apply these rules to human reason, our common criterion.

From the outset of this dispute, and in a categorical reply to the question you have set me, that is to say, whether interest on loans is legitimate , I told you that in current economic conditions, and given the fact that credit has not been democratically organized, I considered this to be indubitably the case and therefore the arguments you took the trouble to put before me were pointless. I also told you that I accepted them in advance, and that the entire question, in my view, was to establish whether the economic environment could be changed, and that Socialism, in whose name I was speaking, asserted this possibility. I added that changes in the conditions of credit were a necessity for the tradition itself, the final term of the procedure that you defend with so much obstinacy and so little philosophy.

Therefore, to the question you put to me, is interest on capital legitimate, I had no hesitation in replying: Yes, in the current state of affairs, interest is legitimate. I maintain, however, that this order can and must be modified, and that inevitably, whether it please us or not, it will be. Was this, then, an evasive reply? And did I not have the right to hope that, myself having replied so clearly to your question, you would in turn answer mine?

But I was dealing with a man whose mind is hermetically sealed and for whom logic does not exist. It is in vain that I shout to you: "Yes, interest is legitimate in certain conditions independent of the will of the capitalist; no, it is not legitimate in certain other conditions, as it is now up to society to create new conditions, on the grounds that interest, excusable in lenders is, from the point of view of society and history, a form of plunder!" You, however, will have none of It. You do not understand it and you do not even listen to my responses. You lack the first faculty of intelligence, namely attention.

What is more, this is what your second letter adds up to, which starts thus: "Sir, you have set me seven questions. Please remember at this point that there is only one question between us: Is interest on capital legitimate ?" All the rest of your epistle is just a reproduction of the arguments in the first, arguments to which I had not replied because I had no need to answer them. Change the environment, I told you, and you change the principle and the practice. You took no notice of my words. You thought it more useful to poke fun at contradiction and antinomy, at thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, aligning usurers and idiots on your side at very little cost, happy to laugh at what they tremble to perceive.

What did I do then?

To rouse this rebellious faculty of attention in you, I used a variety of terms of comparison. Using the examples of the monarchy, polygamy, legal combat, and industrial corporations, I showed you that the same thing could very well have been good, useful, legitimate, respectable, and then become harmful, illicit, and disastrous, depending entirely on the circumstances that surround it, that progress, the major law of humanity, is nothing other than this constant transformation of good into evil and evil into good and that, among other things, this is also true of interest. I said that the time had come for interest to disappear, as can easily be seen from the political, historical, and economic signs that I was pleased to indicate to you in summary form.

This was calling upon the most precious of your faculties. It was saying to you: "When I state that the conditions that make loans excusable and legitimate have disappeared, I am not saying something that is extraordinary, I am just stating a particular instance of social progress. Observe and compare, and once you have made the comparison and acknowledged the analogy, let us return to the question I asked in reply to yours. Can the forms of credit be modified so as to lead to the elimination of interest, and ought they to be so? This, without prejudice to the exoneration that science owes to all lenders, speculators, capitalists, and usurers, is what we have to examine.

But I'll be damned! Is Mr. Bastiat himself in the business of comparisons at all? Is he even capable of making comparisons, any more than he is of paying attention? Sir, you have no grasp of historical analogy and the movement of institutions, and the general law which springs from them you call fatalism ; " I wish to remain on my own ground !," you say in your third letter. Thereupon, like some chatterbox and hugging to your bosom all the words that might supply a few excuses, you quote as though they were new arguments a few facts whose legitimacy in the established discourse I do not deny but whose necessity I query, and consequently whose revision and reform I demand.

When a man who calls himself an economist, with pretensions to the ability not only to reason, but also to explain and sustain a scientific discussion, has come to this impasse, I am bold enough to say, Sir, that he is a desperate man. No powers of attention and comparison ; a total inability to listen and reply! What can I now learn from you? You are adrift alike from philosophy, science, and humanity.

However, let us not lose heart. Perhaps, I tell myself, attention and comparison will be aroused in Mr. Bastiat with the help of another faculty. Observing an idea attentively and then comparing this idea with another is too subtle and abstract a process. Let us resort to history: history is the series of observations and experiences made by the human race. Let us explain progress to Mr. Bastiat; in order to understand progress in its unity and consequently its laws, all that one needs is memory .

When I talk about memory as the faculty of human understanding, I am distinguishing it essentially from individual recollections. Animals recollect but have no memory. Memory is the faculty of making connections and classifying recollections, of considering several consecutive facts as one and the same fact and applying seriality and unity to them. It is attention applied to a series of things accomplished over time and generalized.

So I wrote a monograph on usury. 1913 I showed you the origin of usury, its causes, its pretexts, its analogues, its development, its effects, and its consequences. I showed that the derivations of the principle of usury are completely unfeasible and absurd, that it inevitably engenders immorality and poverty. Having done this, I said to you: "You see that the order and preservation of society are now incompatible with usury, that the conditions of credit can no longer go unchanged, that interest, legitimate at the outset and still excusable today in lenders, (but) upon whom it does not rely for it to be removed, has become legalised plunder in the eyes of social conscience, a monstrous institution that is calling unanswerably for reform."

Unless I am mistaken, this was an opportunity to study history after all, with the new conditions governing credit and the possibility, affirmed by me, of making it free of charge. And remember that most carefully putting aside personal questions, I constantly said to you: "I am not accusing capitalists; I am not complaining about landowners. I am far from condemning bankers and usurers as the Church has done. I acknowledge the good faith of all those who benefit from interest. I denounce an error that is entirely collective, an antisocial Utopia full of injustice." Well then, did you even understand me? For as for refuting me, you have not even dreamt of doing so.

I have your fourth letter before me; 1914 is there a shadow of that historic perception, which is, as I have told you, memory? No. Accomplished facts exist for you solely as memories, that is to say they are nothing. You do not deny them, but since it is impossible for you to follow the thread and generalize from them, you do not extract their content; their meaning escapes you. Your faculty of memory, like your faculties of attention and comparison, is non-existant. All you can do is repeat the same thing over and over again: He who lends for interest is not a thief and nobody can be forced to lend. After that, what is the use of knowing whether credit can be organized on different bases or examining the results of the practice on the working classes? Your theme is done; you do not depart from it in the slightest. And proceeding thus, after explaining practice of usury using several examples, you reproduce it using (theoretical) propositions and say: "This is science!"

I admit to you, Sir, that for an instant I doubted whether there existed on this earth a man who was as deformed by nature with regard to intellect and I impugned your character. For my part, I would a thousand times rather be condemned for my frankness than be seen as clearly lacking what is man's finest quality, the one that defines his power and his essence. My letter dated 31 December was written under the influence of these painful conclusions, and you can now easily grasp its meaning.

I said to myself: since Mr. Bastiat does not deign to honor my reply with his attention, nor to mention the facts that inspire it, nor to take note of the historical movement that quite invalidates his own approach; since, moreover, he is incapable of entering into a dialogue with me and of grasping the arguments of his adversary we have to conclude that he thinks too highly of himself. This is a man, as the saying goes, who delights in his own opinions and, by dint of listening only to himself, has cut himself off from any conversation with his fellow men. Let us therefore attack his judgment, that is to say, his awareness, his personality, his ego .

This is why, Sir, I was led to attack, henceforth, your intellectual honesty rather than your lines of reasoning which are fundamentally invalid with respect to this question. I questioned your good faith: it was an experiment that I allowed myself to carry out on you as an individual, and I beg your pardon for this. To give body and shape to my accusation, I concentrated our entire discussion on a contemporary reality, tangible, and decisive, with which I identified not only your theory but you yourself: the Bank of France.

The Bank of France, as I pointed out to you, is the living proof of what I have been repeating to you for the last six weeks, namely, that while interest was at one time necessary and legitimate, society now has the duty and opportunity of abolishing it.

It has been proved, in fact, by a comparison between the Bank's capital and its receipts that, while paying its shareholders interest on the said capital at 4 percent, it can provide credit and offer discounts at 1 percent and still make a splendid profit. It can do this and it ought to do this; by not doing this, it is committing theft. Its refusal is the reason rates of interest, house rents, and farm rentals, which ought to decrease everywhere to a maximum of 1 percent, remain at the high rates of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, and 15 percent. It is the reason the nation pays more than six billion each year in bonuses and bribes to the non-productive classes and why the nation produces an output of only ten billion each year although it could produce twenty. For this reason, either you justify the Bank of France or, if you cannot do so, if you dare not do so, you should acknowledge that the practice of interest is just a transitional one that must disappear in a higher form of society.

This, Sir, is what I said to you and in pithy enough terms to provoke on your part, a judgment, given your lack of attention, power of comparison, and memory, with regard to the wholly historical question that I had submitted to you previously, I mean a simple and completely intuitive act of thought, faced with a factual question to which the answer is yes or no . All you had to do was reply in a few words, that is true or that is not true , and the process would have been complete.

So either, yes , it is true that without cheating its shareholders and harming itself, the Bank of France could discount at 1 per cent. It could therefore, by virtue of the competition this reduction would create, effect a decrease in the cost of all forms of capital, its own included, to below 1 percent. And since, once begun, the process of reduction would never stop, the Bank could, if it wished, cause interest to vanish altogether. So when credit is paid simply what it is owed, it immediately becomes free credit. It follows, therefore, that interest exists only out of ignorance and barbarism, and therefore that in organised democracy, 1915 usury and rent would be illegal.

It is not correct, that is to say it is not true, whatever the balance sheet published each week by the Bank of France says, that it has a capital of 90 million and receipts of 460 million; it is not true that these huge receipts come from the substitution of bank paper for cash in commercial circulation, etc. etc. On this matter, I referred you back to Mr d'Argout, to whom the debate constantly returned.

Would anyone ever have believed this if you had not drawn our attention to it? To this categorical and stunning fact about the Bank of France you reply neither yes nor no . You do not even have an inkling that the fact we asked you to consider exemplifies perfectly your theory of interest. You do not notice the synonymous nature of these two propositions: Yes, the Bank of France is able to provide credit at 1 percent, therefore my theory is wrong; No, the Bank of France cannot provide credit at 1 percent, therefore my theory is correct.

Your reply, an unimpeachable monument to an intellect that the Divine Word has never illuminated, is that for you it is not a question of the Bank of France but of capital, that you are not defending the privilege of the Bank of France but only the legitimacy of interest, that you stand for the free banking as well as freedom to lend, that if it were possible for the Bank of France to offer credit and discount for nothing you would not stand in its way and that you limit yourself to making one statement which is that the notion of capital necessarily supposes and entails the notion of interest and that the former does not happen without the latter, although the latter occurs sometimes without the former, etc.

This being so, you are as powerless to judge as to observe, compare, and call things to mind. You lack the kind of legal mind which, when faced with two identical or contrary facts, states: Yes, they are identical or no, they are not identical. Doubtless, since you are a thinking person, you have intuitions, flashes of illumination and revelations; for my part, I do not presume to say what is going through your mind. But what is certain is that you do not reason, nor do you reflect. What type of man are you, Mr. Bastiat? Are you even a man?

What! Having been defeated by me in turn in questions of metaphysics, which you do not understand in the slightest, in questions of the philosophy of history, which you describe as fatalism, and in discussion of economic progress, whose most recent advances show that interest is a reductio ad absurdum , you are now surrendering to me on the subject of financial management, whose most splendid corollary is precisely the conversion of credit which is paid for into free credit, you nevertheless persist in upholding the absolute truth of your theory, the one that you have thus destroyed with your own hands! You give ground on all sides; metaphysics, history, social economy, and banking are lacking in your thesis, just as attention, comparison, memory, and judgment are absent from your mind! I ask you once more, what is your method of argument and how do you want people to take you?

Notwithstanding this, I was not discouraged. I wanted to go to the limit and make one more effort. I believed that this inertia in your intellectual faculties might stem from a lack of ideas and I nurtured the hope of being able to kindle the spark in your soul. You yourself appeared to be pointing this way forward to me when you said: "C onvinced that this entire debate rests on the NOTION of capital," and therefore you were trying to explain what you understood by capital; I then said to myself: Since he cannot be approached through logic, let us attack him by way of ideas. It would be a shame for a discussion like this to end without the two opponents being able to acknowledge that, while they have not been able to agree, at least they have understood one another!"

Therefore, especially for you, I analyzed the notion of capital. This analysis completed, I defined the term, deduced its corollaries, and then, in order to avoid any ambiguity in the terms used, I called upon the science of accounting. I recounted the theory of capital first according to your ideas and then according to mine in two comparative tables using commercial book-keeping entries. I devoted thirteen columns of La Voix du Peuple to this exposition, out of kindness, the point being that in my view an economic revolution should emerge from this, and even better, a new science.

All this was a final chance to say to you one last time:

Be careful! Times have changed. The practice of interest has exhausted all its possible consequences, which are now acknowledged to be immoral, destructive of public happiness, and mathematically wrong. Book-keeping gives the lie to interest and its consequences; indeed, book-keeping leaves you without intellectual resources, since it demolishes the very notion of capital. For God's sake, take note then of the facts I am pointing out to you; observe, compare, synthesize, judge, and go back to basic ideas: it is only then that you will have the right to express an opinion. Doubtless, you will persist in your error, but at least your error will be reasoned and you will be mistaken in full knowledge of the facts.

How have you fared in the face of this test? This is what I will be examining, when I reply to your last letter.

I leave aside your grandiloquent and pompous introduction in which you both tell society how lucky it should think itself for the service I have provide d in unveiling the latest word on Socialism and also celebrate your victory. I will not take up your jokes about my doubts and indecisions in my polemic; our readers are sufficiently educated in this respect. They know that what you call doubt in me is none other than the fundamental distinction I made from the outset between the past and present economic systems, a distinction that I supported in turn with all the proofs that metaphysics, history, progress, and even daily routine provided for me, and to which I have been endeavoring, unsuccessfully, to call your attention for the last two months. In a word, I am setting aside everything in your letter that is not directly related to the question and will deal only with the essential.

I had defined capital thus: ANY CREATED VALUE in land, tools of work, goods, provisions of food, or money, which is used or capable of being used for production .

What a surprise! You agree with this definition; you accept it and even seize onto it. Alas! It would have been a hundred times better for you to reject it, along with antinomy and the philosophy of history, rather than overload your understanding with a formula like this! The frightful havoc this horrendous definition has wreaked in your mind has to be witnessed to be believed!

First of all, you have not understood it at all. In spite of the trouble I took to explain it to you, you do not know what a created value is: if this were not so, could you have put the following words into the mouth of one of your characters: "Gentlemen, if you want things of created value from me, such as my furniture, shoes, nails or clothes, then give me in exchange some created value, shall we say, twenty francs in cash"?

In commerce, one calls created value , for example, bills of exchange of sound provenance, possessing full legal tender, issued by a reputable and solvent house, accepted and where necessary endorsed by people who are equally solvent and reputable, such that they offer guarantees of the order of triple or quadruple, etc. and can readily circulate like cash because of the number and solidity of the sureties. The more guarantees and acceptances they have, the more secure is their value. The ideal thing would be to have every citizen as their guarantor and acceptor. Money is like that, the best of all things of created value. Apart from the fact that it carries its own intrinsic guarantee, it also bears the signature of the State that launches it into circulation and like a bill of exchange, is assured of acceptance by the general public. By way of analogy, I would say that furniture, shoes and indeed all other products come to be acknowledged as having created value, not because their manufacture has been completed and they are displayed for sale - which is what you say - but because they have been evaluated by both sides to the transactions and delivery has taken place; and yet solely for the person purchasing them or the one who agrees to purchase them again at the same price. This is how, as I have told you, a product becomes capital, and it is capital only for its acquirer who makes it either a tool or an element of further production. For this person, I say, and for him alone, the product becomes created value, in a word, capital.

Here, Sir, I at least have the advantage that you will not disagree with me. I am the author of the definition and I know what I meant to say; your words make clear your lack of understanding. You do not understand me.

Be that as it may, and without paying it much attention, you take my definition of capital as valid and say that it will serve for the purposes of the discussion. You therefore acknowledge implicitly that society's capital and product are one and the same, and that as a result any credit operation, unless there is fraud, results in an exchange, two things that you initially denied and that I would now congratulate you for having finally understood if only I could believe that you are faithful to the meaning of my words. What is more fruitful, in fact, than this analysis: Since value is nothing more than a proportion, and that all products are necessarily proportional to each other, it follows that from the social point of view products are always values and created values. There is no difference between capital and product, as far as society is concerned. This difference is purely subjective for individuals. It comes from their inability to express the proportionality (between) products in an exact number and from their attempts to arrive at an approximation. 1916 For let us not forget that the secret laws of exchange, the absolute rule governing transactions, intuitive rather than written, natural rather than conventional, is to make actions in private life conform as closely as possible to the practices of social life.

Well, and this is what gives rise to my doubts, this definition of capital that is so profound and clear, that you find worthy of acceptance, this identity between capital and product, credit and exchange, all of this, Sir, is a negation of your theory of interest; indeed, have you no inkling that this is so? Given that J. B. Say's formula, 1917 products are exchanged for other products is identical to that other formula, capital is exchanged for capital; that the definition of capital accepted by you is part of that synonymous relationship; that everything in society converges to make the realities of commerce conform ever closer to this law, then it is obvious a priori that the day will come when relationships governing loans, rents for accommodation, farm rents, interest, and similar things will be abolished and converted into relationships of exchange. In this way the benefits provided by capital will become simply an exchange of capital and, since all transactions will be conducted in cash, interest will inevitably disappear. The concept of usury under this conception of capital would entail contradiction.

You would have been bound to understand this if, when adopting my definition of capital, you had reflected on it for a single minute. But to believe that you will reflect on your own notions, to think that once you have accepted a principle you would adopt its consequences, its movement and laws, is to be sadly strangely mistaken, as I have discovered to my cost. Reasoning, in your eyes, is to contradict without rhyme or reason, with no follow-up nor method. Ideas slide across your mind without penetrating it. You take their sense, which you then apply as you will in accordance with your intellectual preoccupations, but discard the ideas themselves, the germinal insights that alone render intelligence fertile and resolve our difficulties.

Nevertheless, I spared no effort to enlighten you on the meaning and portent of my definition and put you on your guard against it. Abandoning the hope of getting you to conceive it just through the metaphysics of language, I reduced it to equations that were, so to speak, algebraic. For what is the science of accounting that I used on this occasion, other than a form of algebra? But this is a totally new question. Your reasoning on bookkeeping is exactly the same as for created values; having accepted a definition without understanding its terms or glimpsing its consequences, it was still left to you to deny the proofs offered. But, Sir, to prove is to define; what stance do you have with respect to all this?

In your letter dated 3 February, 1918 I read:

"Having invented these figures, you establish accounts for A, B and the Bank. This accounting, once you have accepted the figures, is beyond criticism. However, can we accept your figures? Are they in conformity with the nature of men and of things?"

This, I venture to say to you, is the reversal of arithmetic and common sense. However, Sir, if you had had the slightest notion of accounting, you would not have written lines like these. You would have known that if, as you are obliged to admit, my accounting is beyond criticism , the economic facts on which I have based it are, in the first system, that is yours, of necessity wrong, while in the second system, that is mine, they are of necessity right. This is the essence of accounting, that it does not depend on the accuracy of its data; it does not suffer from inaccurate data . It is intrinsically, and in spite of the wishes of the accountant, a demonstration of the truth or falsehood of its own data. It is by virtue of this property that traders' books have legal standing, not only for them but also against them; error, fraud, lies, inaccurate data in short, are incompatible with bookkeeping. A bankrupt person is condemned on the testimony of his entries much more than on the denunciation of public authority. Such is the incorruptibility of this science, I tell you, that I have highlighted it in my System of Economic Contradictions 1919 as being the finest application of modern thought.

You speak of inaccurate data . But the data on which I have based my accounting is precisely yours, the fact of capital that produces interest . As this fact is deemed to be true in your eyes, I subjected it to the proof of accounting I did the same for the opposing data, which is the one I am defending. Once I had completed this operation, you proclaimed it to be beyond criticism, but, as its conclusion was against you, you protested that the data was wrong . I ask you, Mr. Bastiat, what did you mean to say?

I am certainly no longer surprised now that, as a result of not seeing in a definition what it contains, you ended up finding what is not there, and that from one mistake to the next you fell into the most extraordinary hallucination. Where in this irreproachable accounting, notwithstanding its inaccurate data in your view, did you find that the system that I am defending is paper money ? I challenge you to quote a single word of mine in this long controversy that authorizes you to say as you do, and I believe you do so to extricate yourself from an embarrassing situation, that the theory of free credit is the theory of "assignats." I have not said a word on the alternative theory and system that I would like to see substituted for the one that governs us and in which I continue to see the cause of all the misfortunes of society. You did not want this system to be discussed; you have remained on your home ground and all that I have been able to do is to show you, without however making myself understood, that the practice of interest leads straight to the practice of free credit and that the hour has come to complete this revolution. There has never been any question as to my own theory. I have constantly reasoned in accordance with your data; I have restricted myself, in company with you, to the ways and customs of capital. Read my letter dated 31 December again 1920 ; it does not mention the People's Bank at all, but strictly the BANK OF FRANCE, that privileged Bank directed by Mr. d'Argout, whom you presumably do not suspect of being a partisan of paper money, nor of money made of paper, nor of assignats. A Bank, in short, that since the merging of departmental Banks 1921 and the issue of 100 franc notes has seen its deposits constantly increase, such that it now possesses 460 million in ingots and currency and will end up by engulfing a billion in cash in its coffers if the authorities reduce still further the face value of notes, establish other branches, and business picks up. This is the Bank I was talking to you about; did you perhaps take it for a hypothetical speculation, and its 460 million in cash as a Utopia?

This is what I said to you:

The capital of the Bank of France is 90 million, its receipts are 460 million and its issued notes 472, or therefore a capital, whether realized or guaranteed, of 382 million, which belongs to the French people and on which the Bank ought not to receive any interest.

Well now, the interest owed by the Bank to its shareholders being 4 percent on a capital of 90 million with administrative costs, including risk, at ½ percent, the accumulation of specie is progressive and the total number of issued notes allowable without danger to rise to a figure a third greater than the number of receipts, I say that the Bank of France could and should reduce the rate of its discounts to 1 percent, on pain of charges of misappropriation and theft and, furthermore, organize credit on property at the same time as commercial credit. Why, therefore, do you talk to me of paper money, assignats, legal tender laws, price controls, bankrupt debtors, borrowers of bad faith, profligate workers, and other nonsense? Let the Bank do its job with prudence and strictness as it has done up to now; that is not my business. I say that it has the power and the duty to give credit and discount to those to whom it is accustomed to give such, but at 1 percent per year, including commission. Will Mr. Bastiat for once do me the honor of listening to me?

MR. BASTIAT: "For a Bank's notes to be accepted, they have to inspire confidence;

For them to inspire confidence, the Bank has to have capital;

For the Bank to have capital, it has to borrow it and consequently pay interest on it;

If it pays interest on it, it cannot lend it interest-free." 1922

ME: Well, Sir, the Bank of France has found capital without interest; right now it possesses 382 million that do not belong to it; it will have double this under the same conditions whenever it wants. Ought it to exact interest?

MR. BASTIAT: "Time is valuable. Time is money, as the English say. Time is the stuff of which life is made, as Poor Richard says.

To give credit is to allow time.

Sacrificing time to someone else is to sacrifice something precious to him; a sacrifice of this nature cannot be free of charge."

ME: You will therefore never get the point! I have told you, and I now say it again, that with regard to credit what makes a person need time is the difficulty in getting money for himself, and that this difficulty is above all linked to the interest demanded by the holders of money, so that if the interest was zero, the period of the credit would also be zero. Well, under the conditions that the general public has granted it since the February Revolution, the Bank of France is able to reduce its interest almost to zero; which of us is going round in circles?

MR. BASTIAT: "Oh, yes! … I think … I think I understand at last what you mean. The general public has renounced in the Bank's favor interest on 382 million in notes that are in circulation under its sole guarantee. You ask if there is no way of having the general public benefit from this interest or, what amounts to the same thing, organizing a National Bank that does not exact interest. If I am not mistaken, your invention is based on the observation of this phenomenon. Ricardo had devised a less radical but similar plan and I have found the following remarkable lines in Say:

ME: Well, Sir, your J. B. Say, with all his genius, is a fool. The question has been fully answered; it is that the people who provide the funds, the people who here are the sole capitalists, the sole silent partners , and the true owners, the people who ought alone to benefit from the interest, the people, I say, ought not to pay interest. Is there anything in the world that is simpler and fairer?

Thus, as you will agree, on the word of Ricardo and J. B. Say, there is a way of making the general public benefit , and I quote your own words, from the interest it pays to the Bank, and this way is to organize a National Bank that gives credit at an interest rate of zero percent!

MR. BASTIAT: "No, not that, may God preserve us! It is true that I acknowledge that the Bank ought not to benefit from the interest paid by the general public on capital that belongs to the general public; I also agree that there is a way of having the general public benefit from this interest. However I deny that this way is the one you indicate, that is to say, the organization of a National Bank. I state and repeat that this way is via free banking.

Free Banking! Freedom for credit! Oh, why, Mr. Proudhon has your fiery propaganda not taken this direction?"

I will spare the reader your long speech, in which you deplore the hardening of my position and beg me with comic seriousness to substitute your slogan, Freedom of credit, for mine, Free credit, as though credit could be freer than when it costs nothing. If there is one thing you ought to know it is that there is not one bone in my body that resists freedom of credit; whether it refers to banks or to teaching, freedom is my supreme law. However, I say that until the free banking and competition between bankers enables the general public to benefit from the interest the public pays the banks, it would be a good, useful, constitutional thing and a saving that is wholly republican to create, in the midst of other banks and in competition with them, a National Bank provisionally offering credit at 1 or ½ percent at the risk of future events. Does it offend you to make the Bank of France into this National Bank I am proposing, for the reimbursement of its shareholders? While the Bank of France hands back the 382 million in currency that belongs to the general public and of which it is just the holder. With 382 million, a bank can be very easily organized, don't you think? And the overwhelming majority of people can be taken care of too. In what way, therefore, will this bank, formed by a limited partnership with all the people, not be free? Just do this and when you have belled the cat of revolution, when you have promulgated the first act of the democratic and social Republic in this way, I will be responsible for deducing the consequences of this major innovation for you. You will then know just what my system is worth.

As for you, Mr. Bastiat, who as an economist are making fun of the metaphysics of which political economy is just the concrete expression, you who as a member of the Institut, do not even know the philosophy of your own century, and who as the author of a book entitled Economic Harmonies , probably in opposition to my Economic Contradictions, 1924 do not understand anything about the harmonics of history, only see in historical progress a dreadful fatalism, you the champion though you may be, of capital and interest, are ignorant of the very principles of commercial accounting and who, through the meanderings of a bewildered imagination and on the word of authors you revere rather than in accordance with your intimate convictions, realize that it is possible to organize a bank that gives interest-free credit, using public funds, nevertheless continue to protest against FREE CREDIT in the name of freedom of credit; you are doubtless a good and worthy citizen, an honest economist, a conscientious writer, a loyal representative, a faithful republican, and a true friend of the people, but your final words 1925 give me the right to say to you scientifically: Mr. Bastiat, you are a dead man. 1926

P. J. PROUDHON

Letter No. 14: F. Bastiat to P. J. Proudhon (7 March 1850) 1927

Legitimate right to defense. Origin and summary of a discussion of which the general public is the sole judge.

The cause has been understood and the debate is closed, says Mr. Proudhon, one of the parties to the debate electing himself its judge. Mr. Bastiat has been condemned … to death. I condemn him as regards his intellectual capacity; I condemn him for his inability to pay attention, in his powers of comparisons, in his memory, and his judgment. I condemn him as to his powers of reasoning, I condemn his logic, and I condemn him personally by way of induction, syllogism, contradiction, identity, and antinomy.

Oh, Mr. Proudhon, you must have been very angry when you cast this cruel anathema on me!

It reminds me of the formula of excommunication:

Maledictus sit vivendo, moriendo, manducando, bibendo.

Maledictus sit intus et exterius.

Maledictus sit in capillis et in cerebro.

Maledictus sit in vertice, in oculis, in auriculis, in brachiis, etc. etc.; maledictus sit in pectore et in corde, in renibus, in genubus, in cruribus, in pedibus et in unguibus . 1928

Alas! All the Churches are alike; when they are in the wrong they become angry.

I reject the decree, however, and protest against the closure of the debate.

I reject the decree because it is not up to my opponent to pronounce it. I acknowledge the general public alone as the judge.

I protest against the closure of the debate because, as the defendant, I have to have the last word. Mr. Chevé wrote to me and I answered him; Mr. Proudhon wrote to me and I answered him; he wrote to me again and I replied on the spot. It pleased him to write a fourth, fifth, and sixth letter; I was happy to send him the same number of replies, and he can make all the pronouncements he likes, because unless justice and accepted practice are themselves nothing but contradictions, I am within my right.

For the rest, I will limit myself to summarizing what I have said. Apart from the fact that I cannot continue to debate with Mr. Proudhon if he is not willing, and all the less so, since personalities are starting to replace argument, I would now be in a far too invidious position. Mr. Proudhon is being persecuted 1929 and this would mean that all bias and public sympathy would be with him. He had put the cause of free credit up for scrutiny, and here we have the authorities duly obliging by placing him on the pedestal of persecution. I had just one opponent; now I would have three, Mr. Proudhon, the government, and popular support.

Mr. Proudhon criticises me for two things, first of all for having always defended my statement that interest is legitimate and then for not discussing his theoretical system, that of free credit .

It is true that in each of my letters I have concentrated on examining the essential nature of capital from various points of view in order to establish the legitimacy of interest. For any logical mind, this way of proceeding was critical, for it is very clear that the illusion of free credit evaporates once it is demonstrated that interest is legitimate, useful, and indestructible and has the same essential character as any other kind of remuneration, whether it be profit or wages, constituting as it does the fair payment for a sacrifice of time and labour, voluntarily handed over to the person making the sacrifice by the person who benefits from it. In other words, a loan is one of the many forms of sale . Besides, ought not I to try my best to give this polemic some useful purpose? And when the misguided labouring classes attribute their sufferings to Capital, when the flatterers of the people continue to arouse them against the infamy and infernal nature of capital, encouraging their prejudices in the most despicable way, what more could I do than to set out before the gaze of all the origin and effects of this power that is so misunderstood, since in this way I achieved the precise objective of our argument at one fell swoop?

By proceeding thus, I showed some degree of patriotism and self-sacrifice. If I had heeded only my writer's pride, I would have limited myself to discussing and refuting Mr. Proudhon's quibbles. Criticism is an easy and glittering thing; setting out a doctrine without being obliged to do so is to abandon this fine role in order to hand it over to your opponent. Nevertheless, I did this, because I was more concerned with the polemic than the polemicist and with the readers rather than myself.

Does this mean that I neglected Mr. Proudhon's arguments? I will show that I answered them all and so categorically that he abandoned them all in succession. All the proof that I could ask for is the fact that Mr. Proudhon ended up like all those in the wrong; he became angry.

I will thus take up the same procedure again and having once more called the reader's attention to the nature of capital, I will review Mr. Proudhon's arguments.

May I please be allowed to go back quite far, but only to … the Flood. 1930

When the waters receded, Deucalion 1931 threw stones behind him and they turned into men.

And these men were greatly to be pitied, for they had no capital. They had no arms, nets, or tools, nor could they manufacture any because, to do this, they would have needed to have a few provisions. Well, they were scarcely able to catch enough game each day to satisfy their daily hunger. They felt themselves trapped in a circle which was hard to escape from, and they understood that they would not be extricated from this either by all the gold in California or by all the notes that the People's Bank could print in a year, and they said to each other, "Capital is not all it is cracked up to be."

However, one of these unfortunate people, named Hellen, 1932 who had more energy than the rest, said to himself, "I will get up earlier and go to bed later. I will not retreat before any fatigue; I will endure hunger and will do enough to establish a stock of three days' provisions. I will (then) devote these three days to making a bow and arrows."

And he succeeded. By dint of work and saving, he established a stock of game. This was the first capital in the world since the flood. This is the starting point of all progress.

And several people came forward to borrow it. "Lend us these provisions," they said to Hellen, "We will give it all back to you absolutely intact in a year's time." But Hellen replied, "If I lend you my things, I would ask to share the benefits you acquire with them. But I have a plan, I have taken enough trouble to put myself in a position to accomplish it and I will accomplish it."

And in effect, he lived for three days on his accumulated labour , and during these three days, he made a bow and arrows.

One of his companions came forward again and said to him, "Lend me your weapons and I will return them to you in a year's time." To which Hellen replied, "My capital is precious, there are a thousand of us; one person alone can benefit from them. It is natural that it should be me, since I created them."

But with the help of his bow and arrows, Hellen was able to accumulate additional provisions and make more weapons much more easily than the first time.

For this reason, he lent both provisions and weapons to his companions, stipulating each time that he would be given a share of the surplus game that he was making it possible for them to catch.

And in spite of this sharing, the borrowers saw that their work was made easier. They too accumulated provisions; they too manufactured arrows, nets, and other tools, so that, as capital became increasingly abundant, it was lent on terms that were less and less burdensome. The first impetus had been given to the wheel of progress and it turned with ever increasing speed.

However, and although the ability to borrow constantly increased, late arrivals started to complain, saying, "Why is it that those with provisions, arrows, nets, axes, or saws demand that they receive a share for themselves when they lend us these things? Do we not also have the right to live and live well? Has society not the duty to give us all that we need to develop our physical, intellectual, and moral faculties? Obviously, we would be happier if we borrowed for nothing. It is therefore this vile capital that is the cause of our poverty."

And Hellen assembled them and told them, "Take a careful look at my conduct and the conduct of all those who, like me, have succeeded in creating resources for themselves. You will be persuaded that not only has it done you no wrong, but also that it is useful to you, even if we were so hard-hearted to wish it were not so. When we hunt or fish, we hunt a class of game you cannot attain, so that we have spared you any rivalry with us. It is true that when you come to borrow our tools we take a share in the product of your work, but first of all this is fair, since our work too must be rewarded. Next, this has to be so, for if you should decide that from now on weapons and nets will be lent for nothing, who would make weapons and nets? Finally, and this is what is of most interest to you, in spite of the payment agreed upon, the loan you take out is always beneficial to you, otherwise you would not take it out. It can improve your situation and will never make it worse, for bear in mind that the share you hand over is just a portion of the surplus you obtain as a result of our capital. Thus, after paying this share, you are left with more , thanks to the loan, than if you had not taken it out, and this surplus makes it easier for you to make provisions and tools for yourselves, that is to say capital. From which it follows that the conditions of the loan become more advantageous to borrowers with the passage of time, and that your sons will receive a better share than you in this respect.

These primitive men began to reflect on this speech and they found that it made sense.

Since then social relations have become much more complicated. Capital has taken on a thousand varied forms. Transactions have been facilitated by the introduction of money, written agreements, etc. etc., but through all these complications, there are two facts that have remained and will remain eternally true, and these are:

1. Each time that past labour and present labour are associated in the work of production, the product is shared between them in certain proportions.

2. The greater the abundance of capital, the smaller is its proportional share in the cost of the product. And as capital, in increasing, increases (our) ability to create more capital, it follows that the situation of the borrower is constantly improving.

I can hear someone saying to me, "What do your arguments matter to us? Who is querying the usefulness of capital?"

For this reason, what I am calling the reader's attention to is not the absolute and uncontested usefulness of capital, nor even its usefulness with regard to the person who owns it, but precisely the utility it has to those who do not own it . It is there that the value of economic science lies, and there that the harmony of interests is shown.

Although science is impassive, wise men have a human heart in their breasts; all their sympathy lies with those disadvantaged by fortune, for those of their brethren who bow beneath the triple yoke of unsatisfied physical, intellectual, and moral necessities. It is not from the point of view of the excessively rich that the science of wealth is of interest. What we want is a constant convergence of all men to a level that is forever rising. The question is to know whether this humanitarian evolution can be accomplished through freedom or through coercion. If therefore I do not see clearly how capital benefits even those who do not have it, how, under a regime of liberty, it increases, becomes universal, and constantly levels out, if I were unfortunate enough to see in capital only an advantage for capitalists, and thus appreciate just one aspect of it, certainly the narrowest side, the one that is the least consoling in economic science, I would become a Socialist. For one way or another inequality has to be erased gradually, and if freedom does not include this solution, like the Socialists I would demand it from the law, the State, coercion, science, and Utopia. However, I am happy to acknowledge that artificial arrangements are unnecessary in situations where freedom is enough, that the designs of God are superior to those of legislators, and that true science lies in understanding the Divine work, not in devising another in its stead. For it is truly God who has created the marvels of the social world as well as those of the physical one, and doubtless He has not smiled less on either one of these labors: Et vidit Deus quod esset bonum (And God saw that it was good). 1933 It is therefore not a question of changing natural laws, but understanding them in order to conform to them.

Capital is like light.

There was once a hospice containing both the blind and the sighted. The blind were probably the more unhappy, but their unhappiness did not come from the fact that the others were able to see. On the contrary, in daily life, the sighted provided services to the blind that the blind could never have provided for themselves, and habit prevented them from sufficiently appreciating the services they provided.

Well, hatred, jealousy, and hostility broke out between the two groups. The sighted said, "Let us refrain from tearing down the veil that covers the eyes of our brethren. If sight were to be restored to them, they would undertake the same work as us. They would compete with us and pay us less for our services, and what would become of us?"

For their part, the blind cried, "The greatest of all good things is equality, and if our brethren are to be like us in not being able to see, then they ought to lose their sight like us."

But a man who had studied the nature and effects of the events that had taken place in this hospice said to them:

"Emotion is leading you astray. You who can see, you are suffering from the blindness of your brethren, and the community would achieve a much higher level of material and moral satisfaction at much less cost if the gift of sight had been given to all. You who lack sight, thank Heaven that others can see. They can carry out and help you to carry out a host of things which benefit you, and of which you would be eternally deprived."

Nevertheless, the comparison is in error in one important aspect. Solidarity between the blind and the sighted is far from being as close as that linking the proletariat and capitalists, since while those who see provide services to those who do not, these services do not go so far as to restore their sight, and equality is forever impossible. But apart from the fact that it is currently useful to those who lack it, the capital of those who possess it helps provide the means to acquire it to those without.

It would therefore be fairer to compare capital to language. What madness it would be for infants to be envious of the faculty of speech in adults and to see in this a principle of irreversible inequality, since it is precisely because adults speak today that infants will speak tomorrow!

Remove speech from adults and you would have equality in degradation. Allow speech to be free and you will provide the opportunity for equality in intellectual progress.

In the same way, abolish capital (and you would certainly abolish capital if you abolished its reward) and you would have equality in poverty. Leave capital free and you will have the greatest possible number of opportunities for equality in well-being.

This was the idea that I endeavored to elicit from this polemic. Mr. Proudhon criticises me for it. If I have one regret it is that I never gave this idea enough space. I was prevented from doing this by the necessity of replying to the arguments of my opponent, who now criticises me for not having replied to any of them. Let us look at them.

The first objection put to me (by Mr. Chevé) consists in saying that I confuse ownership with use . The person who lends, he said, hands over only the use of an item of property and cannot receive in return permanent ownership of an item of property .

I replied that exchange is legitimate when it is freely and voluntarily entered into and is between two things having equal value , even when one of these things valued does not relate to a material object. Well, the use of a useful item of property has a value. If I lend a field that I have fenced, cleared, and drained for one year, I have the right to a payment which can be evaluated . Provided that the valuation is done, and even if I am paid in material objects such as wheat or cash, what business is it of yours? Do you really want to prohibit three-quarters of the transactions that men voluntarily enter into between themselves because these transactions suit them? You constantly talk to us of emancipating ourselves and yet do nothing other than present us with new restrictions.

At this point, Mr. Proudhon intervened, and abandoning Mr. Chevé's theory used antinomy against me. Interest is simultaneously legitimate and illegitimate, he said. This implies a contradiction, as is also the case with property and freedom or anything, since contradiction is the very essence of phenomena . I replied that, on this basis, neither he nor I nor any other man would ever be able to be right or wrong on this subject; that to adopt this starting point would be to prevent one from ever reaching a solution, since it would be to proclaim in advance that any proposition must be simultaneously true and false. A theory like this not only discredits any form of reasoning, it rejects the very faculty of reason. In a discussion what is the sign by which you can recognize when one of the two opponents is wrong? It is his being obliged to admit that his own arguments contradict one another. Well, it is exactly when Mr. Proudhon was reduced to this point that he triumphs. I contradict myself, therefore I am on the side of truth, since contradiction is the essence of phenomena. Certainly I might have refused the conflict if Mr. Proudhon had insisted on imposing logic like this on me as a weapon.

Nevertheless, I went further and was at pains to discover how Mr. Proudhon had succumbed to the theory of contradictions. I attribute it to his deriving the idea of absolute perfection from the fact of perfectibility. The incontrovertible fact is that absolute perfection is contradictory and incomprehensible to us, which is why we believe in God but cannot explain Him. We cannot conceive of anything that has no limit and any limit is an imperfection. Yes, interest is an indication of social imperfection. This is also true of labour. Our limbs, organs, eyes, ears, brains, and sinews also witness to our human imperfection. A perfect being is not imprisoned in devices like these.

But there is no line of reasoning more vicious than the one that says: Since interest is an indication of social imperfection, we should abolish interest and thus achieve social perfection. This would be precisely to abolish the remedy for the illness. We might just as well say that since our sinews, organs, and brains bear witness to our limits and consequently to our human imperfection, we should abolish all these things and man will become perfect.

This was what I answered and, to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Proudhon did not reply.

He did not reply, but instead invoked the theory of compensation .

We are not asking, he said, for loans to be made for nothing, but for lending to be made no longer necessary. The goal to which we aspire is not exactly the abolition of interest, but the proper compensation of the parties involved. We want to reach the situation where, in every exchange, the investment of capital and labor is everywhere the same.

Illusion and despotism was my reply. You will never reach a situation in which Mr. Bidault's skilled artisans 1934 can include past labour and present labour in his services in the same proportions as a manufacturer of stockings. Provided the values of the things exchanged are equal, what does the rest matter to you? Do you want proper payment? You have it under the regime of free exchange. Evaluation is the comparison of present labour with present labour, past labour with past labour, or even present labour with past labour. By what right do you wish to abolish this latter type of evaluation, and how will men be happier when they are less free?

This was what I answered and, to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Proudhon did not reply.

He did not reply but, inveighing vehemently against capitalists, he lashed out at them in the old, familiar, and terrible way: capitalists have no right to payment because they are not depriving themselves of anything . They are not depriving themselves of the thing they are handing over because they cannot use it personally .

I replied that this was a terribly misleading argument, and one which incriminates selling as much as lending. If man were not a sociable being, he would be obliged to produce directly all that he needed to satisfy his needs. But he is sociable, and he trades. From this arises the division of labour and the specialization of tasks. This is why each person does just one thing and makes a great deal more than he can consume personally. He trades this surplus for other things that he does not make and which are essential to him. He works for others and others work for him. Doubtless, the man who builds two houses and lives only in one does not deprive himself personally by renting the other. He would not deprive himself any more if he sold it, and if for this reason the rental is theft, this is also true of the sale price. When a hat maker who has one hundred hats in his shop sells one, he does not deprive himself personally, to the extent that he is not reduced to going bareheaded. The editor of Mr. Proudhon's books, who has a thousand copies of them in his warehouses, does not deprive himself personally as his sales progress, since one copy would be enough for his instruction; lawyers and doctors who give advice do not deprive themselves . So your objection attacks not only interest but also the very basis of transactions and of society itself. It is certainly deplorable, in the nineteenth century, to be reduced to refuting seriously such misleading and puerile arguments. This was what I answered and, to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Proudhon did not reply.

He did not reply, but he began to invoke what might be called the doctrine of metamorphosis:

Interest was legitimate in the past at a time when violence tainted all transactions. It is illegitimate now under a regime of law. How many institutions have there not been that were good, just, and useful to the human race and that are now grossly offensive? Examples include slavery, torture, polygamy, trial by combat, etc. Progress, the great law of humanity, is nothing other that this transformation of good into evil and evil into good .

I replied that this was fatalism as damaging in moral terms as antinomy is disastrous in logic. Can it seriously be contended that, depending on the vagaries of circumstance, what was respectable becomes odious and what was unjust becomes just? I reject this indifference to good and evil with all the strength at my disposal. Acts are good or bad, moral or immoral, legitimate or illegitimate intrinsically, because of the motives that determine them or the consequences they generate, and not because of considerations of time and place. I will never agree that slavery was legitimate and good in a bygone age on the grounds that it was "useful" for men to reduce other men to servitude. I will never agree that to subject an accused man to inexpressible torment was a legitimate and proper means of making him tell the truth. That humanity could not have avoided horrors like this, may perhaps be true. As humanity's essence lies in its perfectibility, evil is bound to be found at its inception, but it is no less evil for all that, and instead of supporting civilization it retards it.

Is payment which has been voluntarily made for past labour, is recompense which has been freely awarded for a sacrifice of time, in a word, is interest an atrocity like slavery or an absurdity like torture? It is not enough to claim this, it has to be proved. From the fact that in antiquity there were abuses that have ceased, it does not follow that all the customs of the time were abuses and have to cease.

This was what I answered Mr. Proudhon and he did not pursue the matter.

He did not pursue the matter, but he made a further historical excursus no less strange.

Interest, he said, arose from contracts on private cargo . When one man provided a Ship and Goods for a maritime journey, and another Talent and Labor, they shared the profit in agreed proportions.

There is nothing more natural and fair than this share, I replied. The only thing is that it is not necessarily limited to maritime activities. It includes all human transactions. You are making an exception here out of what is a universal rule, and by doing this you are undermining interest, because exceptions are always deemed to be illegitimate, whereas nothing is better proof of the legitimacy of a rule than its universality. The day that a primitive man lent his weapons on condition that he received a share of the game or the day a shepherd lent his flock on condition that he received a share of the increase in stock was the day on which interest was born, and doubtless it goes back to the origin of life in society, since interest is nothing other than the accommodation made between past labour and present labour, whether (or not) it be a matter of making use of the land, the sea, or the air. Since then, and when experience enabled this progress to be made, the share of capital, having been unpredictable, now became predictable, and, just as sharecropping has been transformed into farm rent, interest has been regularized without changing its nature.

This was what I answered, and Mr. Proudhon did not reply.

He did not reply, but departing from his habitual behavior, he launched into a emotional argument. He must really have run out of resources to resort to an argument like this.

So he put forward some extreme cases in which a man could not demand payment for a loan without causing horror. For example, how could a rich landowner living on the coast welcome a shipwrecked man and lend him some clothing, then extend his demands to the extreme limit?

I replied to Mr. Proudhon … or rather Mr. Proudhon replied to himself using another example, which shows that in certain extreme cases payment for sales, or even of labor, would be as abominable as the repayment of loans. This would be so in the case of a man who, for extending a hand to a fellow man about to drown in the waves, exacted the highest price that could be obtained in such circumstances.

So this argument by Mr. Proudhon attacks not only interest but also all forms of payment, a certain way of establishing the principle of universal freedom from charges .

What is more, it opens the door to all the emotional theories (which Mr. Proudhon combats which such force and such reason) which seek, through the use of extreme force, to base the affairs of the world on the principle of self-sacrifice.

Finally, like Proteus in the Fable, 1935 of whom it was said: "To overcome him you have to exhaust him," Mr. Proudhon, hunted from contradiction to compensation , from compensation to deprivation , from deprivation to transformation and from transformation to self-sacrifice , suddenly abandoned the controversy and came to execution .

The means of execution he proposed to achieve free credit is paper money . I did not call it this, he said. That is true. But what then is a National Bank that lends to anyone who wants it, free of charge, so-called capital in the form of bank notes?

Obviously, we have come back here to that disastrous and inveterate error that confuses the medium of exchange with the objects being exchanged, an error the source of which Mr. Proudhon let us see in his previous letters, when he said: It is not things that make up wealth, but circulation. He did it again when he calculated that interest in France was at 160 percent because he compared all rent paid in cash to capital.

I set Mr. Proudhon this conundrum: either your National Bank will lend notes to anyone who comes to it without distinction, and in this case circulation will be so inflated 1936 that the notes would depreciate, or the Bank would hand the notes out with discernment, in which case your aim would not be achieved.

It is clear, in fact, that if anyone could go to obtain imaginary money free of charge from the Bank, and if this money is accepted at its face value, issues would be unlimited and would rise to more than fifty billion in the very first year. The effect of this would be the same as if gold and silver became as common as mud. The illusion that consists in thinking that wealth is multiplied or even that real circulation becomes more active as the medium of exchange increases, ought not to enter the head of a political writer who, these days, aspires to discuss economic matters. We all know through our own experience that since cash, like bank notes, does not carry interest, everyone keeps as little of it as possible in his safe or wallet, and consequently the quantity requested by the general public is limited. It cannot be increased without being depreciated, and the only result of this increase is that, for each exchange, two écus or two notes are needed instead of one.

What is happening in the Bank of France is surely an unforgettable lesson. In the last two years, it has issued a large number of notes. 1937 However, the number of transactions has not increased. This number depends on other causes, and these causes have led to a decrease in business. What then has happened? As the Bank issued notes, a flood of specie was paid into its vaults, so that one medium of exchange was substituted for another. That is all.

I will go further. It is possible for transactions to increase without the medium of exchange increasing. It so happens that more business is carried out in England than in France, and nevertheless the total amount of paper and specie is less. Why? Because the English bankers, acting as intermediaries, effect many payments and transfers between parties.

In Mr. Proudhon's scheme of things, the objective of his bank is to reduce payments to transfers between parties. This is precisely what écus do in a way that is in truth rather costly. Bank notes constitute a mechanism that achieves the same result at less cost, and the English Clearing House 1938 is even cheaper. But whatever method is used to clear payments, what do these various procedures, that are more or less perfected, have in common with the principle of interest? Is there a single one that ordains that previous work ought not to be paid for and that time does not have a price?

Swamping circulation with banknotes is thus not the way either to increase wealth or to abolish rent. What is more, handing out notes to all comers is to bankrupt the bank within six months.

So now Mr. Proudhon flies from the first thing which I, in my puzzlement, am worried about, to take refuge in the second.

"Let the Bank do its job with prudence and strictness," he said, "just as it has done up to now. That is not my business."

That is not your business! Can you be serious? HERE You have dreamt up a new bank that is to award free credit to everyone and then when I ask you if it will lend to everybody, in order to escape the conclusion with which I am threatening you, you reply: "It is none of my business!"

However, while saying that that is none of your business, you add, "that the new bank will carry out its job with prudence and strictness." This means nothing or it means that it will lend to those who can give their word on its repayment.

But in this case, what will happen to the Equality that is your idol? Do you not see that instead of making men equal before credit, you are constituting a state of inequality that is more shocking than the one you are claiming to destroy?

In effect, in your system, the wealthy will borrow free of charge and the poor will not be able to borrow at any price.

When a wealthy man comes to the bank, he will be told, "You are solvent, here is capital which we will lend you free of charge."

However, let a working man come forward. He will be told, "Where are your guarantees, your land, your houses, or your goods?" "I have only my hands and my integrity." "That does not reassure us; we have to act with prudence and strictness , and so we cannot lend you money free of charge." "Well then! Lend it to me and my companions at rates of 4, 5, and 6 percent. This will be an insurance premium whose risk will be covered by the product." "How can you imagine this? Our rule is to lend free of charge or not to lend at all. We are too good as philanthropists to make anyone at all pay anything, whether they be poor or rich. This is why the wealthy obtain free credit from us and why you will not obtain it, whether you pay something or nothing."

In order to make us understand the marvels of his invention, Mr. Proudhon subjects it to a decisive proof, that of commercial accounting .

He compares the two systems.

In one, workers borrow free of charge (we have just seen how), then by virtue of the axiom, all production yields a surplus , they make a profit of 10 percent.

In the other, workers borrow at 10 percent. The economic axiom does not reappear, and a loss results.

Applying accounting to these hypotheses, Mr. Proudhon proves to us using figures that workers are much more fortunate in one case than in the other.

I did not need double entry book-keeping to be convinced of this.

However, I point out to Mr. Proudhon that his accounts decide the question through begging the question. I have never cast doubt on the fact that it would be very pleasant to have the use of well-furnished houses, well-prepared land, and powerful tools and machines without paying anything. It would be even more pleasant for larks to fall ready-roasted into our mouths, and whenever Mr. Proudhon likes I will prove this to him using debits and credits . The more precise question is: are all these miracles possible?

I therefore took the liberty of pointing out to Mr. Proudhon that I disputed, not the accuracy of his accounting, but the reality of the data on which it is based.

His reply was curious:

"This is the essence of accounting, that it does not depend on the accuracy of the data. It does not suffer from inaccurate data. It is intrinsically, and in spite of the wishes of the accountant, a demonstration of the truth or falsehood of its own data. It is by virtue of this property that traders' books have legal standing." 1939

I beg Mr. Proudhon's pardon, but I am obliged to tell him that justice is not limited, like the Cour des comptes, 1940 to examining whether the books are kept correctly and whether the accounts balance. It also seeks to find whether inaccurate data has not been included.

But truly, Mr. Proudhon has an unparalleled imagination for inventing convenient means of becoming rich, and in his place I would quickly abandon free credit as being an outdated system, and complicated, and disputable to boot. It has been left far behind by accounting, which is of itself a demonstration of the truth of its own data.

All you need is to have two sous in your pocket. Buy a sheet of paper. Write a pretend account on it, the most extravagant that you can dream up. Just suppose, for example, that you have bought a ship cheaply and on credit and that you have loaded it with sand and pebbles gathered on the beach and that you are shipping the lot to England. Then that you have been given an equal weight of gold, silver, lace, precious stones, cochineal, vanilla, perfumes, etc. in exchange, and that on your return to France buyers are fighting over your opulent cargo. Put figures on all this. Do your accounting in double entry. Take care that it is accurate and here you are, in a position to tell Croesus what Mr. Rothschild said of Aguado, 1941 "He left thirty million; I thought he was better off." For if it conforms to Mr. Juvigny's laws, 1942 your accounting will entail the truth of your data .

No means more convenient than that for becoming wealthy has ever come to mind apart from the one produced by the son of Eolus. 1943 I recommend it to Mr. Proudhon.

He took it into his head to go to all the crossroads, where he shouted ceaselessly in a raucous voice, 'People of Baetica 1944 , do you want to become rich? Imagine that I am very rich and that you too are very rich. Convince yourselves every morning that your fortune has doubled during the night. Then get up, and if you have creditors go and pay them with what you have imagined, and tell them to use their imagination in their turn. 1945

However, I leave Mr. Proudhon at this point, and in bringing this polemic to a close I turn to the Socialists and implore them to examine the following questions with impartiality, not from the point of view of the capitalists but in the interest of the workers:

Should the legitimate remuneration of a person be identical whether he devotes his present day's work to production or whether in addition he devotes tools that are the fruit of past work to it?

Nobody would dare to support such a suggestion. Two elements of remuneration are involved, and who would complain of this? Would the buyer of the product complain? But who does not prefer to pay 3 francs a day to a carpenter equipped with a saw than 2 francs 50 to the same carpenter who makes planks with his bare hands?

Here the two elements of work and remuneration are in the same hands. But if they are separate and work together, is it not fair, useful, and inevitable for the value of the output to be shared between the two according to agreed proportions?

When it is the capitalist who establishes the business at his own risk, payment of the labor employed adjusts to the situation and is known as wages. When the worker takes on a project and runs a risk, the remuneration of capital adjusts itself and is known as interest .

One might believe in arrangements somewhat nearer perfection, in a closer association between risk and recompense. In former times, this was the avenue that Socialism explored. The rigidity of one of the two elements seemed to it to be a backward step. I could demonstrate that it is progress but non est hic locus (this is not the place).

There is one school, which goes by the name of "complete socialism," which goes much further. It claims that all recompense must be denied to one of the elements of production, namely capital. And this school has inscribed Free Credit on its banner in place of its former motto, Property is theft !

Socialists, I call upon your good faith, is this not the same thing expressed in different words?

It is not possible in principle to dispute the justice and usefulness of a share being made between capital and labor.

It remains to be seen what law governs this sharing.

And you will quickly find it in the following formula: the more that one of these elements is preponderant over the other, the smaller is its proportional share, and vice versa.

And if this is so, the propaganda of free credit is a calamity for the working class.

For, in the same way as capitalists would harm themselves if, after having proclaimed the illegitimacy of wages, they reduced workers to either dying or leaving the country, workers would be committing suicide if, after having proclaimed the illegitimacy of interest, they forced capital to disappear.

If this disastrous doctrine were to spread, if the voice of universal suffrage leads to the supposition that it will not hesitate to invoke the help of the law, that is to say, the help of organized force, is it not clear that terrified capital, threatened with the loss of its right to any compensation, would be forced to flee, hide, or disappear? There would be fewer businesses of all sorts, while the number of workers would remain the same. The result can be expressed briefly as an increase in interest and a decrease in wages .

There are pessimists who state that this is what Socialists want: for the workers to suffer, for it to be impossible for order to be restored, and for the country to be perpetually on the brink of an abyss. If there are people perverse enough to want this, let society stigmatize them and God judge them!

As for me, it is not for me to give an opinion on intentions in which, incidentally, I cannot believe.

However, I say: free credit is a scientific absurdity, involving antagonism to established interests, class hatred, and barbarity.

Freedom of credit is social harmony, it is right, it is respect for human independence and dignity, and it is faith in the progress and destiny of society.

FREDERIC BASTIAT.

4. T.242 "Comments at a Meeting of the Political Economy Society on Disarmament and the English Peace Movement" (10 Nov. 1849)↩

Source

T.242 (1849.11.10) Bastiat's comments on on disarmament and the English peace movement at a Meeting of the PES (Séance de 10 nov. 1849). In "Chronique," JDE, 15 Nov. 1849, T. XXIV, pp. 438-440; also ASEP (1889), pp. 86-90. Not in OC. [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

This is the seventh record of eleven which we have of Bastiat attending one of the regular monthly meetings of the Political Economy Society. See the Editor's Introduction to the first one, above pp. 000, for more details.

This meeting is particularly noteworthy because of the diversity of the participants which shows the broad range of professions the Society drew upon. The stenographer notes that this meeting was "one of the most well attended, most brilliant, and the most animated the Society has had" even though several luminaries were not able to attend.

The topics covered included a report on Horace Say and Bastiat's visit to England following the August Peace Congress in Paris to attend more Peace Congresses in London, Birmingham, and Manchester and to meet with Richard Cobden (perhaps to secretly begin negotiations for a disarmament treaty between France and England); 1946 whether France was ready for disarmament given the threats which it faced both internally (from socialism) and externally (from hostile powers like Austria and Russia); a vigorous reply by Garnier and Bastiat who reiterated what he had said at the Paris Peace Congress in August that heavy taxation was eating away at the heart of French society by draining the resources of the ordinary working people and driving them into revolt; the question of whether or not "Perfidious Albion" (Britain) could be trusted to patrol the world's strategic waterways; and how best to organise France's army, either along the lines of the British system of voluntary recruitment or the Prussian Landwehr system.

It is clear from the remarks that Garnier and Coquelin were the only ones present at the meeting who came to the defence of Bastiat's radical opposition to military spending and conscription.

Text:

Although several members of the Legislative Assembly had not been able to come to the last meeting of the Political Economy Society, (and) although the Secretary (of the Society) had informed (the Society) of the letters (received) and the reasons (given) concerning the circumstances which prevented Messieurs the duc d'Harcourt, 1947 (Auguste) Vivien, 1948 Léon Faucher, 1949 (Auguste) Walras, 1950 (Victor Destutt) de Tracy, 1951 and (Hippolyte) Passy 1952 attending the annual dinner, and in spite of the fact that some other members were far away from Paris, the meeting was one of the most well attended, most brilliant, and the most animated (the Society has had). It should be noted, the attendance for the first time, of M. (Marie) Fournier, 1953 Representative from Marseilles, and M. (Jules) Dupuit, 1954 the Chief Engineer of the (Department) of Bridges and Roads, who is the author of a very remarkable critical article which we have published in a recent issue (of the JDE), on the present legislation governing transportation. 1955

As dessert was served, the President of the Society M. Dunoyer, having invited M. Horace Say to give a few details about the interesting trip the (French) Friends of Peace had in England, the conversation continued in this direction until half past ten, and was followed by all the Members with great interest.

M. Horace Say delivered his account with a charm that was testimony to his excellent memory of the three meetings (he attended) in London, Birmingham, and Manchester. He explained to the meeting how the combined efforts of the Quakers and Dissenters, along with those of the supporters of economic ideas, made this movement in favour of peace a serious one worthy of attention. In his turn, M. Frédéric Bastiat said that the middle and popular classes (now) see quite clearly that in England large armaments were a (form of) trickery, 1956 just as they had realised that high tariffs were a form of trickery, as they were beginning to realise that the colonial system is a trick. He added that all these things - armaments, protection, colonies, and high (government) expenditure fed socialism here at home (in France).

These claims found a hardened opponent in M. Gabriel Lafond 1957 who had been an old travelling companion of (the explorer) Jules Dumont d'Urville. 1958 Lafond gave a presentation which was full of geographical erudition in order to prove that the English were full of good intentions concerning maritime matters, (but) that they had only freed their slaves out of commercial calculation. Without going into the details of these ideas, M. Dunoyer noted that the agitation of the Friends of Peace, excellent in itself, nevertheless had come at an inopportune time, when war was no longer international but domestic, and when disarmament would no longer be undertaken to the detriment of foreign wars but perhaps to the advantage of the enemies of domestic and social order. 1959

Replying to these two Members, M. Joseph Garnier 1960 cited as facts (for consideration) what had happened under our very eyes over the past two years: the international war between Germany (or rather Prussia) and Denmark; 1961 the war of pure nationalism between Italy and Austria; 1962 a similar war between Hungary and Austria; the international intervention of Russia in favour of Austria against Hungary; 1963 and the international intervention of France, Austria, and Spain in the affairs of Italy. 1964 Didn't all these sieges, all these attacks, all this expenditure, all this devastation, all these butcheries, all this carnage, have their origin in the system of international intervention and the system of resorting to armed conflict which the Friends of Peace want to abolish?

As for socialism, M. Joseph Garnier going even further than the view held by M. Bastiat, 1965 thought that not only did permanent armed forces strengthen socialism by requiring excessive expenditure which increased the burden of taxes and prevented useful reforms. And furthermore, that they (armed forces), like the rest of society, are vulnerable to attack (from within) and have been attacked by this cankerous rot; that it was wrong, in his view, to rely upon armed force to defend for ever the social order; that above all it was necessary to attack error by teaching and discussion, since socialist error, as shown in the recent revolution, can be found in the mass of the nation, in the heart of the reaction itself, and even in the parliamentary majority of which at most (only) 50 Deputies were completely free of (any taint of) socialism, 1966 which was very apparent among some of them, mixed or latent among the others, but dangerous in all of them. We should mention that these claims, supported by M. Coquelin, did not receive general approval (at the meeting).

M. Joseph Garnier also replied to M. Gabriel Lafond's (claim about) "Perfidious Albion", that far from having inspired the emancipation of the slaves, it had been defeated by the religious people of England, the same people who had made an alliance with the Leaguers on the question of free trade, 1967 the same people who are joining with those who are concerned with the questions of financial reform, colonial reform, and disarmament, and in proclaiming equality they have thought nothing about the interests of the colonies, but the interests of humanity, as when they proclaim "Let the colonies die rather than the Gospel!"

M. Natalis Rondot 1968 had already replied to M. Gabriel Lafond on the subject of the maritime (strong) points occupied by the English, that he had been able to judge for himself when he travelled to China (in 1843), a view which was shared by other sailors, how useful it was that England had taken (control) of several waterways around the world, as one was thus assured of getting protection which other nations would not have established without its (help).

M. (Louis) Wolowski thought that one mustn't confuse "improving socialism" and "plunderous socialism," 1969 against which one had to always have an armed force at the ready. He saw the possibility of only a partial disarmament, and furthermore that England did not appear to him to be the only nation one could imitate. It was also from the North that fear must come … 1970

It seems to us that is is unfortunate that M. Wolowski gave the name of "socialism" to (the) aspirations for progress, while one should, scientifically speaking at least, reserve this name for the actions of those who, knowingly or not, by using argument or force, want to move towards communism. There is some danger (here) of making a pact with the devil. Concerning the matter of disarmament, one could point out to the Honourable Representative of la Seine (Wolowski) that, given the fact that France was the most bellicose and most feared people in Europe, it is she who should provide the example. And England should do likewise with its Navy. Someone really has to take the first step.

After M. Wolowski, the Honourable M. de La Farelle, 1971 a corresponding member of the Institute and former Member of the Chamber of Deputies, very succinctly resumed the discussion and asked if the solution could not be found in a better organisation of armies, an organisation which at the same time would borrow from the system of voluntary enlistment of the English (to provide) (armed) forces to defend against the dangers from abroad, and from the Prussian system of the Landwehr 1972 (to provide) armed forces to confront domestic dangers. M. de Colmont, 1973 former Secretary General of the Ministry of Finance, supported M. de La Fa Farelle and expressed the opinion that it was a matter of (finding) a better foundation for the "recruitment tax". 1974

As the evening was drawing to a close end, M. Raudot, 1975 Representative of Saône-et-Loire, only wanted to add a few words to say that he thought that society and its official representatives, himself included, were more mired in the detours of socialism than they realised. (Laughter broke out at this moment from one of the corners of the table, when a Member of the Society, a former Minister, related how M. Raudot himself was considered to be a socialist by the supporters of centralisation, to which M. Raudot had publicly responded by correctly making several criticisms of communism.) Furthermore, M. Raudot said that one shouldn't forget when we were busy reorganising the armed forces that the arming of all the citizens in order to get public peace was an illusion. When all the citizens were armed, the troublemakers were also armed, and then it would be necessary, in order to keep a close eye on the population which had arms, to have (an even) more numerous regular militia in order to keep a close eye on the population which did not (have arms). This was a violation of the grand principle of the division of labour.

5. T.319 "Speaks in the Assembly on the Right to Form Unions" (16 Nov. 1849)↩

Source

T.319 [1849.11.16] "Speaks in the Assembly on the Right to Form Unions" (16 Nov. 1849). Brief remarks on the right to form unions on eve of his major speech the next day. CRANL, vol. 4, p.501. [Not in OC. DMH.] [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

This is the 12th of eight speeches and seven other shorter contributions Bastiat gave in the Chamber between May 1848 and February 1850. See the Editor's Introduction above, pp. 000 for more details.

Bastiat has the floor in the Assembly to give a major speech on the right to form trade unions. There is a procedural dispute over whether or not there are enough Deputies in the Chamber for a speech to be given and the President of the Assembly is interrupted by calls from socialist Deputies for a count of heads to see if there is a quorum. Bastiat begins his speech but is interrupted again from someone on the Left forcing the President to consult with his officials. They cannot decide with certainty that there are enough Deputies in the Chamber so the President postpones Bastiat's speech to the following day when he does give it. It can be found in CW2, "The Repression of Industrial Unions," pp. 348-61.

Earlier in the evening the President of the Chamber had opened discussion for the Second Reading of a Proposal concerning the Repeal of Articles of 414, 415, 416 of the Penal Code which banned the formation of trade unions. 1976 Deputy Louis Wolowski, 1977 who was also a member of the Political Economy Society, made a point of order about how late it was for a discussion of such an important topic to begin and asked for an adjournment. This was denied. The floor was then given to another member of the Society, M. Morin (representing La Drome) 1978 who gave a long and impassioned speech in defence of the right to associate and to form unions with only one condition attached, namely that no intimidation or violence could be involved (pp. 497-99).

He was followed by the conservative judge M. de Vatimesnil, 1979 the Secretary of the Committee which had drawn up the bill for the Assembly, who gave an equally impassioned speech (pp. 499-500) on how dangerous any trade union was, how they were wrong in themselves even if no violence was involved in their formation, and that any industrial union inevitably leads to "political unions" (or parties) which must be banned. It was at the end of Vatimesnil's speech that the disruptions began and there were increasing calls for a count of heads and postponement of the proceedings until the next day. This is when Bastiat takes the floor briefly.

What makes this short speech interesting is Bastiat's definition of the word "coalition" (union) and the interruptions he had to put up with before he could finally give his speech.

Text

M. President. 1980 M. Bastiat has the floor.

M. Frédéric Bastiat. I would like to point out to the Assembly the handicaps faced by those who would like to defend the freedom to form unions after the speech you have just heard, and the very enlightening speech which M. de Vatimesnil gave at the First Reading (of the Bill). Now he comes before us bringing numerous facts taken from documents which are in the Library, when two amendments are presented which have neither been distributed nor printed and about which we have no knowledge, and at such an advanced hour in the proceedings.

Several Deputies : Adjoin until tomorrow! (No! No!)

M. Frédéric Bastiat. I am under the orders of the Assembly, but I think that the discussion of a question as serious as this and which cannot be treated lightly, would benefit considerably if I were permitted to postpone my remarks until tomorrow.

M. President. The Assembly just made its decision, it cannot change it right now.

M. Frédéric Bastiat. In that case, I will limit my myself to these extremely short observations, since I cannot get to the root of the question. Messieurs, what are we dealing with here? (Noting more than) creating or revising the Articles of the Penal Code. As a result, we will be occupied in examining what is or what is not a crime. The Honourable Secretary (of the Committee, Vatimesnil) has always and endlessly reasoned as if it were a point of law, a matter of well established fact, that a union, by its very existence, is a crime.

I am completely opposed to this way of thinking. The word "union" (coalition), for example, carries with it the idea that there is no crime. The word "union" can only be translated by many other similar words, such as association, combination, agreement, acting in concert. Thus it is not the union itself which is the crime, for it it were, then (any) coalition would always be a crime, no matter to what purpose it had. Associations formed to do charitable works would (then) be crimes.

(Objections from the Chamber.)

A voice from the Left . We don't have a quorum!

M. President. If you want to interrupt the discussion to find out if we have sufficient numbers I will consult the Rules Committee which is the sole judge in this case. (Yes! Yes!)

(M. President consults with the Secretaries of the Rules Committee.)

M. President. The Rules Committee is not unanimous on the question of whether or not we have sufficient numbers in the Assembly. ...

[The Assembly is eventually adjourned.]

6. T.245 "Comments at a Meeting of the Political Economy Society on State Support for popularising Political Economy, his idea of Land Rent in Economic Harmonies , the Tax on Alcohol, and Socialism" (10 Dec. 1849)↩

Source

T.245 (1849.12.10) Bastiat's comments on state support for popularising political economy, his idea of land rent in Economic Harmonies at a Meeting of the PES (Séance de 10 dec. 1849). In "Chronique," JDE, 15 Dec. 1849, T. XXV, pp. 110-112; also ASEP (1889), pp. 91-94. Not in OC. [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

This is the eighth record of eleven which we have of Bastiat attending one of the regular monthly meetings of the Political Economy Society. See the Editor's Introduction to the first one, above pp. 000, for more details.

The topics discussed here included John Prince-Smith's 1981 efforts to spread free market ideas in the German states by translating and circulating copies of Bastiat's works, most notably Protectionism and Communism (Fall 1848), The State (Sept. 1848), Capital and Rent (February 1849), and Damn Money! (April 1849). Bastiat and Marie Raudot 1982 argued that it would be inconsistent for the Society to ask the government to fund measures to spread free market ideas in the state run colleges and the University given their opposition to tax increases, but this was opposed as too rigid and excessively "purist" by Horace Say, Théodore Morin, 1983 and Charles Renouard. 1984 At the end of the meeting the discussion turned to the recently published first volume of Bastiat's Economic Harmonies which was due for release early in the new year. His arguments about land rent as being nothing special but just another example of a service which is being paid for, was challenged by Joseph Buffet, 1985 former Minister of Commerce, Charles Coquelin, Joseph Garnier and Auguste Walras, who defended the traditional view that land had a "special character" which Bastiat could not ignore.

We have combined parts of the ASEP report and that of the JDE to have a more complete picture of what was said at the meeting.

Text:

M. (Propser) Paillottet, 1986 the ex-Vice-President of the Industrial Tribunal and a member of the Council for the Promotion of Workers' Associations communicated to the meeting some interesting news.

He informed the Society that an Association for the Dissemination of the Best Writings on Political Economy has been formed in Berlin, which will lead to a real antidote to (the problem of) socialism. He brought to our attention a publication by M. (John) Prince-Smith whom we had the pleasure of meeting at the Congress of Economists held at Brussels in 1847, 1987 and who is one of the supporters of this useful association which we welcome with very great warmth.

M. Prince-Smith, after having (helped) establish this way of better popularising (economic ideas), reminded us of the error of members of the status quo who resort to violence and plunder as the means (to achieve their ends):

Political economy steps in and says: when there are empty stomachs and inactive hands, the hands have to be put in motion in order to satisfy the needs of the stomach. When needs exist, there is no lack of goals for labor; but the means to (undertake) labour may be lacking. Thus, it is necessary that the means of undertaking labor, that is to say capital, increase to the point where there is enough for all hands to be occupied, and that happens better and faster in a natural order.

When property and the right of inheritance are protected by (both) external and internal peace, in the interest of all, we will no longer have any need to maintain an armed force which jeopardises the real interests of the State, and increases the conflicts which are its purpose to restrain by devouring the resources of the people. If the people, if all the classes of the nation, had better understood their common interests, Prussia, to cite only one example, would have been able since "the Peace" (of 1815) to have maintained a sufficient (level) of public force, and at the same time have saved 10 million Thalers per annum, thus we would now have (enough) work tools for a million or more workers, and bread for more than a million families. It is no surprise that bread is lacking in a system which requires the State each year, in order to maintain an unproductive (armed) force, to consume the means of employing at least 100,000 workers' families, and the funds necessary to support a half a million men!

The lack of success of our efforts to improve this situation shows how (much) we are lacking in economic enlightenment, and how important it is for us that its guiding star rise again to lead us to a better future.

In Germany, there have been, until now, practically no popular works of political economy published, or at least they have not been made to feel very welcome. Our association, faithful to the true principles of this science, felt obliged to translate the works of the ingenious M. Bastiat and to get by importing (from abroad) what it couldn't get here either at such a good price or such good quality. Like (all) imports from abroad, by creating a market in our own country, they will develop here the need (for them) which they will soon be able to satisfy. 1988 There is every reason to hope that our national mind, (thus) informed and stimulated by foreign competition, will not take very long to deploy its own forces (in response).

J. Prince-Smith, Director. Berlin, 26 October, 1849.

One can become a member of the Association by agreeing in writing to distribute every year at least 2 Thalers (7 fr. 80c.) worth of pamphlets. It is strongly recommended that several people in the same locality get together to sell and distribute the publications of the Association.

Copies of these various pamphlets, if they are purchased at the same time, are counted as a group and sold at a reduced price, if they reach the set number.

Price of one copy, 2 groschen; for 25 copies, 1 Thaler; for 100 copies, 2 and 1/3 Thalers; that is to say 5 sous, 3 sous, and 2 sous each, according to the quantity purchased.

The pamphlets already published by the Association include some articles published by Bastiat in the Journal des Économistes , and which were then republished under the titles Capital and Rent , Protectionism and Communism , The State , and Damn Money! 1989

After M. Paillottet's report the conversation turned to the difficulties of spreading economic ideas in France. Different views were expressed about efforts to achieve this very desirable result, and the Society asked its officers to explore ways and means (to do so), with the assistance of those members who have the time to devote to this matter.

The discussion not only covered the means of spreading the ideas but also the serious question of principle. Some members, such as M. Bastiat and M. (Marie) Raudot, both elected Representatives of the People, expressed the hope that the Political Economy Society, which advocated the non-intervention of the government in general should not ask it to popularise the principles of economic science, thereby showing itself to be weak and exposing its principles to the dangers of (educational) programs (taught by) government (appointed), university, or (private) monopoly professors. M. Horace Say, a Councillor of State, M. (Théodore) Morin, a Representative of the People, and M. (Charles) Renouard, a Councillor as the Supreme Court (la Cour de cassation), argued against this excessive purity, and thought that, while we were waiting for the freedom of eduction (to be introduced), something which has been desired for so long, it would be useful and wise to make use of the resources of the present organisation of public education and to invite the government to introduce the study of political economy into all its branches. Today, this study is a necessity, not to mention all the kinds of "system thinking" which lie behind Education and the University. As for the difficulties which come from the restrictions placed on (education) programs, a little bit of liberty and independence on the part of the Professors, as well as the all the trouble we would have in finding (some more), we are convinced that they would emerge little by little by themselves as it were, and we would see what has happened more than once, namely the phenomenon of a transformation of the spirit of (government) regulation, whether through ignorance or prejudice, into a true professor of political economy.

At a late hour, when a group of members of the Society had already left, another conversation of great interest was taken up concerning the ideas put forward by M. Bastiat in his last book, entitled Economic Harmonies , 1990 especially concerning the way he treated property in land. M. Bastiat rejected the idea (that rent came from land). He believes and argued that there is never anything else in the market price (of a good) than the value of the services (it provided); and it seems that he means entirely by this word the payment for labour and capital, or the costs of production. M. (Joseph) Buffet, former Minister of Commerce, M. (Charles) Coquelin, 1991 M. Joseph Garnier and M. (Auguste) Walras 1992 put some very lively and insistent arguments to M. Bastiat. M. Buffet, in particular, explained with perfect clarity and a remarkable understanding of the special character of land considered as a means of production, the influence of natural monopolies of the price of goods, and the consequent appearance of rent in several phases of production. But the latter are questions which are too difficult to be treated in the midst of all the interruptions and clashes (which happen) in a conversation. Furthermore, it would be difficult for M. Bastiat to reply completely and convincingly, (even if) he had truth on his side, which for us is still an (open) question.

7. T.168 "Liberty, Equality" (c. 1850)↩

Source

T.168 (1850.??) "Liberty, Equality" (Liberté, Égalité). Paillottet included this as an appendix to the pamphlet "Baccalaureate and Socialism" (1850). He says that it was written in early 1850 as a draft of a chapter for the second volume of Economic Harmonies which was never completed. [OC4, pp. 501-3] [CW2, pp. 232-234] (also CW4)

Editor's Introduction

Paillottet tells us in a note that he found this sketch among Bastiat's papers and believed he had written it in early 1850 as part of a proposed chapter for the second volume of his Economic Harmonies and never finished it. In the sketch he rails again about the influence the study of the classics has on children who are taught the values of slaver owners and conquerors. He does this in many other places such as the early piece "On the Romans as Plunderous Villains" (before 1830), 1993 but also in most detail in his pamphlet on education Baccalaureate and Socialism , (early 1850). 1994 Since the Romans talked a lot about "liberty" while owning slaves they were able to separate the two concepts in their minds, much as many Founding Fathers of the American Constitution were able to do, and as did many French conservatives who defended protection, subsidies, and the colonial regime in France in the 1840s.

Bastiat also laments how readily most people refuse to see that the privileges and benefits they ask the "great law factory" in Paris (which is the Chamber of Deputies) 1995 to grant them is just another form of plunder, but in this case "legal plunder" sanctioned by the state.

Text

Words have their changing fortunes just as men do. Here are two which man has made divine or damned in turn, so that it is very difficult for philosophers to speak about them calmly. There was a time when he who dared to examine the sacred syllables would have risked his head, since examination implies doubt or the possibility of doubt. Today, on the contrary, it is not prudent to mention them in a certain place and that place is the one from which the laws that govern France are issued! Thank Heaven I have to deal only with Liberty and Equality from the economic point of view. This being so, I hope that the title of this chapter will not have too painful an effect on the reader's nerves.

But how has it happened that the word L iberty sometimes makes hearts beat faster, arouses enthusiasm in nations, and is the signal for actions of the utmost heroism, while in other circumstances it appears to emerge from the hoarse throats of the populace only to spread discouragement and terror far and wide? Doubtless it does not always have the same meaning and does not whip up the same idea.

I cannot stop myself believing that our entirely Roman education has something to do with this anomaly. …

For many long years, the word Liberty has struck our young ears, bearing a meaning that cannot be adjusted to modern behavior. We make it the synonym of national supremacy abroad and of a certain equity at home for the sharing of conquered loot. This sharing was in effect a great subject of dissent between the Roman people and the Senate which, when recited, always has our young people taking the side of the people. Thus it is that the battles between the Forum and liberty end up by forming an indissoluble association of ideas in our minds. To be free is to struggle and the region of Liberty is that of storms. …

Did it take us very long after leaving school before we were going about all the public places railing against foreign savages and avaricious nobles ?

How can liberty understood in this way fail to be in turn an object of enthusiasm or terror for a working population? …

The people have been and are still so oppressed that they have not been able and cannot achieve liberty except through struggle. They resign themselves to it when they feel oppression clearly, and they surround the defenders of liberty with their homage and gratitude. However, the struggle is often long and bloody, a blend of triumphs and defeats; it can generate scourges that are worse than oppression. … When this happens, the people, tired of combat, feel the need to draw breath. They turn against the men who exact from them sacrifices beyond their strength and start to doubt the magic word in the name of which they are being deprived of security and even liberty. …

Although struggle is necessary to achieve liberty, let us not forget that liberty is not a struggle, any more than soldiers presenting arms is a maneuver. Writers, politicians, and speakers imbued with the Roman philosophy make this mistake. The masses do not. Combat for its own sake repels them, and it is in this that they justify the profound saying: There is someone with more wit than the witty, and this person is everyone . 1996 …

A common fund of ideas links the words, liberty, equality, property and security to one another.

Liberty , whose etymology is weights and scales, implies the ideas of justice, equality, harmony, and balance, which excludes combat, which is exactly the opposite of the Roman interpretation.

On the other hand, liberty is generalized property . Do my faculties belong to me if I am not free to make use of them, and is not slavery the most total negation of property as it is of liberty?

Finally, liberty is security , since security is also property that is guaranteed not only in the present but also in the future.

Since the Romans, and I stress this, lived from booty and cherished liberty, since they had slaves and cherished liberty, it is clear that the idea of liberty was in their eyes in no way incompatible with the ideas of theft and slavery. 1997 This must therefore be true of all our generations who have been to school, and these are the ones who are governing the world. In their minds the ownership of the product of our faculties or the ownership of the faculties themselves has nothing to do with liberty and is an asset that is infinitely less precious. For this reason theoretical attacks on property scarcely move them. Far from it, so long as the laws go about this with a certain symmetry and with an aim that is overtly philanthropic, this form of communism attracts them …

You should not believe that these ideas disappear when the first fires of youth die down and when you have grown out of the urge to upset the tranquility of the city as the Roman tribunes used to do, when you have had the good fortune to take part in four or five insurrections and have ended up choosing a station in life, working, and acquiring property . No, these ideas do not pass away. Doubtless, people value their property and defend it with energy, but take little account of the property of others. If it is a case of violating it, provided that this is carried out through the intervention of the law, 1998 they have not the slightest scruple in doing so. The concern of us all is to curry favor with the law, to attempt to put ourselves in its good graces, and if it smiles on us we ask it quickly to violate the property or the liberty of others for our benefit. This is done with charming naivety, not only by those who proclaim themselves to be communists or communitarians but also by those who claim to be fervent devotees of property, 1999 by those who are roused to fury by the sole mention of the word communism, by (insurance) brokers, manufacturers, ship owners, and even by the archetypal property owners, those who own land. …

8. T.301 "On coerced Charity" (c. 1850)↩

Source

T.301(1850) "On coerced Charity" (1850). This previously unpublished sketch was discovered by the original French editor Paillottet among Bastiat's papers and inserted in a footnote to "Justice and Fraternity." Paillottet says that "These ideas of the author were written in his handwriting in a commemorative album sent to him in 1850 by the Literary Society on the occasion of the London Exhibition." [OC4, p. 326] [CW2, p. 81]

Editor's Introduction

Here Bastiat returns to his objection to the idea that charity should be coerced by the state, i.e. "la charité légale" (coerced or state provided charity) instead of being provided voluntarily by individuals, i.e "la charité volontaire" (voluntary charity). He first discussed this in his "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine" (February 1845) where he states:

Next, political economy distinguishes between voluntary charity and state or compulsory charity. The first, for the very reason that it is voluntary, relates to the principles of freedom and is included as an element of harmony in the interplay of social laws; the other, because it is compulsory, belongs to the schools of thought that have adopted the doctrine of coercion and inflict inevitable harm on the social body. 2000

He had written probably the previous year the chapter on "Exchange" in the first volume of EH where he makes a very similar comment:

Why then does nothing emerge from our legislative Assemblies? Because they do not know this. Political economy offers them the following solution: JUSTICE THROUGH THE LAW (justice légale), PRIVATE CHARITY (charité privée). The legislative assemblies take the opposite course and, without realizing it, obey the Socialist influence and want to encase charity in law, that is to say, banish justice from it at the risk of killing off private charity at the same time, which is always swift to give way to state enforced charity (la charité légale).

Why then do our legislators overturn every notion in this way? Why do they not leave each one in its place, Fellow-feeling in its natural domain, which is Freedom, and Justice in its place, which is the Law? Why do they not apply the law uniquely to the reign of justice? Might this be because they dislike justice? No, but they lack confidence in it. Justice is freedom and property. 2001

He has a similar set of arguments about the distinction between "la fraternité légale" (state imposed fraternity), desired by the socialists, and "la fraternité libre, spontanée, volontaire" (free, spontaneous, and voluntary fraternity), preferred by the economists, which he develops further in his pamphlet "Justice and Fraternity" (JDE, June 1848). 2002

Text

There are three levels of human (activity): the lowest, that of plunder; the highest, that of charity; and a middle level, that of justice.

Governments only ever exercise one (kind of) action which has force for its sanction. Well, it is allowed to force someone to be just but not to force him to be charitable. When the law wishes to achieve by force what the moral law succeeds in doing through persuasion, far from lifting itself to the level of charity, it descends to the sphere of plunder.

The proper sphere of the law and governments is justice.

9. T.315 "The Consequences of an Action" (c. 1850)↩

Source

T.315 [1850.??] "The Consequences of an Action" (Si toutes les conséquences d'une action) This previously unpublished note was discovered by the original French editor Paillottet among Bastiat's papers and inserted in a footnote to WSWNS, chap XII The Right to Work" which was published in July 1850. No date was given. [OC5, p. 392] [CW3]

Introduction

This is another unpublished fragment which Paillottet found in Bastiat's papers. He dates it to sometime in early 1850 and inserted it as a footnote in WSWNS which was published in July 1850. 2003 He is playing around with the idea of "the seen" and "the unseen" with the twist here being his attempt to quantify it in a kind of thought experiment. There is also a brief mention of the idea of "concentrated benefits" (such as the beneficiaries of a tariff) and more widespread harm (on consumers).

Text

If all the consequences of an action were visited on its author, our education would be swift. But this does not happen. Sometimes the beneficial and visible consequences are in our favor and the harmful and invisible ones are for others to face, which makes them even more invisible. We then have to wait for a reaction from those who have had to bear the harmful consequences of the act. Sometimes this takes a long time and this is what preserves the reign of the error.

A man carries out an action that produces beneficial consequences worth 10 in his favor and harmful consequences worth 15 spread over 30 of his fellow men, so that what was borne by each of them was just ½. In all, there was a loss and the reaction was bound to come. We can see, however, that it will be all the slower since the harm is more widely spread over the mass and the benefit more concentrated on a single point.

10. T.182 "Our Abilities vs. Our Needs" (c. 1850)↩

Source

T.182 (1850.??) "Abilities vs. Needs." Fontenay included this piece as part of his long note at the end of Chap. XVI "Population" in the second expanded edition of EH which he and Paillottet edited and published in June 1851 (EH2 pp. 463-4). It also appeared in a shortened note in OC6 (1st ed. 1855). Fontenay states that he found it among Bastiat's papers and it was one of the last things he wrote. [OC6, pp. 480-81] [CW4]

Introduction

These are fairly tersely written notes which we have expanded a little to aid the reader. It is another example of Bastiat thinking out loud to himself as he explores his ideas and playing with numbers to get a better idea of the relationships between them.

Here we also have the first and only use of an expression which is intriguing, namely "l'association des efforts" which we have translated as "the association or collaboration of effort." 2004 It strongly resembles Ludwig von Mises' idea of "the law of association" which he borrowed from David Ricardo and made into a key component of his theory of human action. See for example in Human Action (1949):

The law of association makes us comprehend the tendencies which resulted in the progressive intensification of human cooperation. We conceive what incentive induced people not to consider themselves simply as rivals in a struggle for the appropriation of the limited supply of means of subsistence made available by nature. We realize what has impelled them and permanently impels them to consort with one another for the sake of cooperation. Every step forward on the way to a more developed mode of the division of labor serves the interests of all participants. In order to comprehend why man did not remain solitary, searching like the animals for food and shelter for himself only and at most also for his consort and his helpless infants, we do not need to have recourse to a miraculous interference of the Deity or to the empty hypostasis of an innate urge toward association. Neither are we forced to assume that the isolated individuals or primitive hordes one day pledged themselves by a contract to establish social bonds. The factor that brought about primitive society and daily works toward its progressive intensification is human action that is animated by the insight into the higher productivity of labor achieved under the division of labor. 2005

Bastiat quoted Ricardo many times, usually concerning his theory of value and of rent, but not his "law of association" which he must have known about.

Text

In the chapter on "Exchange" 2006 it was shown that when living in a state of isolation men's needs were greater than their abilities (to satisfy them), and that when living in a social state men's abilities were greater than their needs.

This excess of abilities over needs arises from exchange, which comes from — the collaboration of effort, — the division of labor.

From that comes an action and a reaction of causes and effects in the (expanding) circle of infinite progress.

That our abilities are greater than our needs, (thereby) creating in each generation a surplus of wealth, allows it (generation) to raise a more numerous generation. — A more numerous generation allows a better and much deeper division of labour; it is a new (higher) level of superiority given to (our) abilities over our needs. 2007

What magnificent harmony!

Thus, at any given period, the total number of general needs being represented by 100, and that of our abilities by 110, the excess of 10 can be divided — (let's say) 5 for example going to improve the lot of mankind, to stimulating our higher needs, to develop in men the feeling of dignity, etc., — and 5 to increase their numbers.

In the second generation, their needs are 110, — let us say 5 more in quantity and 5 more in quality.

But, for the very same reasons (for the double reason of the physical, intellectual, and more complete moral development (of man), and of the greater density (of population)), our abilities have also increased in power. They can be represented by the figure of 120 or 130.

(Then there is a) new surplus, a new division (of wealth), etc.

And so one doesn't (need to) fear that there will be too much (produced); the increase in our needs, which is nothing other than the feeling of dignity, provides a natural limit …

11. T.284 "A Note on Economic and Social Harmonies" (c. early 1850)↩

Source

T.284 (1850.??) Undated note by Bastiat on the "Economic and Social Harmonies" found among his papers (c. June 1845). Ronce, pp. 227-8. It can also be found quoted in Fontenay's "Notice" in OC1 (1862) and the Foreword to the 2nd ed. of Economic Harmonies (1851). 2008

Editor's Introduction

It is hard to know exactly when Bastiat thought he had the ability to write a major treatise on economic and social theory, but we do know that from quite early on he thought one needed to be written. The origins of his treatise on economics, Economic Harmonies , will be discussed in greater detail in CW5 (forthcoming), so our remarks here will be limited.

It seems that by the beginning of 1846, when he was appointed to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, after a year of significant success in entering the world of the Parisian political economists he no doubt felt he was at long last a "real" economist and had the ability to write a major treatise. 2009

Why he thought one (or more) volumes of a new theoretical treatise needed to be written is a longer story which goes back to the late 1820s when he and his friend Félix Coudroy were discussing in earnest the writings of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer 2010 who had a profound impact on their thinking. Bastiat had discovered the writings of the two Restoration liberals in the Revue encyclopédique and eagerly reported this to Félix in a letter. 2011 They then began reading copies of Comte and Dunoyer's journal Le Censeur européen (1817-1819) in which they took the economic theories of J.B. Say and the political ideas of Benjamin Constant and wove them into a new form of classical liberalism which had a social component which involved notions of class, exploitation, and the relationship between the mode of production and political culture. They called this the "industrialist theory" of society 2012 which they explored in considerable depth in a number of works which appeared in the 1820s and 1830s, most notably Dunoyer's L'Industrie et la morale considérées dans leurs rapports avec la liberté (1825) and Comte's Traité de législation, (1826) and Traité de la propriété (1834).

Bastiat wanted to do something similar to the economic theory of his own day by using the ideas of Say, Constant, Comte, and Dunoyer to study "all forms of freedom" in a very ambitious research project on liberal social theory. This new synthesis, "un sujet plus vaste" (a much larger subject), 2013 he would call "Social Harmonies." In another letter to Richard Cobden on 18 August, 1848 he explained that he wanted to "first of all to set out the true principles of political economy as I see them, and then to show their links with all the other moral sciences." 2014 And in a late letter to Casimir Cheuvreux (14 July 1850) he stated "When I said that the laws of political economy are harmonious, I did not mean only that they harmonize with each other, but also with the laws of politics, the moral laws, and even those of religion." 2015 And finally, in his "Draft Preface" to the Economic Harmonies (fall 1847) he said he wanted to show how "All forms of freedom go together. All ideas form a systematic and harmonious whole, and there is not a single one whose proof does not serve to demonstrate the truth of the others." 2016

An early reference to this elaborate project can be found in a letter he wrote to his dear friend and neighbour Félix Coudroy in Mugron on 5 June, 1845, soon after his arrival in Paris. The use of the word "we" suggests that Bastiat regarded Félix as a kind of co-author: 2017

If my small treatise, Economic Sophisms , is a success, we might follow it with another entitled Social Harmonies . It would be of great use because it would satisfy the tendency of our epoch to look for organizations and artificial harmonies by showing it the beauty, order, and progressive principle in natural and providential harmonies. 2018

The fragment we are reproducing here was probably written after the appearance of the first volume of the Economic Harmonies in January 1850, as he expresses frustration with the order in which he had originally planned to arrange the chapters and hopes he can rectify this problem in a future edition. Of course, he did not live long enough to do this.

From his scattered remarks in his correspondence (interestingly mostly written to non-economists like Félix Coudroy and Richard Cobden) and elsewhere we can piece together a rough outline of what he had in mind. He wanted to follow up the success of his Economic Sophisms with another work to be called "Social Harmonies." Whereas the former took a "negative" perspective in that it "demolishes" false economic arguments, the latter would take a "positive" point of view in that it would "build" a new theory of how societies functioned as a whole. 2019 After writing a couple of articles on competition and population theory in 1846 which would late appear as chapters in the first volume of Economic Harmonies , 2020 he began work on it in earnest in the fall of 1847 when he gave some lectures at the Taranne Hall in Paris when he also probably wrote a touching "draft preface" in the form of an ironic letter to himself. In this letter he chastises himself for being too preoccupied with only one aspect of freedom, namely free trade or what he disparagingly called this "single crust of dry bread as food," and having neglected the broader picture. In several letters 2021 he refers to his project as a multi-volume study of "social harmonies" which would include a social, legal, and historical aspect, in addition to the economic. 2022 The plan was to devote one volume to the basic theory of social harmony broadly understood, 2023 before devoting another volume to one aspect of this larger whole, namely the economic dimension, 2024 and then at least one volume to the "disturbing factors" which disrupted social harmony. 2025 The latter volume would be a study of the "disharmonies" which resulted from the upsetting of the natural harmony of voluntary and non-violent human interaction by "disturbing factors" (les causes perturbatrices) such as war, slavery, and legal plunder. In other words, this volume would be "The History of Plunder" he had also planned to write.

The volume on "The History of Plunder" was especially dear to him. In a note at the end of the "Conclusion" to ES1 his French editor Paillottet tells us that:

The influence of plunder on the destiny of the human race preoccupied him greatly. After having covered this subject several times in the Sophisms and the Pamphlets, 2026 he planned a more ample place for it in the second part of the Harmonies , among the disturbing factors. Lastly, as the final evidence of the interest he took in it, he said on the eve of his death: "A very important task to be done for political economy is to write the history of plunder. It is a long history in which, from the outset, there appeared conquests, the migrations of peoples, invasions, and all the disastrous excesses of force in conflict with justice. Living traces of all this still remain today and cause great difficulty for the solution of the questions raised in our century. We will not reach this solution as long as we have not clearly noted in what and how injustice, when making a place for itself amongst us, has gained a foothold in our customs and our laws." 2027

Because he was so pressed for time as his health rapidly failed during 1849-50 he decided to focus on one aspect, the "economic harmonies", and leave the others to another time. In a burst of intense activity over the summer of 1849 in Louis XIV's old hunting lodge Butard in the woods west of Versailles (which had been made available to him to write in peace and quiet by his benefactors Hortense and Casimir Cheuvreux) he was able to finish the first part of Economic Harmonies with 10 chapters which was published in January 1850. 2028 He wrote to Félix in January 1850 soon after volume one had appeared, saying:

Now I would ask the heavens to grant me one year to write the second volume, which has not even been started, after which I will sing the "Nunc dimittis." 2029

But he continued to be (or allowed himself to be) distracted with other projects during his final year such as the pamphlet Plunder and Law (May 1850), The Law (June 1850), and What is Seen and What is Not Seen (July 1850). 2030 After his death on Christmas Eve 1850 his friends Prosper Paillottet and Fontenay assembled from his papers a more complete edition of the Economic Harmonies (with 15 additional chapters), along with a list of chapters he had planned for the additional volumes.

The other volumes were never written.

Text

I had originally thought to begin with an exposition of the Economic Harmonies and as a result to treat only purely economic subjects, such as value, property, wealth, competition, wages, population, money, credit, etc. Later, if I had had the time and the energy, I would have called the reader's attention to a much larger subject, the Social Harmonies . It is here that I would have talked about human nature , the driving force of society , 2031 responsibility , solidarity , etc. … Having conceived the project in this fashion I had commenced work on it when I realised that it would have been better to merge rather than to separate these two different kinds of approaches. But then logic demands that the study of mankind should precede that of economics. However, there was not enough time: how I wish I could correct this error in another edition!… 2032

12. T.250 "Comments at a Meeting of the Political Economy Society on the Limit to the Functions of the State" (Part 2)" (10 Jan. 1850)↩

Source

T.250 (1850.01.10) Bastiat's comments on the limits to the functions of the state (part 2) at a Meeting of the PES (Séance de 10 jan. 1850). In "Chronique," JDE, 15 Jan. 1850, T. XXV, pp. 202-205; also ASEP (1889), pp. 94-100. Not in OC. [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

This is the nineth record of eleven which we have of Bastiat attending one of the regular monthly meetings of the Political Economy Society. See the Editor's Introduction to the first one, above pp. 000, for more details.

The topic for the second time in as many months was on establishing limits to the power of the state. The stenographer of the meeting expresses some frustration that the previous conversation had got sidetracked given the complexity of the topic and the range of views of the participants. They would return to the same topic at the next meeting of the Society.

The Polish economist Louis Wolowski argued for expanded state activity in the areas of insurance and land credit which he thought the states in Germany and Poland handled very well. M. Hovyn-Tranchère was an ally of Bastiat's in that he wanted a much more restricted sphere of activity for the state and thought that socialist ideas were not limited to small groups of activists like Louis Blanc in the Luxembourg Palace but had spread to many, perhaps most of the Deputies in the Chamber. Even so-called conservatives in the Chamber make unnecessary concessions to socialist ideas. Bastiat previously had made the same argument in Protectionism and Communism (January 1849) 2033 where he pointed out how much of socialist thinking had been accepted by conservative advocates of tariff protection and subsidies for industry.

Molinari was not present at this meeting physically but his recent work Evenings at Saint Lazarus Street (September 1849) had probably sparked these discussions in the first place. He would later argue that there was a distinction between "socialism from below" and "socialism from above." Like Bastiat, he thought the conservative elites who controlled the French state and got enacted policies of tariff protection and subsidies for industry and agriculture were a form of "socialism" which was similar to the demands of Blanc and others for subsidies for the employed and the working class. The former he called "socialisme d'en haut" (socialism from above) because the conservative elites wanted to use the power of the state to benefit themselves and their allies; the latter he called "socialisme d'en bas" (socialism from below) because Louis Blanc and the agitators in the socialist Clubs wanted to use the power of the state to benefit themselves and their allies. 2034

Bastiat entered the debate with objections to a state run insurance business as well as "Peoples Banks" like the ones advocated by the socialist-anarchist Proudhon. The remainder of the discussion covered topics such as the nature of public goods (although they did not use this term), such as education, the issuing of money, and public security, and whether or not they should be provided privately or by the state. Horace Say concluded that the determining factor was whether or not the state provided these services "better" than private industry. The President of the Society, Charles Dunoyer, warned those present that there were some economists, like Molinari, who wanted to reduce the size of the state "to nothing", but they were mistaken since, even if the state was strictly limited to only providing security, it necessary intervened indirectly in every aspect of life.

Text

One of the most sensitive questions that one can examine, one which at the same time applies to political economy and all the other sciences, including that of political philosophy, has been touched upon, and several other matters treated in depth, at the previous meeting of the Political Economy Society. 2035

Already on more than one occasion, at the insistence of some members, this question has been made the order of the day, but the conversation constantly ended up in a digression or (focused) on one particular case, such as (state) assistance (for the poor), expropriation (of private property) on the grounds of public utility, etc. This time, although some members who took part in this interesting discussion took pleasure in (pursuing) some particular questions, such as the state monopoly of insurance, land credit, as well as others, were happy to see that the problem was frankly taken up, probed, dug into, clarified, and even partly resolved.

To begin, the floor was given to M. Wolowski, 2036 Representative of the People, who would like to expand the functions of the State and to make it grease the wheels of the administration and take advantage of (state) centralisation to (introduce) a better system of insurance, and to establish in France institutions of land credit such as that which have been established in Germany and Poland. M. Wolowski thinks that it would be (both) useful and advantageous for the State, while not becoming involved in the operations of banking itself, to be able to centralise the payment of interest on land debt and mortgages, the repayment of this debt, and to provide a guarantee for the paper which covers these debts and mortgaged property. In addition he thinks that the State can be usefully employed in the organisation of retirement savings banks because it will inspire the greatest confidence possible for bank transfer payments and provide the greatest security for the payment of retirement pensions.

In doing all this. M. Wolowski believes that (the State) can act without (using) force against anyone, and (should) act only by making (these) facilities open in such as way as to stimulate and enrich the planning of the citizens, and at the same time removing parasitical jobs from the body politic. The Honourable Representative thinks that, although our country is too given to state intervention, and he is fearful every time this intervention (is used to regulate) the production of wealth, he finds that it (intervention) is advantageous in all those institutions whose purpose is the preservation of this wealth.

M. Hovyn-Tranchère 2037 put on trial the mania for State intervention in general. He had in mind for good reason (the example of) socialism pure and simple; and he showed that between the economic theories of the Luxembourg Palace 2038 and many of those men who belonged to the parties most opposed to them there was no more difference than logic pushed to its extreme by the revolutionaries of the kind we have just mentioned, and that (logic) which is incompletely (followed) by the others. State intervention is the scourge of our day; M. Hovyn-Tranchère believes that we have to fight it everywhere and to the bitter end, and that at the present moment it is even dangerous to halt the discussion at (more) specialised topics where there might perhaps be some advantage in letting the State intervene more or less.

Directing our attention to the matter of land credit, M. Hovyn-Tranchère, said with good reason that the numerous illusions which are floating about concerning this matter (and which have been entertained by many members of the Constituent Assembly, notably by the Agriculture Committee, (on this see the very surprising report by M. Flandin), 2039 have no other cause than ignorance of the most elementary principles of political economy. After some reflection on this, the Honourable Representative thinks that the greatest and sole service which could be given to (the system of) land credit and to indebted land owners is to facilitate the sale of (their) goods and their bankruptcy by reducing the property transfer tax.

This subject naturally led the Honourable Member to speak about the present state of eduction which he judged by the fruits which they bear, namely with the greatest harshness. The majority of men who become active in political affairs make concessions to socialism. They speak so eloquently about "order" and "liberty;" they demonstrate their courage but leave no trace of their passage. Since the level of understanding and public morality is getting lower, the Honourable Member concluded that if the tree has produced such fruit for such a long time then it is maggot ridden and it is time to cut it down.

As his general conclusion M. Hovyn-Tranchère thinks that the men charged with the administration of the country ought to stop abruptly and immediately going down the path which intervention is taking us to our ruin.

M. Bastiat spoke along the same lines as M. Hovyn. It is precisely the progress made by the insurance industry which shows what kind of a future (the principle of) (state supported) association has, and the danger that it would have (posed) had the State seized control of this branch of human activity; it would have found its progress ipso facto halted and paralysed, and would have never made any progress if, from the beginning, the State had intervened with its shackles and its bureaucratic practices. He finds the same arguments (apply) to the development of workers' self-help banks, 2040 and he insisted especially on this point that the State by intervening halts individual activity, gets in the way of social action, and weakens the energy which drives the human species to improve and develop itself. M. Bastiat only recognises and accepts the utility of State intervention in the enforcement and guarantee of security, things which require the use of force.

The Honourable Member (Bastiat) opposed a point made by M. Wolowski by arguing that the State had even less (reason) to involve itself in the preservation of wealth than in its production, since it required more moral strength, foresight, and individual energy to keep what one had (acquired) than to earn it.

M. Cherbuliez 2041 suddenly entered the conversation by asking what could be a solution to the problem posed by the Political Economy Society, namely (to identify) the general principles, so to speak the higher and governing principles, by means of which it would be possible to determine whether a given function of the State was within the purview of the government or whether it ought to be left to private industry.

By analysing State activity (in this way), M. Cherbuliez thinks that it includes three things: the unity of its goal, the unity of its management, and the bringing together of the force needed to achieve this goal.

By testing the (issues) of security and education against this principle he showed that in the case of security there was necessarily unity of purpose and unity of management for all members of the society, (since) everyone was interested in having order maintained and justice provided in the same manner; and finally in order to achieve this result, that is was essential that society gather together all its forces. It is not the same for education. Here, the unity of purpose does not exist; citizens are catholics, protestants, jews, etc., believers and non-believers; there are a thousand ways open to them to provide education for their children, and the unity of management simply leads to tyranny for education, and for learning under this bastard (of a ) standard under which we now groan.

M. de Colmont, 2042 continuing the discussion on the topic of finding a general principle, thought that the activity of government ought to be brought to bear in the defence of all interests, and be restricted to the maintenance of all liberties and all faculties, expressions which are, so to speak, synonyms. It is this which should occupy the administration of justice and the levying of taxes which this task requires. This is why the government, led by the way things are, has to retain the monopoly of the issuing of money, since there are advantages and security for everyone that this issuing of money be confined to its sole care. It is the same for the Postal Service and all (State) functions where it is recognised that State action is indispensable to maintain the full exercise of the liberties and faculties of every person.

In the eyes of M. (Horace) Say, the most practical criterium for judging if a function ought to be reserved to the State, or to be forbidden to it, is this: Does the State do better or worse than private industry? For example, by analysing labour and the development of (mutual) Benefit Societies M. Say showed that the State would never have been able to avoid the difficulties which this industry faced; that it would never have been able to assess the risks; and that it would never have been able to know how to combat the false declarations and claims with the same skill as the Companies driven by private interest. It is quite the opposite with security, concerning which it is impossible to do better than to place a part of (the State's) revenue in common, so that officers of an association which has been organised in the general interest 2043 can guarantee us security, justice, order, and the freedom of working, consuming, bequesting, giving (away) our goods, and exchanging with whomever it seems in our interest (to do so). It goes without saying that in several of these matters the State in no way achieves its goal, and that liberty is still strangely unknown to it.

M. Coquelin 2044 recalled a general principle which he had already expressed in a previous discussion. 2045 According to him, the State must intervene in matters of security and justice; it alone, soaring above all (human) activities like a Mount Sinai, can guarantee liberty and competition which are the life (blood) of all industries. But below this Mount Sinai, M. Coquelin allows no exceptions (to the principle of competition), not even that of the railways, which he does however appreciate might cause some people to hesitate.

Before closing the meeting, the President (of the Society) M. Charles Dunoyer was keen to make one observation of some usefulness, especially for those 2046 who might conclude from the general tendency of economists to reduce the functions of the State, that their intention would be to reduce it to nothing. He said that the simplest government, one which only looked after guaranteeing security, justice, liberty, the property of all citizens, would still necessarily intervene in all human activity; that it would intervene more than ever only in a legitimate manner, to pass good laws which would suppress everything which was bad and improper, as well as to (enforce) the application of these laws. It is not a small service, for example, to provide justice; today it (this service) is only provided in a very incomplete manner, and it is only by including it in its great and good area of specialization that the State will be able to perfect its activity, to better guarantee security, to better help liberty and equality triumph among mankind, and to better serve civilisation.

With the observation by M. Joseph Garnier that this discussion had led to the production of several (general) principles which needed to be thought about, gone into (more detail), and compared, the Society decided that it would take up this matter again at a future meeting. 2047

13. T.313 "Speaks in a Discussion in the Assembly on Public Education" (6 Feb. 1850)↩

Source

T.313 [1850.02.06] "Speaks in a Discussion on Public Education". Short speech to the National Legislative Assembly, 6 Feb. 1850, CRANL, vol. 5, p. 386. Not in OC. CW4

Editor's Introduction

This is the 14th of eight speeches and seven other shorter contributions Bastiat gave in the Chamber between May 1848 and February 1850. See the Editor's Introduction above, pp. 000 for more details.

It was his second last appearance in the Chamber and it was a discussion he very much wanted to participate in as the freedom of education was very dear to his heart. His appearances were limited because of his worsening health, so he published a long pamphlet, Baccalaureate and Socialism , 2048 which he could distribute to the other Deputies in lieu of giving a long speech in the Chamber.

Under discussion was the second reading of the Law concerning Public Education which was held on the 5 February 1850 session. 2049 It would eventually lead to the passage of the Falloux Law of 15 March 1850. 2050 There were four issues in dispute, who should run the schools, who should set the curriculum, who should teach in the schools, and how the schools would be funded. The two main players were the State and the Catholic Church which had traditionally played the leading role in education. The result of the Falloux law was to allow members of the Church to teach without needing diplomas issued by the government University but under government supervision, requiring secular schools to employ teachers with government issued diplomas, and allowing the expansion of private secondary schools. Liberals like Bastiat got squeezed out of the debate as they objected to both the increased state funding and control of schools.

The President of the Assembly André-Marie Dupin summed up the state of play as a complex discussion of a bill which had scores of amendments which were encapsulated in three different bundles of amendments put forward by the conservative Pierre Saint-Beuve, 2051 the radical republican Victor Richardet, 2052 and Bastiat in the middle. Bastiat's specific amendments (the President said there were 10) are unclear as they are not listed in the Chamber's public record but there is evidence that the key issue was the removal of the phrase "by (having) a bachelor's diploma (of education)" from the proposed law setting the conditions that would allow someone to exercise the profession of a teacher in either public or private schools. This is an attempt by Bastiat to remove one of the key conditions by which the state, i.e. the state University which set the curriculum and issued the diplomas, could control education by only permitting those who had a state issued diploma to teach either public or private schools.

The radical M. Richardet's counter-proposal consisted of 6 articles the aim of which was the absolute liberty of education. 2053 They were:

Art. 1: Education is completely free.

2. All decrees, laws, ordinances, memoranda, and legislative provisions whatsoever, concerning education are revoked.

3. No restrictive or preventive law of any kind will be imposed upon education, which is one of the fundamental, inalienable, and imprescriptible rights of all citizens.

4. All citizens engaged in education will be able to associate, organise, and administer (their affairs) freely as they judge it convenient, so that they can offer to families the conditions of morality, capacity, and improvement (required for) their instruction and method (of teaching).

5. Local Communes will only impose on their schools municipal regulation of health and public morals.

6. All infractions will by judged by regular courts.

For some reason, Bastiat found Richardet's proposals too extreme and he thus tried to steer a middle course between Saint-Beuve's establishment position and Richardet's.

Text

Monsieur President: 2054 I ask if the amendment has support?

From the Left: Yes! Yes!

(M. Bastiat goes up to the Lectern.)

Monsieur President: Monsieur Bastiat has the floor.

Monsieur Bastiat: Citizen Representatives, you have just rejected in succession two counter-proposals, one which proposed a system of liberty even greater than the one contained in my proposal, since I, by conforming to the Constitution, sought to organise the method of monitoring (it); the other proposal by Saint-Beuve which seems to me to more closely approach the Committee's proposal since it keeps the (government) University and thinks that it is compatible with liberty.

My proposal, in positioning itself between these two extremes, by adhering to the (principles) of the Constitution in all its provisions, which states that education is free under certain moral and physical conditions and is subject to supervision by the State, as I said (before) by positioning itself between these two extremes, it appears to me that it will have no chance of being passed by this Assembly. Therefore, I give up (my right) to speak on it any further and I reserve the right to take the floor and speak on one of the articles of the Committee's proposal concerning the liberty of education, not from the perspective of the people concerned, but on the subject matter and the method of education (Calls of "Very good".) 2055

Monsieur President: Now that will bring us back to the real amendments (under discussion). You can distribute them again and draft them differently …

14. T.314 "Speaks in a Discussion in the Assembly on a Plan to give money to Workers Associations" (9 Feb. 1850)↩

Source

T.314 [1850.02.09] "Speaks in a Discussion on a Plan to give money to Workers Associations". Short speech to the National Legislative Assembly, 9 Feb. 1850, CRANL, vol. 5, p. 452. Not in OC. CW4

Editor's Introduction

This is the 15th (and last) of eight speeches and seven other shorter contributions Bastiat gave in the Chamber between May 1848 and February 1850. See the Editor's Introduction above, pp. 000 for more details.

After this appearance in the Chamber Bastiat took a leave of absence and never returned. He would die in Rome on Christmas Eve 1850.

The speech covers a technical matter concerning the duty of the government to pay promptly money it had promised to a worker's association. As a result of the government's delay in paying, the workers were forced into great hardship and were close to bankruptcy. Although Bastiat says he was opposed to the government giving taxpayer's money to any kind of association, he did believe that the principle of association was such an important one that it should do nothing to impede or hamper it in any way. He didn't want the failure of this particular association, which was the fault of the government, to be blamed by the workers and their socialist friends on "the principle of association" itself.

Text

Discussion of a proposed law granting the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce a credit of 1,202,513 fr. 06 c. from (the budget) for fiscal year 1849, which was not spent by the end of fiscal year 1848, which had (allocated) 3 million francs for the benefit of some workers associations.

M. President: 2056 Does anyone wish to speak against the proposal?

I will remind the Assembly once again that here it is a matter of a grant and that the Government and the Commission (of Labour) ask that we act urgently on it. As a result, before we begin the discussion, and the Assembly has (already) decided that it will begin doing so immediately, I must consult the Assembly on the matter of its urgency.

A Member (of the Assembly): Monsieur Bastiat, speak about its urgency!

M. President: M. Bastiat has the floor on the matter of its urgency.

M. Bastiat: Citizens, I have only a few words to say and they are precisely on the matter of its urgency.

I wish to bring to the attention of the Assembly that it cannot not immediately vote in favour of the measure which is being requested, without compromising the honour and the reputation of France.

It is not a matter of a sum which it can allocate at its will. It is rather a sum which it has already allocated by a signed act of law.

We are in the same situation now as we were some time ago concerning Montevideo. 2057 Then, we had a serious matter to discuss, the Assembly voted on it; but reserved for another day the discussion of the main question.

(Here) we have a number of workers association, one of which we have promised to give a (certain) sum (of money), some capital, which it requires to operate. This capital should have been distributed to them in four or five payments. Well, what happened? The law was passed and notarised and an amount was due to be paid to the account of the workers. They had undertaken certain commitments, they made some purchases, while expecting to cover their expenditures with the money they expected to receive. But what happened? As a result of the failures of our accounting system, these unfortunate people were in arrears within four months. They have been obliged to sell their clothes, their furniture, and their tools, in order to keep their business afloat. They were sued in court, declared bankrupt, but in all truth it is the State which is bankrupt with respect to them.

I ask you Messieurs, if we ought to leave them in this position? I believe the question is extremely serious, not only regarding these (particular) individuals, but regarding associations (in general). As far as I am concerned, I have complete faith in the principle of association, which is tied up with society itself, and which ought to develop with it; but I am not a supporter of (public) funds which are given to associations at taxpayer expence. But I believe that there would be nothing more disastrous, when all is said and done, than if the State failed to meet its commitments, because then all the prejudices, all the preconceptions which we have to combat and will have to fight with so much difficulty (in the future), will (continue to) exist and will (grow) in strength. If associations fail we will not be able to say that it was the fault of (a) principle, rather (it was) the fault of the Government. Concerning what I have said, I challenge any manufacturer to withstand what these poor unfortunate (workers) had to cope with. They did it as a result of their great faith in the principle of association. They wrote to me and said "We will sell everything including the shirt off our backs rather than sacrifice this principle for which we are the Apostles." There they were for four months in this situation with an authorisation for a payment which had been approved by (our) notaries.

I say that, in these circumstances, it is impossible that the Assembly would reject (the bill's) urgency.

M. Manuel: 2058 There is no urgency. Article 17 states the opposite!

M. President: There is a difference in the delay in (its) promulgation, as a result the matter of its urgency can be agreed to. I consult the Assembly on the matter of its urgency.

(Its urgency is agreed to.)

15. T.251 "Comments at a Meeting of the Political Economy Society on the Limits to the Functions of the State (Part 3)" (10 Feb. 1850)↩

Source

T.251 (1850.02.10) Bastiat's comments on the limits to the functions of the state (part 3) at a Meeting of the PES (Séance de 10 fev. 1850). In "Chronique," JDE, T. XXV, no. 107, 15 fev., 1850, pp. 202-5; also ASEP (1889), pp. 100-5. Not in OC. [CW4]

Editor's Introduction

This is the tenth of eleven records we have of Bastiat attending one of the regular monthly meetings of the Political Economy Society. See the Editor's Introduction to the first one, above pp. 000, for more details.

This is the third and final discussion held by the Political Economy Society on the topic of the limits of the functions of the state. The two previous ones had been held on 10 October 1849 and 10 January 1850. 2059 Bastiat was present at all three which was unusual as he had missed many others because of his failing health or parliamentary duties. He had attended meetings intermittently beginning in October 1848 until the October of 1849 when he attended five in row. Immediately prior to that he had missed four in row over the summer of 1849 when he was secluded in the Butard hunting lodge just outside Paris working franticly to finish the first volume of Economic Harmonies . Once that was completed he had more time to attend and the subject matter seemed to interest him more, namely the three sessions on the proper limits to state functions, one on peace and disarmament, and one on his soon to be published book.

On the question of how limited the powers of the state should be the Society seemed to be split into four camps. At the furthest extreme was Gustave de Molinari's whose book Evenings on Saint Lazarus Street which was published in September provoked the first meeting on this topic in October. He did not attend any of the sessions as he was universally criticised for his advocacy of the private provision of all public goods, including police protection and national defence. Next to him, with an "ultra-minimalist" view of state functions was Bastiat and Hovyn-Tranchère who believed the state should limit itself strictly to protecting the liberty and property of citizens and providing only a very few public goods such as water supply, rivers, and managing the state-owned forests. The bulk of the members of the Society seemed to be supporters of a limited state along the lines defined by Adam Smith, namely, police and defence, and a broader range of public goods than the "ultra-minimalists" like Bastiat wished to allow, such as the delivery of letters and issuing currency. The fourth group was a heterogenous group of members such as the economist Wolowski and various lawyers and politicians who thought the government should be involved in providing subsidised land credit, savings banks, and other services to citizens because it could do so better than private enterprise. 2060

The final meeting on this topic is unusual in that it opens with an essay that one of the core members of the Society, Ambroise Clément, had written and the JDE had published on "The Rational Duties of Political Authority" in that month's issue which presents the consensus limited state perspective of the majority of the members. The topics covered in the meting include Michel Chevalier's argument that it was a mistake to set down in theory specific limits to state power when, as the English and Americans had shown with respect to public works like canal building and state colleges, that expedience was a better principle to follow. Bastiat countered by saying that the English free traders had always sought out the underlying principles behind what they advocated and this made them the radical force that that they were to become. He then argued that when the state provided services it harmed the consumer by forcing them to pay a fixed price for the good or service being sold. The Supreme Court lawyer Charles Renouard came up with the interesting argument that the state should not only avoid doing too much but also attempt to avoid doing harm, in a kind of political "Hippocratic oath" for politicians. There was also some discussion about how many people in France actually worked for the state and what impact this had on recent French politics.

Text

We are publishing (in this issue) a well-researched article by our colleague (Clément) 2061 on the fundamental question of the limit to the reasonable functions of (political) authority, with which the Political Economy Society concerned itself in its last two meetings.

We summarized the substance of the ideas which were expressed on this tricky subject in the meeting of 10 January, and we sketched in just a few words the opinions of the Members who spoke at the last meeting, according to the resumé of the previous discussion which was presented by M. Joseph Garnier, upon the invitation of the President M. Dunoyer.

M. Michel Chevalier established that in principle the solution to the problem posed (by the Society) was only found in an ideal (world) which civilisation would gradually reach; this ideal world consists of a maximum of liberty granted to the citizens and of a minimum of functions reserved for the government. But it is difficult to specify what this maximum and this minimum are, since they depend on the potential of individual industry, the aptitudes of citizens, and the energy of society. It is even necessary that we give up the desire to formulate these limits; and to imitate the English and Americans who, every time they had to get the State to intervene in large enterprises, did not dream of turning their "conduct of the moment" into a general system, (but) left it as a measure of expediency . 2062

When it was a question of the Erie canal, 2063 people were not troubled with the question of knowing whether it was worth more if the State built the canals or didn't; they asked who could do it: and as it was stated (earlier) if individuals couldn't undertake (the building) of this public utility the State intervened; but the intervention of the State was the rule of the moment, and later (private) companies were allowed to do it. Things happened the same way in England.

Furthermore, in the state of New York, they realised that there were not enough college professors, that there were not enough of them to (satisfy) the needs of the public; and the government, without establishing the principle that it would take control of education, set up a university, 2064 all the while not getting itself involved in secondary education, the need for which the free schools were fully satisfying.

In France, we have the all too frequent habit of wanting to generalise and establish some unchanging principles which apply to everything. Thus, there are those who, by turning some things into principles, have reached the conclusion that the State should never alone be responsible for the railways. In this way (too), opponents of commercial liberty have pushed their opposition to the extreme and have created this mad theory of national labour , 2065 (something) which is incompatible with all progress and all reforms.

M. Bastiat remarked that the English appeared to him to be be much more willing to take up questions of principle than M. Michel Chevalier said. When it was a question of free trade , 2066 M. Cobden and his friends at the very start went down to the basics of the doctrine and during the memorable campaign they never stopped proclaiming its legitimacy and drawing conclusions from that.

Returning to the main point of the discussion, M. Bastiat said that, since society was based upon a general exchange of services, this exchange ought to be undertaken freely and that the State, by intervening and by wishing to provide services, violated the liberty of the buyers of these services, by forcing them (the buyers) to accept them and to pay for them at a fixed price. From this he concluded once again the injustice of government intervention everywhere, except in the production of security and the administration of some common(ly) owned property, such as water supply, rivers, etc., to which some group of citizens, as a collective entity, had delegated some of its rights and powers in order to support.

M. Charles Renouard, 2067 a Councillor in the Supreme Court (Cassation) and one of the vice-presidents of the Society, recognised that the State had two duties, outside of which its intervention appeared to him to be harmful.

The first of these duties of the State was not to oppose the free development of morality and liberty by mixing itself in the affaires of its citizens; the second was to administer well what comprised the common interest, to maintain security and justice within the country, to guarantee the independence of the country, to maintain good relations with other societies across the world, and to establish a public force with sufficient men and finances to inspire respect. Beyond the fulfilling of these duties, the government (would) usurp its (proper) functions.

In an animated and thoughtful conversation M. Renouard insisted on the importance of not doing harm; assuredly, (doing) good was preferable, but in the absence of (doing) good, the absence of (doing) harm is a great good next to harm. Now, it is in abstaining more and more from seizing control of various branches of work that governments will at least stop doing a certain (amount) of harm, and will leave society to free itself from its nappies/diapers and advance towards liberty, morality, and civilisation. M. Renouard was pleased to say that taking everything into consideration mankind was steadily advancing towards progress, and that one could see this march just by considering some quite short periods of time. Society was much better (off) than it was 50 years ago, and 50 years ago it was much better than (it had been) in the time of Louis XIV, who was a great king but under whom none of us (today) would want to live.

The floor was then given to M. (Alphonse) Rodière, professor in the Faculty of Law in Toulouse and who was also teaching a free course in political economy to some students in that town. M. Rodière was currently in Paris as an examiner at the School of Law in Paris and had been invited to attend the meeting by the Society. M. Rodière remarked that there were only two logical positions (to take) in this serious matter: that of the socialists who want the State to do everything, and that of the economists who want the State to concern itself only with what is necessary or indispensable. The State ought to ensure respect for good laws, (whether) between one nation and another, or between one individual or another; it ought to maintain security, justice, the organisation of a public armed force, and to concern itself with some other related matters. At this time in France, the State has obviously gone beyond the limits of these natural functions, since there is a government employee (agent) for every 16 inhabitants 2068 , and perhaps even one for every nine if one includes the army in this average. By going to the root of the matter one can see in this fact the principle cause of the (political) spasms and the revolutions which have followed one after the other in our country.

M. Dussart, 2069 former Councillor of State, emphasised the necessity of the government in exercising its control over everything. He cited on this subject, the activity of the communal authorities who have to look after lighting, paving, running water, etc. activities which have been neglected in England, to the point where, in researching the causes of the high mortality (rate) during the cholera (epidemic), it was revealed that is some parts of London some sewers and dung pits had not been emptied for 50 years. 2070 He cited this recent law passed by Parliament which ordered an Irish land owner to "do justice to his land," that is to say to invest the necessary capital (to maintain it) or abandon it. From these and other facts, M. Dussart concluded that, without being too specific, he was (in favour of) quite extensive intervention by the State. His observations provoked several objections. As for the law on Ireland, it is doubtful whether experience has shown it to be profitable, and that this attack on the liberty of the landowners has been useful to the unfortunate people of that country.

M. Rodet, 2071 who completely supported the opinions expressed by M. Michel Chevalier, replied to M. Dussart that, (had) the system of intervention, control, and centralisation (existed then), the town of Bourges would never have been able to give Jacques Cujas a teaching position. 2072 Today the State would say to the municipal government of this town: "It is I alone who ought to teach the law." M. Rodet added that the State should only do what the Communes cannot do, and that the latter (should) only concern themselves with a few general matters which were unrelated to the work of its citizens.

M. Howyn-Tranchère closed the meeting by explaining clearly that in England and America, examples cited by M. Michel Chevalier and M. Rodet, that the principle of non-intervention was accepted; that the problem (had been) resolved in the public mind and in the government's mind; and that it was quite the opposite in our country, where as a result the principle of non-intervention had to be brought to (the public's) attention every time they strayed from it. M. Howyn remarked that, furthermore, the acts of intervention which have been cited are those of a particular State, of a "politicised" State, and not those of the State in the abstratct; while here at home intervention always comes from the central State, from the central bureaucracy.

16. T.253 "The Balance of Trade" (29 March 1850)↩

Source

T.253 (1850.03.29) "The Balance of Trade" (Balance du commerce). Written on 29 March 1850 for an unnamed journal; also published as a chapter in the pamphlet Plunder and Law (1850), pp. 54-61. [OC5, pp. 402-406.]

Editor's Introduction

The idea that France should ensure by means of legislation that it have a "positive balance of trade," that is, that it sell more goods abroad than it paid for imports, was a perennial argument used by the protectionists. Bastiat had first written against this idea in October 1845 in an article also called "Balance du commerce" which was published in the Journal des Économistes and later appeared in the First Series of his Economic Sophisms in January 1846. 2073 His target in that article was Thémistocle Lestiboudois (1797–1876) who was a Deputy from Lille (elected 1842) who supported the liberals in 1844 in wanting to end the stamp tax on periodicals but opposed them in supporting protectionism. Bastiat returned to this topic again in March 1850 in order to rebut the similar arguments put forward by the protectionist Deputy François Mauguin (1785-1852), but he was unable to speak on the floor of the Chamber because of his worsening throat condition. Instead he published this short article in an unnamed paper to make his views known. The French editor Paillottet offered this explanation in a note:

During the discussion on the general budget for expenditure for the financial year 1850, Mr. Mauguin naively set out from the rostrum the old and erroneous theory of the balance of trade. ( Le Moniteur dated 27th March). Bastiat, who had already refuted him in his Sophisms , thought it necessary to attack him again, and as his health no longer allowed him to mount the rostrum, on 29th March 1850, he sent to a daily broadsheet the reflections we are publishing here. It should be noted that he has simplified the hypothetical calculations he used to elucidate his thesis by excluding some of the elements he had used in 1845. 2074

It should be noted that Paillottet is incorrect in thinking that Bastiat had argued against Mauguin in 1845. It was Lestiboudois.

The Balance of Trade

The balance of trade is an article of faith.

We know in what it consists: if a country imports more than it exports, it loses the difference. Conversely, if its exports exceed its imports, the surplus forms its profit. This is held to be an axiom and laws are passed in line with this.

On this basis, Mr. Mauguin, 2075 complete with figures, warned us the day before yesterday that France has an export trade in which she has managed to lose 200 million every year, gratuitously and without any obligation to do so.

"In eleven years you have lost 2 billion in trade, do you understand?"

Then, applying his infallible rule to the details, he told us "In 1847, you sold 605 millions' worth of manufactured items and purchased just 152 millions' worth. You therefore earned 450 million.

You purchased 804 millions' worth of unprocessed items and sold just 114 millions' worth. You therefore lost 690 million."

This is how, with daring naivete, you draw the full consequences of an absurd principle! Mr. Mauguin has found the secret of making everyone, even Messrs. Darblay 2076 and Lebeuf 2077 , laugh at the expense of the balance of trade. This is a fine success, and I may be allowed to envy it.

Allow me to assess the merit of the rule by which Mr. Mauguin and all prohibitionists calculate profits and losses. I will do so by relating two commercial operations, which I have had occasion to engage in.

I was in Bordeaux. I had a cask of wine worth 50 francs, which I sent to Liverpool, and the Customs Service recorded in its register an EXPORT OF 50 FRANCS.

On reaching Liverpool, the wine was sold for 70 francs. My agent converted the 70 francs into coal, which was found to be worth 90 francs in the Bordeaux market. The customs Service was quick to record an IMPORT OF 90 FRANCS.

The balance of trade showed a deficit of 40 francs.

On the basis of my studies, I would always have thought that I had earned this sum of 40 francs. Mr. Mauguin has shown me that I have lost this sum and that, through me, France has lost it too.

Why does Mr. Mauguin see a loss in this? Because he assumes that all surpluses of imports over exports necessarily imply an outstanding amount that has to be paid in écus. 2078 However, in the operation I have just spoken of, one which reflects all lucrative trading operations, where is the outstanding amount to be paid? Is it thus so difficult to understand that a trader compares current prices in various markets and takes the decision to trade only when he is certain or at least is likely to see the value of his exports return at an increase? Therefore, what Mr. Mauguin calls a loss should be called a profit .

A few days after my transaction, I quite frankly regretted it; I was annoyed that I had not delayed it, for the price of wine fell in Bordeaux and increased in Liverpool so that, had I not been in such a hurry, I might have purchased at 40 francs and sold at 100 francs. To tell the truth, I believed that, in these circumstances, my profit would have been greater. Mr. Mauguin's doctrine has it that it is the loss that would have been more crushing.

My second transaction, dear Editor, had quite a different outcome.

From the Périgord, I had sent to me some truffles that cost me 100 francs. They were intended for two famous English ministers at a very high price, which I intended to convert into pounds. Alas! I would have done better to eat them myself (the truffles, I mean, not the pounds or the Tories!). All would not have been lost, as it happened, since the ship carrying them foundered on leaving the port. The Customs Service, which this time had recorded an export of 100 francs, did not have an import to record against this. 2079

Mr. Mauguin would therefore say that France has earned 100 francs, for this is the very sum by which, thanks to the shipwreck, exports had exceeded imports. If the business had had a different outcome, if it had brought me 200 or 300 francs' worth of pounds, the balance of trade would then have been unfavorable and France would have suffered a loss.

From the point of view of science, it is sad to think that all trading enterprises that result in a loss according to the traders provide a profit according to this class of theoreticians who are always speaking out against theory. 2080

However, from a practical point of view, it is even sadder, for what is the result?

Let us assume that Mr. Mauguin had the power (and, to a certain extent, he has it through his votes) to substitute his calculations and wishes for those of the traders and to give, in his words "a proper trading and production system to the country, a proper incentive to the national output," just what would he do?

All the operations consisting in purchasing cheaply within the country in order to sell at a high price abroad and converting the profit into goods that were highly sought after at home, would be abolished by law by Mr. Mauguin, for these would be the very ones in which the value of the goods imported would exceed the value of those exported.

On the other hand, he would tolerate and encourage if necessary through subsidies (taxes on the general public) all the enterprises that are founded on this basis: purchasing expensively in France in order to sell cheaply abroad, in other words, exporting what is useful to us in order to bring in things we have no use for. Thus, he would leave us perfectly free to send cheese from Paris to Amsterdam, for example, in order to import fashion goods from Amsterdam to Paris, for we may be sure that, in this operation, the balance of trade would be totally in our favor.

Yes, it is a sad, and I will even add, degrading thing that lawmakers are unwilling to let those involved take decisions and act on their own account, at their own risk and perils, in these matters. At least then, each person would be responsible for his own actions; he who makes a mistake would be punished and have to mend his ways. However, when lawmakers tax and prohibit trade, if their ideas are hopelessly wrong, this error has to become the general rule of conduct of a great nation. In France we have a great love of liberty, but not much understanding of it. Oh! Let us try to understand it better and we will not love it any the less.

Mr. Mauguin asserted with imperturbable aplomb that there is no statesman in England who does not profess the doctrine of the balance of trade. After calculating the loss that, according to him, results from our importing too much, he cried out: "If a similar table were drawn up for England she would tremble, and no member of the House of Commons would not feel his seat threatened."

For my part, I state that if someone told the House of Commons "The total value of what leaves the country exceeds the total value of what enters it," it is then that its members would feel threatened and I doubt that a single speaker could be found who dared to add: "The difference between these two figures represents a profit."

In England, everyone is convinced that it is important for a nation to receive more than it gives. What is more, they have realized that this is the ambition of all traders, and for this reason the decision has been taken to leave things alone and to allow Freedom of Trade. 2081

17. T.255 "England's New Colonial Policy. Lord John Russell's Plan" (JDE, 15 Apr. 1850)↩

Source

T.255 (1850.04.15) "England's New Colonial Policy. Lord John Russell's Plan" (Nouvelle politique coloniale de l'Angleterre. Plan de Lord John Russel), JDE , 15 April 1850, T. XXVI, pp. 8-15. [DMH]

Editor's Introduction

With the Revolution of February 1848 and the suspension of the French Free Trade Association Bastiat had directed most of his attention to politics and opposing the spread of socialist ideas over the following 16 months. He returned to his first love which was protectionism and its close connection with colonialism and war, with his big speech at the Peace Congress in August 1849 2082 and two articles published in the JDE in February and April 1850. 2083 An issue which kept coming up among some of his French critics were the motives of the British in introducing liberal reforms like the abolition of protectionism, the Navigation Acts, and slavery. The cynics believed that Britain was only introducing these reforms because it was in their material self-interest to do so. Bastiat on the other hand thought that reformers like Sir Robert Peel, Richard Cobden, and Lord Russell were genuinely committed to individual liberty.

To help persuade his critics that they had misjudged the British reformers Bastiat translated speeches by Richard Cobden (given at Bradford in early 1850) and Lord John Russell 2084 (given in Parliament in February 1850) so they could judge for themselves. We have included the speech by Russell because of Bastiat's introduction and commentary which is revealing. We have located the original transcripts of the debate in the Commons on February 8 1850 and have replaced Bastiat's translations with these originals. 2085

Text

If one were to ask oneself what economic policy in modern times has exerted the greatest influence on the destiny of Europe, perhaps one might answer, that it is the aspiration of certain people, particularly the English people, towards their colonies.

Might there exist in the world a single source which vomits on humanity so many wars, battles, oppressions, coalitions, diplomatic intrigues, hatred, international jealousy, spilt blood, displaced work, industrial crises, social prejudice, deception, monopolies, and misery of all kinds?

The first strike against the colonial system has been made voluntarily and scientifically in the very country in which it has been practiced with the greatest success and is therefore one of the greatest events which might be shown in the annals of civilisation. One would have to be deprived of the faculty of understanding the relationship between cause and effect not to see the dawn of a new era in industry, commerce, and the politics of nations.

For centuries the idea which dominated the policy of Great Britain was to have numerous colonies and to construct these colonies in such a way as to base their relationship with the mother country on "reciprocal monopoly." 2086 Now, do I have any need to state what that policy is? To seize control of a piece of territory, to break its communication with the rest of world for ever; these are acts of violence which can only be accomplished by force. It provokes reaction in the conquered country and the (other) countries which have been excluded, and it provokes resistance by the very nature of things. A nation which goes down this road puts itself by necessity in the position of being everywhere and always in the (most) wrong and of having to work without ceasing to weaken other nations.

Suppose that, when this system began, England had encountered a difficulty. Suppose that (someone) had pointed out, let us say arithmetically, that its colonies when organised in this fashion would have been a burden to it, that as a result, that its self-interest would have been to let them govern themselves, in other words, to liberate them; it is easy to see that, according to this hypothesis, the terrible effects which British power has had on the course of human events would have been transformed into an act of benevolence.

Now, it is certain that there are men in England who accept in their entirety the teachings of economic science, and demand, not out of philanthropy but out of self-interest (understood as what they consider to be the general good of England itself), the breaking of the ties that bind the Metropole to its 50 colonies.

But they have to fight against two powerful forces: national pride and the interests of the aristocracy.

The fight has begun. It belonged to Mr (Richard) Cobden to strike the first blow. We have brought to the attention of our readers the speech the illustrious reformer gave at a meeting in Bradford on 15 February. 2087 Today we are going to bring to your attention the plan adopted by the English Government, as presented by the Chief of the Cabinet Lord John Russell to the House of Commons in its sitting on 8 February last. 2088

The Prime Minister began by listing the number of English colonies. Then he discussed the principles according to which they were organised: 2089

In the first place, the object seems to have been to send out settlers from this country, and to enable them to colonise these distant islands. But, in the next place, it was [538] evidently the system of this country—as at that time it was the system of all the European countries—to maintain strict commercial monopoly in relation to its colonies. By various statutes, to which I need not further allude, several of which have been very recently under the consideration of the House, we took care that all the trade of the colonies should centre in this country; that all their productions should be sent here, and that no other nation should bring those products to this country, or carry them abroad. It was conceived that we derived great advantages from this monopoly; and Mr. Dundas, so late as 1796, speaking of the colonies, expressed the opinion, that unless the trade of our colonies was secured by us with monopoly, they would find a market for their goods elsewhere, which would be productive of great loss and detriment to the nation.

But there was another and a most remarkable characteristic attending these colonies, and this was, that wherever Englishmen have been sent, or have chosen to settle, they have carried with them the freedom and the institutions of the mother country.

With these words, Lord Russell quoted the letters patent granted by Charles I, according to which the founders of the colonies (Russell is quoting documents relating to Barbados) had the right to make laws "with the consent, assent, and approbation of the free inhabitants of the said province;" that their successors would have the same rights, as if they had been born in England, possessing "all the liberties, franchises, and privileges of this kingdom, and them to use and enjoy as liege people of England."

It is easy to understand that these two principles, namely the reciprocal commercial monopoly, and the right of the colonies to govern themselves, could not work together. The first one destroys the second, or at least it only leaves the quite illusory ability to decide petty municipal affairs, something which would have offended the prejudices concerning trade restrictions which were current in this period.

But these prejudices have faded away in public opinion. They have also faded away in legislation, as the commercial reforms achieved these past few years have shown. 2090

As a result of this reform, the English in the mother country and the English in the colonies have gone back to enjoying the freedom to buy and sell according to their respective desires and interests. The tie of monopoly has thus been broken, and commercial freedom has been achieved. Nothing any longer can oppose the proclamation of political freedom as well.

[Bastiat then continues to quote selected passages from Russell's speech in the Commons:]

… I think it is absolutely necessary that the Government and the House should determine and declare what are the principles upon which they will hereafter proceed. If, as I firmly believe, it is our duty to maintain our great and valuable colonial empire, let us see that those principles are sound which we adopt in our colonial administration; let us see that they are likely to conduce to the credit of this country, and to contribute to the happiness and prosperity of our colonies.

With regard to our commercial policy, I have already said that the whole system of monopoly is swept away. What we have in future to provide for is, that there [549] shall be no duties of monopoly in favour of one nation, and against another, and that there shall be no duties so high as to be prohibitory against the produce and manufactures of this country. I think we have a right to ask this in return for the protection which we afford to the colonies.

I now come to the question, as to the mode of governing our colonies. I think that, as a general rule, we cannot do better than refer to those maxims of policy by which our ancestors were guided upon this subject. It appears to me, that in providing that wherever Englishmen went, they should enjoy English freedom, and have English institutions, they acted justly and wisely. They adopted a course which was calculated to promote a harmonious feeling between the mother country and the colonies, and which enabled those who went out to these distant possessions to sow the seeds of communities of which England may always be proud.

… Up to 1828 there were very grave dissensions between the Ministers of the Crown in this country and the Canadian people. The Government of this country thought themselves justified in applying the taxes of Canada without the authority or consent of the inhabitants of the colony. Mr. Huskisson proposed an inquiry into that subject. Parliament, for a long time, turned its attention to the matter. Commissions were sent out; Committees were appointed; but, in the end, an insurrection broke out in Canada, and blood was shed both in the Upper and Lower Provinces. The Government of which I was a Member thought it necessary, for a time, to suspend the constitution of the colony. We afterwards proposed the union of the two provinces, and also to give the colony ample powers of legislation. In establishing that kind of government in so important a province, a question arose which, I trust, has been solved to the satisfaction of the people of Canada, although it is one which could not be solved in the same manner in a province of less importance, and of less extensive population. The popular party in Canada, proposed that they should have what they called responsible government—that is to say, that not only should there be a legislature freely elected, but that instead of what had become the custom, that the Ministry should be named by the Governor General totally irrespective of the prevailing opinions of the Legislature, they should be taken from that party in the Assembly which was supported by a majority. That plan was adopted.

… That government [551] has been conducted of late years in conformity with what Her Majesty's Ministers believe to be the opinion of the people of Canada. When Lord Elgin saw that the Ministry he had found in office had narrow majorities in the Assembly, he proposed either that they should continue in office until they were obstructed by adverse votes, or that they should dissolve the Assembly. They preferred to dissolve the Assembly. The new Assembly which was returned gave a great majority to their adversaries, and Lord Elgin placed their adversaries in office. I do not think that it would be possible to carry out more fairly, or more fully, the principle of allowing the province to manage its own affairs.

With respect, likewise, to Nova Scotia [552] and New Brunswick, no very long time ago the Executive Council was the same body as the Legislative Council, and there was no separate Legislative Council; but—I think it was when Lord Glenelg held the seals of office—a change was made, and the councillors have been chosen, if not from a particular party, in such a manner as to conciliate the opinion of the province, and to command the support of a majority of the Legislature in Nova Scotia and for New Brunswick. We have not heard of late years of those unhappy dissensions which used to prevail when the Executive Councillors of the Government found themselves in a small minority in the Assembly.

With respect to the Cape of Good Hope, there has been, of late years, a discussion with regard to the introduction of representative government. Lord Stanley had that question under his consideration; and without at all refusing the introduction of representative government, he pointed out many difficulties which had to be considered before the decision was ultimately come to. Those difficulties, and indeed every topic connected with the subject, have been discussed in the Cape by the Governor and his advisers, by the Colonial Secretary, the Chief Justice, and others, who are fully competent to form an opinion from their general knowledge of the principles of the Government, and likewise from their local knowledge of the interests of the colony; and the result is, that Her Majesty's Government have come to the decision that representative institutions shall be introduced [553] at the Cape. With respect to the representative assembly, they have adopted a franchise, into the particulars of which I shall not now enter, for the papers are in the hands of Members, enabling them to judge of the proposal; a representative assembly will be chosen by persons having a certain amount of property, and qualified in the manner which has been specified. But a question arose as to the formation of what is called in other colonies the legislative council; and, upon the whole, Her Majesty's Government came to the opinion, that, instead of imitating the constitution of Jamaica, or that of Canada, it Would be advisable to introduce into the Cape of Good Hope a council which should be elective, but elected by persons having a considerably higher qualification than that of the electors of the representative assembly. These, it was considered, might be persons who had been named by the Crown as persons of weight and influence, as magistrates and others, or persons who had been selected by municipal councils as persons entitled to the highest offices which they could confer. It is proposed that the representative assembly should have a duration of five years, and the legislative council a duration of ten years, but half to resign their seats at the expiration of five years.

… Now, with regard to Australia, the Bill which I have to ask that the Chairman should obtain leave to bring in, will propose legislation by Parliament upon that subject. The measure which I propose, and which is nearly the same as one that Was proposed last year, goes not on the [554] principle of having a council and assembly, as hitherto, in imitation of the Government of this country, has been usually the form most palatable and popular in our colonies; but it is proposed that there should be but one council, a council of which two-thirds shall be formed of representatives elected by the people, and one-third named by the Governor. The reason for adopting this proposal is, that after a great deal of deliberation, that plan was adopted some years ago, and, I think, was finally enacted by Parliament in 1842. Since that time, the scheme has been found so far acceptable to the people of New South Wales, that upon the whole, so far as we could ascertain their sentiments, they appear to prefer that form of popular government to I that which is more in analogy with the Government of this country. ["Hear, hear!" and "No!"] Well, for my part, I can only say that we have been anxious to adopt that form which was the most agreeable to the views of the colony, and that, if in New South Wales there had been a clear and prevalent opinion that it was advisable to leave their present constitution, and to adopt the form of council and assembly, the Government would have been quite ready to take that course, and that the Committee of the Council, to which this question was referred, would have proposed that constitution.

… With respect to other matters, there is a change, though not a very considerable change, in the Bill as it was first proposed last year; for we then proposed that the customs' duties which now prevail in New South Wales should be enacted by Parliament for the whole of the Australian colonies, and should be binding till they were altered by the proper authorities. We have thought that although it is a most desirable object that the customs' duties should not vary in the different Australian colonies, it is not advisable to enact that uniformity by authority of Parliament, but that it is better to leave them to settle for themselves whether they will not adopt a similar tariff for all the various parts of Australia.

… We propose that the Port Phillip district shall be separated from New South Wales, and that it should likewise have its council; and that there should likewise be introduced in Van Diemen's Land, where it has not existed before, a popular element into the Legislative Council, forming that council upon the same principle as the others, and that in South Australia there should be a similar body.

We propose, likewise, that on the proposition of two of these colonies there should be an assembly of these different Australian councils, that they should have the power of framing the same tariff for all, and that they should have various other powers which we think might be found useful, to pervade the whole of these colonies. To that body, likewise, we propose to refer the power of dealing with that question, which is so important to our Australian colonies—the price of the waste lands.

I do not know that I need enter further into the description of this Bill, because the Bill itself was in the hands of Members at the end of last Session; as I have said, there are no great alterations from what was then proposed, and in a few days I trust Members will again have the Bill in their hands, and they can canvass its contents. But I have stated enough to show that both in the North American colonies and in the Australian it is our disposition to introduce representative institutions, give full scope to the will of the people of those colonies, and thereby enable them to work their way to their own prosperity far better than if they were controlled and regulated by any ordinances that went from this country.

… With respect to New Zealand, we began very soon, in 1846, showing at least a disposition for representative institutions; showing, perhaps, too much haste in the manner in which we adopted them; but we began by enacting a Bill for the purpose of introducing representative institutions in New Zealand. The very able Governor of that colony pointed out the difference which exists between the native race of New Zealand and any of those native races with which the British people had hitherto had to deal, whether in North America, whether at the Cape of Good Hope, or whether in New Holland and Van Diemen's Land. He pointed out their capacity for civilisation; he pointed out how ill they would brook the interference and government of a small number of persons of the English race, who should have the sole legislative authority over them. His objections, when they reached this country, were felt by my noble Friend and by the Government to be founded in reason—founded in his knowledge of the people among whom he dwelt, and whom he was commissioned to govern; and we therefore proposed to suspend that constitution. The Governor now writes that he has introduced a Legislative Council in the southern part of New Zealand; he writes also that it is his opinion that at the expiration of the term fixed by Parliament, representative institutions can safely and usefully be introduced into New Zealand. Therefore, believing his opinion to be well founded, we propose only to wait for any further representations from him as to any alterations that should be made in the Act which passed with respect to New Zealand; and with regard to time, to introduce those alterations, that the constitution may be put [557] into operation at the time which has been already fixed by Parliament.

The Minister then outlined the plan which he proposed concerning Jamaica, Barbados, British Guiana, Trinidad, Mauritius, and Malta. He spoke about the repugnance which all the colonies felt about receiving convicts and concluded from that the necessity of restricting this form of punishment. 2091

As for emigration which had reached enormous proportions especially over the past few years, he was pleased to announce that the government would refrain from any intervention beyond a few subsidies and temporary assistance. "Emigration," he said, "has risen over the past three years to 265,000 people per annum." 2092 He estimated that the cost had been no less than 1,500,000 pounds sterling. 2093

[Bastiat summarises and paraphrases the following section:]

Now, I beg the House to consider how very large this emigration is. It is within 40,000 or 50,000 of what has been computed as the whole annual increase of the population of this country; and though it has been, no doubt, magnified in one or two of those years by the famine which took place in Ireland, yet I consider that as regards this first sort of emigration—namely, that which consists of labourers, and principally going to the United States and British North America—it is an emigration which we may look to see continue for many years. I believe that the means which the labouring classes have found for themselves, of transmitting money home to their relations and friends, to enable them to emigrate, when they have obtained a sufficient sum from their wages, is likely to continue, and to furnish the means of a great expenditure for the purposes of emigration.

I do not believe that the time will speedily arrive when there will be no great demands for labour in the United States and British North America. The difficulty which existed hitherto was that of finding means of transportation, and of enabling persons almost destitute here, and obtaining no demand for their labour, to get a position in other countries, where they could obtain that demand.

I do not believe that any Government scheme could have been so extensive as to effect that purpose; nor do I believe, that, if it had been so extensive, it would have effected the purpose in the same way as [564] this voluntary emigration. In the first place, if you laid out a hundred, or two or three hundred thousand pounds for that object, it would, no doubt, have been a very large sum; but I believe the sum which has been expended for the purpose, in the way I have mentioned, in one year, has been no less than 1,500,000l. sterling. Now, I believe, if you had laid out 1,500,000l., you would have found every species of abuse; you would have carried many persons from this country with false characters, and they would have been found such a curse by the United States and by our own provinces, that these countries would soon have put a stop to it, and have said—" Don't send to us the idle, the halt, and the crippled—the mere dregs of your population. If such is the character of your emigration, we must interfere and check it." That, I believe, would have been the consequence of any great plan of emigration carried on by the Government.

After a few more thoughts Lord Russel concluded as follows:

The whole result of what I have to say is, that in the first place, whatever discontent—and, in some places, well-founded discontent, it must be owned—has arisen from a transition painful to the colonists, from a system of monopoly, as regards the colonies, to a system of free trade, we ought not to attempt to go back, in any respect, from that decision, but that you shall trade with your colonies on the principle that you are at liberty to obtain productions from other countries where they may be produced better or cheaper than in the colonies, and that the colonies should be at liberty to trade with all parts of the world in the manner which may seem to them most advantageous. That, I say, must in future be a cardinal point in our policy.

The next point, I think, is, that in conformity with the policy on which you have governed your British North American colonies, you should, as far as possible, proceed upon the principle of introducing and maintaining political freedom in all your colonies. I think whenever you say political freedom cannot be introduced, you are bound to show the reasons for the exemption, and to show that the people are a race among whom it is impossible to carry out free institutions—that you must show the colony is not formed of the British people, or even that there is no such admixture of the British population as to make it safe to introduce representative institutions. Unless you can show that, I think the general rule would be that, you [566] should send to the different parts of the world, and maintain in your different colonies men of the British race, and capable of governing themselves; men whom you tell they shall have full liberty of governing themselves, and that while you are their representative with respect to all foreign concerns, you wish to interfere no further in their domestic concerns than may be clearly and decidedly necessary to prevent a conflict in the colony itself.

I believe these are the sound principles on which we ought to proceed. I am sure, at least, they are the principles on which the present Government intends to proceed, and I believe they are those which in their general features will obtain the assent and approbation of the House.

I believe not only that you may proceed on those principles without any danger for the present, but there may be questions arising hereafter which you may solve without any danger of such an unhappy conflict as that which took place with what are now the United States of America. On looking back at the origin of that unhappy contest, I cannot but think that it was not a single error or a single blunder which got us into that contest, but a series of repeated errors and repeated blunders—of a policy asserted and then retreated from [567] —again asserted, and then concessions made when they were too late—and of obstinacy when it was unseasonable. I believe that it was by such a course we entered into the unhappy contest with what were at its commencement the loyal provinces of North America. I trust we shall never again have to deplore such a contest. I anticipate indeed with others that some of the colonies may so grow in population and wealth that they may say—" Our strength is sufficient to enable us to be independent of England. The link is now become onerous to us—the time is come when we think we can, in amity and alliance with England, maintain our independence." I do not think that that time is yet approaching. But let us make them as far as possible, fit to govern themselves—let us give them, as far as we can, the capacity of ruling their own affairs—let them increase in wealth and population, and whatever may happen, we of this great empire shall have the consolation of saying that We have contributed to the happiness of the world.

It is not possible to announce the greatest things with such simplicity, and so it is that, without directly looking for it, one come across true eloquence.

18. T.256 "Comments at a Meeting of the Political Economy Society on Land Credit" (10 Apr. 1850)↩

Source

T.256 (1850.04.10) Bastiat's comments on land credit at a Meeting of the PES (Séance de 10 Avril 1850. "Chronique," JDE, 15 April 1850, T. XXVI, pp. 99-101; also ASEP (1889), pp. 109-13. [DMH] Not in OC.

Editor's Introduction

This is the eleventh and final record we have of Bastiat attending one of the regular monthly meetings of the Political Economy Society. See the Editor's Introduction to the first one, above pp. 000, for more details.

This is the last meeting of the Society Bastiat attended before his poor health forced him to leave Paris to spend the summer in his home Department taking the waters at the spa town of Eaux-Bonnes in a fruitless attempt to recover, and working on his last and perhaps best known pamphlets, The Law (June 1850) and WSWNS (July 1850). He must have been very unwell as he said very little at the meeting. He was also depressed at the poor reception his book Economic Harmonies had had among his colleagues and the unseemly delay in reviewing it in the JDE (one finally appeared in June some 6 months after it had appeared in print). 2094

The topic for this month's discussion was land credit or mortgage which had been discussed recently by various bodies such as the Agricultural Council, the Council for Agriculture, Manufacturing, and Commerce, as well as the National Assembly. The socialists had taken up the idea of government of subsidised "Peoples Banks" (most notably by Proudhon) during 1848 and 1849 as a way to alleviate the heavy indebtedness of small shopkeepers and famers and the economists had responded vigorously, with several essays by Louis Wolowski in the JDE 2095 and Bastiat's long debate with Proudhon over "Free Credit" (October 1849- March 1850). 2096

Bastiat began the debate but said very little. The discussion ranged over historical reasons why the French people had bought more land than they could pay for and the legal obstacles placed in the way of selling land easily to get out of debt. There was some support for the idea of some government intervention to guarantee fixed low mortgage payments for farmers as existed in some of the German states and Poland and how that might work in France.

Text

At this meeting, the Political Economy Society was concerned with the subject which was the order of the day at the Agricultural Congress and the Council for Agriculture, Manufacturing, and Commerce, 2097 and which the Assembly itself took up with a proposal put forward by the Honourable M. Wolowski. 2098 We wish to talk about land credit, a subject which follows naturally from that of the constitution of banks, which we treated in the previous meeting.

We don't need to say that the Political Economy Society has never confused the capability given to the land owner to borrow at his own risk, capabilities which have improperly been called "land credit," with credit for improving rural land, or credit which is similar to that given to other producers. Nor is there any need to add, concerning this or any other question which we have discussed, that the Political Economy Society has been deluded as have many others elsewhere about the wonders of land credit and of agricultural credit, such marvels which they wish the State to profit from, which French landowners in a short period could be exonerated from the 11 to 12 billion francs of mortgage debt, that the country ought to have a mass of paper wealth from compulsory sales either by forcing this criminal (thing called) money to circulate, or this tyrant of capital to produce.

If the Political Economy Society has the pleasure of proving that has never lost its mind, it sees with some satisfaction that reason is beginning to reappear as well in the public mind, concerning questions of agricultural and land credit.

M. Bastiat, 2099 Representative of the People, took the floor first and began by describing the illusions which have been generally made about the use of credit for agricultural production and showed that instead of looking for some imaginary assistance for agriculture, quite simply all that is needed is to remove the obstacles which prevent the transfer of landed property.

M. Howyn-Tranchère then brought to our attention the changes which customs have produced in the countryside, where everybody always buys too many fields in order to satisfy their need to acquire things, and (thereby) deprives themselves of the capital needed to improve the land. The Honourable Representative fears that land credit, since it is thought to be (well) organised and productive, in no way answers the needs of agriculture, and that the resources that it offers are not at all devoted to farming, but to buying yet more land. "In the end, he says, it is only necessary to look for a way to make it easier to liquidate a mortgaged property, (for example) by the sale of a part of the land separated from the rest. Now, the simplest way to get this result is to lower the taxes on transferring and conferring land titles."

M. Horace Say agreed wholeheartedly with this general idea that the co-called "organisation of land credit" was above all a matter of obstacles in our Law Codes and administration which have to be got rid of. He spoke about and explained the nature of these obstacles. First of all, he explained how the value of land has been raised by the impact of the laws (governing) the (system) of tariff protection, in such a way that the mortgage payment was in part based upon an component which was quite artificial. In the second place, partly because we have inherited the prejudices of our forebears concerning the role played by land(ed property) which for a long time was granted certain rights and benefits which have not been granted to other forms of property, and partly because over the entire revolutionary period property in land offered greater security (and) fortunes were made by acquiring land whose value increased at a greater rate as a result of the preponderance of demand. So that when all is said and done, credit today is based upon two (sources of) value which are artificial.

In the third place, all our mortgage laws have been impregnated with a spirit of feudalism and have been combined in such a way as to prevent a land owner from being evicted; without taking into account the special protection given to women and minors, who have not in fact taken advantage of it.

Fourthly, if you wish to lend or borrow using installments you come up against the code of criminal procedure with its formalities, tax requirements, and delays, which are like all the bad old practices used against the Jews, the Lombards, and the usurers, but (now) harming and hindering all lenders indiscriminately, leaving them to die of hunger in the face of a loan for which they cannot be reimbursed.

Hardship, reform, land credits, all of this (is tied to) the reduction and abolition of the following obstacles: 1. the customs laws, 2. the prejudices and other factors which encourage buyers towards land, 3. the Mortgage Code, 4. the Criminal Code of Procedure.

M. Louis Leclerc, 2100 after having fully accepted the observations of MM. Bastiat, Howyn and (Horace) Say, reminded us that in addition to all the improvements which had just been discussed, that it would be desirable to see introduced in France similar institutions to those which have operated for a long time in Poland, Silesia, and other parts of Germany, which ease the burden of the debts of the land owners and the loans made by capitalists, with the issuing of mortgage papers carrying a very low level of interest, which agriculture needs, and requiring repayment in installments over a period of 40 years.

Concerning this matter, M. Leclerc reminded us of the quite reasonable resolution made earlier this year by the 500 members of the Agriculture Congress who almost unanimously rejected (the idea of) a forced suspension of mortgage payments and the taking over of the administration of mortgage banks by the government. 2101

On the subject of these Polish and Prussian institutions, M. (Louis) Rodet, 2102 who is a member of the Chamber of Commerce, made the observation that in our country there were not the same conditions necessary for (their) success. Indeed, in Poland, in Silesia, and in Prussia landed property is still feudal, and the land owners enjoy a situation of solidarity which no longer exists in France.

M. Rodet then went into some detail about the special nature of agricultural production and revenue which comes from the land. He concluded by reminding us that in England men who have managed to acquire some capital dream of remaining a farmer, while in France the contrary is the case. It is rare for the son of a farmer, if he becomes prosperous, to continue in the same profession as his father. Here we have a fact of (local) customs which in part explains the situation of our agricultural industry.

After the meeting ended, the conversation continued among various groups who had attended. This meeting was much better attended that the previous one, which in turn had been the best attended we had (ever) seen. M. Bommart, a former Deputy and Inspector of Studies at the School of Bridges and Roads, had been invited to this meeting by the Society; as had M. Léopold Javal and M. Roger de Fontenay 2103 who had been invited by some members of the Society; and M. Giraud, a Member of the Institute, M. Vée, former Mayor of the 5th Arrondissement (in Paris), and M. de Billing, former Ambassador in Denmark, (all three of whom) had been recently nominated Members of the Society.

19. T.248 "Abundance" (summer 1850, DEP)↩

Source

T.248 (1850.??) "Abundance" (Abondance). Published as "Abondance", Dictionnaire de l'économie politique (Paris: Guillaumin, 1852), vol. 1, pp. 2-4. [OC5.7, pp. 393-401]. Paillottet states that it was written sometime in 1850, possibly in the summer or early fall, before Bastiat's departure for Italy in Sept.1850.

Editor's Introduction

Bastiat was held in such high regard by the Parisian political economists that soon after his arrival in Paris in May 1845 he was approached (presumably by the publisher Guillaumin) to assume the position of editor of their main journal, the Journal des Économistes , to replace Hippolyte Dussard (1798-1876) who was editor between 1843 and 1845. Bastiat agonized over the decision 2104 but turned it down because of the low pay and because he had his heart set on founding a French Free Trade Association modelled on Richard Cobden's Anti-Corn Law League. Joseph Garnier was eventually offered the position which he accepted and held for 10 years.

Another important and influential role Bastiat might have been expected to play was on the editorial committee of Guillaumin's massive project to publish a compendium of political economy, the Dictionnaire de l'Économie Politique (Dictionary of Political Economy). After the upheavals of 1848-49 Guillaumin decided in early 1849 to use his considerable editorial and organizational skills to begin planning what he thought would be an unanswerable riposte to the challenge posed by socialism. With funding organized by Guillaumin and with Charles Coquelin as the main editor, the aim was to assemble a summary of the state of knowledge of liberal political economy with articles written by leading economists on thematic topics, biographies of key historical figures, bibliographies of the most important books, and economic and political statistics. The result was a two volume, nearly 2,000 page, double-columned encyclopedia of political economy which appeared in 1852-53. 2105

Bastiat had been a major figure in Guillaumin's earlier anti-socialist campaign in 1848 with the flood of anti-socialist pamphlets which the economists produced. Bastiat wrote about 12 which were advertised as Bastiat's "Petit pamphlets" (Little Pamphlets). 2106 This first anti-socialist campaign was designed to counter "socialism from below" (as Molinari put it) 2107 and this second assault, from the ramparts of the DEP, was designed to counter "socialism from above," i.e. the socialist ideas held by French manufacturers, President Louis Napoléon, and the bureaucracies which controlled the French economy. Guillaumin appointed Charles Coquelin as the senior editor and he was a good choice as he had considerable organisational skills and a near photographic memory. Around Coquelin were a handful of the most important economists who wrote the key articles, such as Molinari (who wrote 29 including on such key topics as "Céréales" (Grain), "Liberté du commerce, liberté des échanges" (Free Trade), "Paix, Guerre" (Peace and War), "Tarifs de douane" (Tariffs), "Travail" (Labour), "Union douanière" (Customs Union), "Usure" (Usury)); Joseph Garnier who wrote 28; Horace Say 29; Ambroise Clément 22; and Courcelle-Seneuil 21. Coquelin wrote a massive 70 articles before he died suddenly in August 1852 from a heart attack while still working on volume 2.

Given Bastiat's status among the economists he would have been expected to write as many as the others, perhaps even the flagship article on "Political Economy," 2108 but his rapidly deteriorating health in late 1848 and early 1849 meant that he was unable to play much of a role. This article on "Abundance" is the only one he was able to write for the DEP and it was probably completed sometime during the summer of 1850 when he was also racing to finish "The Law" (June 1850) and "What is Seen and What is Not Seen" (July 1850) and before he left for Italy in September under his doctor's orders. Out of respect for his contributions to French political economy, the editor's of the DEP used his pamphlet on "The Law" as the entry for "The Law" in the DEP and Charles Coquelin used large extracts from his essay on "The State" as the entry for "The State" which appeared under his name, i.e. "Ch. C." 2109 So even though he had died at the end of 1850, Bastiat's spirit very much lived on in the greatest monument to mid-19th century political economy, the formidable and authoritative DEP.

Some important concepts Bastiat dealt with in this article include the following:

the idea of "ceteris paribus" (all other things being equal) which he introduced into French political economic thought (see the glossary entry on "Cereris paribus.")
the idea that people have a hierarchy of needs which they attempt to satisfy according to how "pressing" or urgent they are, beginning with the "grosser" needs which sustain life, then other physical needs such as housing and clothing, and finally higher and more "spiritual needs" such as education and aesthetic interests.

Text

In terms of its powers of exposition, political economy is a grand and noble science. It scrutinizes the mainspring of the social mechanism 2110 and the functions of all the various organs of that marvelous living body known as human society. It studies the general laws according to which the human race is stimulated to increase in numbers, wealth, knowledge, and morality. However, by recognizing the existence of a social free will like we do the existence of an individual free will, 2111 political economy makes clear how providential laws may be misinterpreted or violated, what terrible responsibility arises from these disastrous experiments and how civilization may, as a result, be halted, set back, buried and stifled for lengthy periods.

Who would believe it? This science, so wide-ranging and high-minded in its exposition of the world, is almost reduced, when it comes to controversy and its engagement in polemic, to the thankless task of proving the following proposition, one that is so clear it almost appears puerile: "Abundance is better than scarcity."

The fact is that if the matter is examined closely, it is clear that the majority of objections and doubts raised against political economy do imply the principle that "Scarcity is better than abundance."

This is what these very popular sayings express:

"There is over-production."

"We are dying from a surfeit."

"All the markets are choked and all career opportunities blocked."

"The ability to consume cannot keep up with the ability to produce."

Take someone who is against machines. 2112 He deplores the fact that the miracles of human genius are extending his power to produce indefinitely. What is he afraid of? Abundance.

Take the protectionist. He bemoans the bounty of nature in other climes. He is afraid that France will have some share in this by way of trade and does not want the country to be free because, if she were, she would be sure to incur the calamities of invasion and flooding . 2113 What is he afraid of? Abundance.

Take the statesman. He is terrified by all the ways of satisfying needs which production is building up in the country and, since he thinks he can glimpse in the far-distant future the ghost of a revolutionary increase in well-being and a rebellious increase in equality, he imagines a world of heavy taxes, huge armies, the wasting of products on a grand scale, lavish lifestyles, and a powerful artificial aristocracy whose task, by means of their luxurious and ostentatious lives, is to solve the problem of the subversive excess of productivity made possible by human industry. What is he afraid of? Abundance.

Finally, consider the logician who, disdaining roundabout routes, goes straight to the point and advises that Paris should be burnt periodically in order to offer labor the opportunity and benefit of rebuilding it. 2114 What is he afraid of? Abundance.

How can such ideas have grown up and, it must be said, sometimes prevail, not, doubtless, in people's personal lives but in their theories and the laws they pass? For if there is one statement that appears to prove itself intrinsically, it is definitely this: "When it is a question of useful things, it is better to have them than not." And while it cannot be denied that abundance is a calamity when it relates to things that are harmful, destructive or unwelcome, such as locusts, caterpillars, vermin, vices, or noxious and polluting fumes, it cannot be any less true that it is a blessing when it concerns things that fulfill our needs and give satisfaction, objects that people want and pursue with the sweat of their brow, that they are ready to pay for with work or trade, and that are valuable, such as food, clothing, housing, works of art, the means of transport, communication, learning or entertainment, in short, everything that political economy is concerned with.

If a comparison needs to be made between civilization as it occurs in two nations or in two centuries, are not statistics employed to ascertain which of the two, in proportion to population, offers the more opportunities to earn a living, the more agricultural, industrial, or artistic products, the more roads, canals, libraries, and museums? Isn't the answer to be found, if I may express it in this way, in a comparison of consumption, that is to say, by differences in abundance ?

Perhaps it might be said that it is not enough for products to be abundant ; they also need to be distributed justly.. Nothing is truer than this. But let us not confuse matters. When we support abundance while our opponents decry it, both sides understand these words: ceteris paribus , all other things being equal, 2115 with equity in distribution being assumed to be the same.

Furthermore, it should be noted that abundance is of itself a reason for good distribution. The more abundant a thing is the less value it has, and the less value it has the more it is within the reach of all and the more people are equal with respect to it. We are all equal with regard to air because it is inexhaustibly abundant in relation to our needs. We are slightly less equal with regard to water because, since it is less abundant, it starts to incur costs. We are still less equal with regard to wheat, perishable fruit, or freshly picked produce; with regard to things that are in short supply , not having equal access to goods is always inversely proportional to their ABUNDANCE.

In reply to the sentimental scruples of our age, we would add that abundance is not just a property of a material good. Needs develop within the human race in a certain order; they are not all equally pressing and it may even be noted that their order of priority is not their order of worthiness. The grosser needs clamor to be met first, because life depends on their satisfaction and, whatever the speechmakers say, before people live with dignity they have to live. Primo vivere, deinde philosophare. 2116

From this it follows that it is the abundance of the things most apt to meet basic needs that enables the human race to make its enjoyments increasingly spiritual and rise to the realms of Truth and Beauty. It can concentrate on perfecting style, cultivating art, and delving into thought only when time and strength, as a result of progress, cease to be taken up with the requirements of physical life. Abundance, the fruit of long periods of work and patient thrift, cannot be instantaneously universal right from the very beginnings of society. It cannot be achieved at the same time over the entire range of possible production. It follows gradually, moving from the material to the spiritual levels. How unfortunate are those nations which, when external forces such as those of government endeavor to invert this order, substitute for basic but essential needs ones that are higher but premature, thus changing the natural direction of work and upsetting the balance of needs and satisfaction that guarantees social stability.

Besides, if abundance were a calamity, that would be as unfortunate as it is strange, for however simple the remedy (what can be easier than refraining from producing and destroying production?), individual opinion would never be persuaded to follow it. It is no use making speeches against abundance, over-abundance, plethora, or glut; it is no use propounding the theory of scarcity, supporting it with laws, forbidding machines, hampering, hindering and opposing trade, for all this will stop no one, not even the leaders of the chorus in favor of these harassments, from working to achieve abundance. Right around the world, you will not meet a single person whose acts do not speak out against these vain theories. You will not meet one who does not seek to make the most of his abilities, to organize them, economize on them, and improve the results they yield by making use of natural forces. You will not find one, even among those who speak out loudest against the freedom to trade, 2117 who does not act on this basis (while wishing to forbid it to others): namely, to sell at the highest possible price and buy at the lowest, with the result that the theory of scarcity that holds sway in books, journals, conversations, or parliaments and through this, in the laws, is refuted and countered by the way all the people who make up the human race, without exception, act. This is clearly the starkest rebuttal that can possibly be imagined.

But, faced with the problem of whether abundance is better than scarcity, why is it that all those who have virtually come down in favor of abundance through their actions, their way of working and trading, make themselves theoretical defenders of scarcity to the point where they mold public opinion in this direction and generate floods of restrictive and constraining laws?

This is what we still have to explain.

Basically, what we are all aspiring to is that each of our efforts should achieve the greatest possible level of well-being. If we were not social beings, if we lived in isolation, we would know of only one rule to achieve this target: to work more and more effectively , a rule that implies steadily increasing abundance.

However, because of trade and the division of labor which follows it, it is not in the first instance to ourselves but to others that we devote our work, effort, products and services. This being so, without losing sight of the rule, produce more , we have another that is more constantly present in our minds, namely, produce more value . For it is on this that the quantity of services that we need to receive from others in return for ours depends.

Now, creating more products and creating more value are not the same thing. It is very clear that if, by force or by fraud, we managed to make the particular service or item associated with our own occupation extremely scarce, we would become richer without either increasing or improving our work. For example, if a shoemaker was able deliberately to make all the shoes in the world disappear in a puff of smoke except for those in his shop or to paralyze anyone who knows how to use a shoemaker's knife or a shoehorn, he would become another Croesus; 2118 his lot would improve, not in line with the general lot of the human race but in inverse relationship to the general trend.

Here then is the complete and horrible secret behind the theory of scarcity, as revealed in restrictions, monopoly, and privileges. It does nothing more than translate and shroud in scientific language the selfish feeling that we all have deep in our hearts: competitors get in our way.

When we bring a product to the market, two circumstances are equally likely to increase its value. The first is that it will encounter a very great abundance of things for which it can be traded, namely, everything, and the other is that it will be met with a very great scarcity of all the things that are like it.

Well, neither by our own actions nor by means of the intervention of the law and the power of the state can we influence the first of these. Universal abundance unfortunately cannot be decreed; other factors are required for this, and legislators, customs officers and restrictions are powerless in the matter.

If, therefore, we wish to increase the value of the product artificially, we have to act on the other element that constitutes its value. In this case, the individual will is not as powerless. Using ad hoc legislation, arbitrary action, bayonets, chains, restrictions, punishment, and persecution, it is possible to chase away competitors and create the scarcity and artificial increase in value that is the objective of our actions.

Things being the way they are, it is easy to understand what can and has to happen in an age of ignorance, barbarity, and unfettered greed.

Each individual petitions the legislature, this intermediary of the power of the state, to create an artificial scarcity of the things that he produces, using all the means in its power. 2119 Farmers ask for wheat to be made scarce, breeders ask the same for cattle, ironmasters likewise for iron, colonists for sugar, weavers for woolen cloth, etc. etc. Each one gives the same reasons; these end up creating a body of doctrine which one could well call "the theory of scarcity;" and the power of the state makes this theory triumph through the use of iron and fire.

However, leaving aside the masses thus subjected to a regime of universal privation, it is easy to see into what cruel hoax its architects are hurling themselves and what terrible punishment awaits their unscrupulous rapacity.

We have seen that the value of each specific product is made up of two elements: 1. the scarcity of similar products and 2. the abundance of everything that does not resemble it.

Well, please note this: for the very reason that the legislative authority, a slave of individual selfishness, works to achieve the first of these two elements of value, it necessarily destroys the second, since they are one and the same thing. One after the other, the legislature has satisfied the wishes of farmers, breeders, ironmasters, manufacturers, and colonists, by producing an artificial scarcity of wheat, meat, iron, woolen cloth, sugar, etc., but is this anything other than destroying general abundance which is the second condition governing the value of each particular product? Thus, after having subjected the community to the real deprivation inherent in shortage, with the aim of enhancing the value of products, it so happens that people have not even succeeded in achieving this shadow or embracing this phantom of raising this nominal value, precisely because what the scarcity of the particular product does to support it is countered by the scarcity of other products. Is it therefore so difficult to understand that if the shoemaker we mentioned a moment ago succeeded in deliberately destroying all the shoes in the world except for the ones he made, he would be no further advanced, even from the puerile point of view of nominal value, if at the same time every object for which shoes were traded became scarcer to the same extent? Only one thing would have changed: everyone, including our shoemaker, would be worse shod, clothed, fed, and housed, although products would have retained the same relative value with regard to each other.

And this has to be so. Where would society be if injustice, oppression, selfishness, and greed brought no punishment in their wake? Fortunately, it is not possible for a few people, without harming themselves, to use the power of the state and the apparatus of government 2120 in order to profit from scarcity, and thus hold back the universal impetus of the human race towards abundance.

20. T.278 "The Society's farewell to Bastiat at a Meeting of the PES" (10 Sept. 1850)↩

Source

T.278 (1850.09.10) The Society's farewell to Bastiat at a Meeting of the PES (Séance de 10 sept. 1850). In "Chronique," JDE, T. 27, no. 114, 15 sept. 1850, p. 197; also ASEP (1889), p. 124. Not in OC.

Editor's Introduction

The last time Bastiat spoke in the Legislative Assembly was on 9 February when he gave a short speech on the Assembly's legal and moral obligation to give money it had already promised to a worker's association (see above, pp. 000). Shortly after that he took a leave of absence as he could no longer speak, was in nearly constant pain, and needed time away to recuperate. 2121 He wrote to his friend and benefactor Hortense Cheuvreux that his doctor had ordered him to take holiday and return to Mugron and then visit a spa town in the Pyrénées foothills, Les Eaux-Bonnes. 2122

He left Paris for Bordeaux and then Mugron in May where he spent several weeks writing his pamphlet "The Law." By June 2 he had finished the first half and sent a copy to Prosper Paillottet in Paris for editing. 2123 The full pamphlet appeared in print later that month. He then spent several weeks taking the spa waters in Les Eaux-Bonnes, but seemed to find time to work on the pamphlet WSWNS, promising Paillottet on 23 June that he would have it finished in a few days time. 2124 It appeared in print in July.

While he was in Les Eaux-Bonnes he received a copy of the June issue of JDE with Ambroise Clément's very critical review of his book Economic Harmonies which had been published in January. The fact that the review had been delayed for so long, that he probably felt a certain coldness towards his work at meetings of the Political Economy Society during the year, and now the hostile review (on top of his worsening health) made him sad and depressed. He confessed to Fontenay on 3 July that:

Perhaps you are too ardently in favor of the Harmonies in the face of opposition from Le Journal des Économistes . Middle-aged men do not easily abandon well-entrenched and long-held ideas. For this reason, it is not to them but to the younger generation that I have addressed and submitted my book. People will end up acknowledging that value can never lie in materials and the forces of nature. …

However, I do not conceal a personal wish. Yes, I would like this theory to attract enough followers in my lifetime (even if only two or three) for me to be assured before dying that it will not be abandoned if it is true. Let my book generate just one other and I will be satisfied. 2125

Bastiat returned to Paris for the last time in early August but his health showed no improvement and his doctor (Andral we learn from this extract) ordered him to spend the winter in Pisa as he would probably not live through another cold and wet Paris winter. 2126 He said farewell to his colleagues in the Society at their meeting on 10 September and it must have been very difficult for him to meet them again after Clément's review since most of the members shared his criticism of his work.

Bastiat's journey took him to Lyons, Marseilles, and then to Pisa by ship. He complained bitterly about having to share a cabin on the boat, the rudeness of the porters, and the time he had to spend in quarantine. After spending most of October in Pisa, he decided to move on to Rome where he remained from 8 November until his death on 24 December.

Text

M. Frédéric Bastiat, Representative of the People, came to the last meeting of the Economists in order to say farewell to the Members of this Society. Yielding to the sage advice of his doctor, Dr. Andral, M. Bastiat is going to spend the winter in Pisa (in order to ) restore his health which the Paris climate and too much hard work has made worse. At this moment he is afflicted with a persistent sore throat which has completely deprived him of the use of his voice. We hope that the brilliant author of the Economic Sophisms and the Economic Harmonies, under the influence of the favourable Italian climate, will soon be able to complete the second volume of his last work which is already quite advanced.

At this same meeting which was presided over by M. Horace Say, who has recently arrived back from a trip, the discussion took up the question of sugar which has recently been submitted for discussion to the Council of State and which should soon be brought before the Legislative Assembly ….

In the absence of M. M. Joseph Garnier, M. Guillaumin who was the only member present who had participated at the meeting of the Congress of Peace in Frankfort, presented to the Society some interesting details about the activity of the Congress and some of the various events which took place there.

21. T.292 "On the Idea of Value" (late 1850)↩

Source

T.292 (1850.11.??) "On the Idea of Value" (Note complémentaire et inédite de Bastiat sur l'idée de Valeur) (late 1850). Ronce notes that Bastiat before he died asked Paillottet to give this unpublished note to Fontenay. In Ronce, Appendix IX, pp. 312-14.

Editor's Introduction

This may have been one of the last things Bastiat was working on when he died. Ronce states that Paillottet had been given a copy of the sketch by Bastiat with instructions to give it Fontenay, who would be one of Bastiat's literary executors who oversaw the publication of the second edition of Economic Harmonies and then Bastiat's Collected Works .

Bastiat has been stung by the critical review of the first edition of Economic Harmonies written by Clément in the JDE, especially the comments rejecting his view of population, rent, and value. 2127 In fact, Clément's review was an extended critique of Bastiat's theory of value which he harshly described as "it is particularly in this part of his book that he appears to me to have moved away from the truth" (p. 237), "contestable," and "confused." 2128 (p. 239). Bastiat complained to his close friends about his treatment at the hands of his colleagues whom he described as "middle-aged men (who) do not easily abandon well-entrenched and long-held ideas." 2129 This extract then, might be seen as one last attempt to explain what his new theory of value was and to try to dispel some of their misunderstandings.

Some of the key points he makes in the sketch are:

that individuals place values on things they want and for which they are prepared to pay or exchange other things
that the values individuals place on the things they want change over time and circumstance
that the things individuals want and place a value on may be products or services
that he thinks that "value results from the service and not from the product," thus in a biological sense "the service is the genus and the product is the species"

Bastiat had said something similar in EH1 but perhaps not as clearly:

We might ask the following subtle question at this point: Should the principle of value be seen in physical objects, and thus by analogy attributed to the services? I say it is the other way round: it should be recognized in services and then attributed, by metonymy if you like, to physical objects. 2130

Text

Theories are compromised when one exaggerates them. I did not say in absolute terms that material things do not have value, that things which are bought and sold, like wheat, land, houses, or clothing, do not have value.

I said the following: that there is value in the services which people provide for each other, because they place a value on them. 2131

There is also value in the products that they exchange, because they place a value them.

Then, since the value is identical to itself, I thought that it ought to have the same cause, the same origin, the same raison d'être, whether it was in services, or in products.

Consequently, I wondered if value was originally (located) in the product and from there extended by analogy to the service, or perhaps whether it wasn't the other way around.

Here is not the place to go into what line of investigation I thought was most important.

Whatever it was, I found that value results from the service and not from the product. I have provided a thousand reasons for this, one of which appears to me to be unanswerable, namely that each time one offers a product for sale one provides a service, while each time one provides a service one does not offer a product for sale.

Thus the service is the genus and the product is the species; and since value is common to both, it must extend from the service to the product, not from the product to the service.

Put in this way, is this any reason to ban from scientific language and especially from everyday speech the following expressions: gold is worth (this much), land is worth (that much), this hat and these shoes are worth (so much)?

Who could think like this?

I only ask that when one expounds on value, that one keep in mind, when pronouncing the words "this hat is worth so much," the how and why (of value).

I wish that one would understand that, even though this does not agree with received (economic) doctrine, that if the hat is worth (something) it is (because) a service is provided in selling it; and that if, in selling it, no service is provided (as could happen in a place like Turkey), 2132 even though it would not cease being a product because of that, it would cease having value .

But we do admit that when the service is incorporated and embodied (as one says today) in the product, popular and even scientific language makes it very clear that this product is worth (so much), that this product has some value.

But note one thing; from the moment when the incorporation is made, when the service has assumed a material form, the value of the product does not remain fixed and unchangeable. This hat which is worth 16 francs (today) will perhaps be only worth 12 francs in a year's time, without having undergone any material change.

What is the reason for this variability in the value of a product?

It is easy to grasp and it proves again and again how much value has its roots in the service (provided) and not in the material (thing).

This hat is worth 16 francs today because society values at this level the collection of services that one or more people have provided in selling a hat of this quality.

The following year, what will make this value go up or down? Is it because there is more or less of the material thing? No. It is the evaluation made at this time of the same services. If in a year's time, one provides me with less of a service in making me a hat, whether because one has learned to make them faster, or because one has found (other) supplies of raw materials, or because there are fewer and less eager buyers, not only will the value of this service drop but as well it will lead to the decrease in what we have termed the incorporated value , 2133 in other words the value of the product which has existed for a long time. This value represents a genus (or type) of services which continue to be provided and this genus follows all the fluctuations, and all the twists and turns of these services. It is thus (the same) for all the products which dot the globe; and I (would) say that the visual field of the economist is very narrow if he does not see the origin of value where I have placed it.

22. T.279 "The announcements of Bastiat's death at a Meeting of the PES and in the JDE" (10, 15 Jan. 1851)↩

Source

T.279 (1851.01.10) The announcement of Bastiat's death at a Meeting of the PES (Séance de 10 Jan. 1851). In "Chronique," JDE, T. 28, no. 117, 15 jan. 1851, p.104-5; also ASEP (1889), p. 141. Not in OC.

Editor's Introduction

Bastiat finally succumbed to his long illness on Christmas Eve 1850 in Rome. Paillottet describes his last days in a letter to Bastiat's close friend and benefactor in Paris, Madame Hortense Cheuvreux who had been in Rome with Bastiat until about the 14th December and had to return to Paris to be with her sick mother. 2134 Bastiat's cousin Eugène de Monclar who was a priest heard his last confession and gave him the last rites. Paillottet said that Bastiat had told him that "I want to die in the religion of my forefathers. I have always loved it, even though I have not followed its external practices." One wonders whether any priest other than a family member would have given Bastiat the last rites given the very harsh comments he had repeatedly made about "theocratic plunder" and "theocratic fraud" in his theory and history of plunder. 2135 Furthermore, in a letter to M. Casimir Cheuvreux in July 1850 he argued that Catholicism was a set of "extinguished beliefs" and that "acquiescence in form alone" would lead to it having to confront an "inevitable ordeal":

Extinguished beliefs will no longer be revived, and the efforts made in times of terror and danger to give society this anchor are more meritorious than effective. I believe that an inevitable ordeal is lying in wait for Catholicism. Acquiescence in form alone, which each person requires from others and from which acquiescence each person allows himself dispensation, cannot be a permanent state of affairs. 2136

It is problematic to determine exactly what killed Bastiat. The information we can get from his letters are vague which is not surprising given the state of medical knowledge in 1850. We learn from his death announcement in the JDE that he was already suffering from his throat condition when he arrived in Paris from Mugron "six years ago." The traditional view, as expressed by Dean Russell, 2137 was that he died of tuberculosis but several of his comments in his letters suggest otherwise. The symptoms he complained about suggest cancer of either the larynx or the oesophagus: he found it painful to speak to the point he was no longe able to; he had coughing fits; he felt a lump growing in his larynx; he felt pain when drinking, eating, breathing, talking, coughing; and towards the end there was unbearable pain. If it was cancer that killed him it is amazing that it took 6 years to do so.

Sadly, his death had been prematurely announced in an Italian newspaper and he consoled his friend Paillottet in a letter dated 11 October from Pisa. In it he tells us how he wished to be remembered:

I feel the desire to live, my dear Paillottet, when I read your account of your anxiety at the news of my death. Thank heaven, I am not dead, not even more seriously ill. This morning, I saw a doctor who is going to try to rid me, at least for a few minutes, of this pain in my throat, whose constancy is so distressing. But in any case, if this news had been true, you would have had to accept it and be resigned to it. I would like all my friends to acquire the philosophy I have myself acquired in this respect. I assure you that I will yield my last breath with no regret and almost with joy, if I could be sure to leave behind me, to those who love me, no searing regrets but a sweet, affectionate, and slightly melancholic memory. When I am no longer ill, this is what I will prepare them for. 2138

Text: The Account in the JDE

The daily newspapers have already announced the great and very sad loss suffered by (economic) science with the death of Frédéric Bastiat. Our illustrious and very unfortunate friend (finally) succumbed (to his illness) on 24 December in Rome. The air and the sun of Italy was not able to stop the ravages of the disease which had afflicted him for a long time, a disease which had already affected him six years ago when he began (writing) for the Journal des Économistes that series of works filled with knowledge, good sense, and sparkling wit, which in a short space of time made his name, and which will leave in economic science a brilliant and profound mark. 2139

However, three months ago when it was decided that he should move away from Paris and to quit the worries of his parliamentary life, even though the sickness had spread to his larynx and he could only speak in a quite voice, his spirit had lost nothing of its vigour; his energetic constitution remained; and we hoped that rest and the mild climate (of Italy) would delay for some years more the end of this mighty creature.

But alas, the illness only got worse and when M. Paillottet, who was very fond of him, hurried from Paris to attend to his needs out his deep friendship, he understood that one could no longer have any illusions (about his condition).

This poor martyr (to the cause) could no longer take food without such painful efforts that it provoked agonizing and prolonged coughing fits. But he did not want to receive his friend until this dreadful crisis had passed; and then, if his suffering left him some moments of calm, he dictated to him once more the next installment of the work which preoccupied him up until the very last moment. 2140

If he had not stayed in Paris and (pursued) the life of a Parliamentarian Frédéric Bastiat would have been able to pursue a longer career. The former's climate did not agree with him at all, and perhaps what agreed with him even less was the spectacle of (all) the agitation, intrigue, and inadequacy which confronted him in his efforts to bring about useful reforms, the triumph of truth, and the practice of the good.

With his passing, the Legislative Assembly lost a model of integrity and independence; economic science lost a charming writer who had the rare and precious gift of being able to understand the big picture and to make it popular. France and the entire world one could say as well, have lost one of those fine and fertile minds, the character and products of which (will) comfort and honour humanity.

Text: ASEP version

Meeting held 10 January, 1851

At his meeting, M. Horace Say and several other members discussed before the Society the distinguished services rendered by Frédéric Bastiat and the considerable loss which economic science and the country have suffered by his loss. M. Horace Say read out loud a moving letter from M. Cobden. 2141

The Society, (having been) touched by the devotion M. Paillottet showed towards his friend, asked several of the members to communicate to him their deep gratitude.

The conversation then turned to the legal relationship between the two precious metals used as currency, 2142 concerning the fall in the value of gold. A scholarly and instructive historical discussion took place, especially between Messieurs Michel Chevalier, Charles Coquelin, and (Garcia) Quijano, 2143 but it was too technical and too full of numerical data for us to reproduce here.

Appendices↩

Appendix 1: Further Aspects of Bastiat's Thought (CW4)↩

Bastiat's Anti-socialist Pamphlets, or "Mister Bastiat's Little Pamphlets"

Between May 1848 and July 1850 Bastiat wrote a series of 12 anti-socialist pamphlets, or what the Guillaumin publishing firm marketed in their Catalog as the "Petits pamphlets de M. Bastiat" (Mister Bastiat's Little Pamphlets), which included several for which Bastiat has become justly famous such as "The State" (Sept. 1848), "The Law" (July 1850), and "What is Seen and What is Not Seen" (July 1850).

The pamphlets sold well for Guillaumin and they were reprinted several times and even marketed as a set which could be purchased for 7 fr. for the complete set of 12. Some originally appeared in journals such as the JDE, while others were written as stand alone pamphlets. In May 1849 five of them were bundled together as set or perhaps a single volume (it is not clear which) with the title Petits pamphlets de M. Frédéric Bastiat which was reviewed rapturously by an unnamed reviewer in the JDE. 2144 The reviewer, probably the young economist, colleague, formidable debating partner in the political "Club de la Liberté du travail," and friend of Bastiat, Alcide Fonteyraud, 2145 praised the author for having combined science and truth (which he thought French thinkers had in abundance) with something it had lacked up until now, namely "du bouquet et que ce bouquet soit de haut goût, du bon goût surtout" (a (certain) bouquet, which should be of elevated taste, and especially of good taste). What Fonteyraud realised, perhaps better than many of his older colleagues, was the brilliance with which Bastiat was able to combine mastery of economic theory, with a clever and witty style which appealed to a broad range of readers, and a fervent commitment to justice and a belief in individual liberty, a combination which was rare anywhere, even in France. 2146

De quelle reconnaissance ne devons-nous donc pas être animés lorsque sous la même plume se présentent à la fois une pensée originale et forte, un sentiment profond du juste et du vrai, un ardent amour pour la liberté, un style où les rigueurs de la logique se dérobent sous la grâce piquante de l'expression, et où l'on retrouve, à côté de l'ironie ailée, de l'atticisme élégant d'un jouteur littéraire, cette bonhomie charmante qui berce la passion comme au son d'une idylle!	What gratitude we therefore owe for being so enriched when someone comes along and with the same pen expresses original and deep thoughts along with a profound sense of justice and truth, an ardent love of liberty, a style where logical rigor is cloaked with a biting and charming turn of phrase, and where one finds upon the wings of irony the Attic elegance of a literary jouster, this charming bonhomie which beguiles the passions with the sounds of a romantic idyll!
Or, cette reconnaissance nous la devons à M. Bastiat, car il n'a cessé de poursuivre la veine piquante de ses Sophismes économiques — devenus aujourd'hui un livre classique dans la bibliothèque de tous ceux qui comptent encore l'esprit pour quelque chose.	Now we owe this debt of gratitude to M. Bastiat because he has not ceased pursuing the biting style of his Economic Sophisms , which today have become a classic work in the libraries of all those who still regard the mind as something important.
Il n'a cessé de revendiquer à haute et intelligible voix les droits méconnus du producteur, du consommateur, de l'ouvrier : traquant le monopole et l'abus dans leurs positions les plus inaccessibles ; lançant ses traits hardis et ses apologues vengeurs à la face des maltôtiers, des douaniers, des puissants de la Banque, de la soie, de la laine ou du fer ; prêchant l'Évangile de l'abondance, de la liberté , de la paix et du bien-être ; rendant la science agréable et facile aux esprits rétifs et encroûtés ; combattant le socialisme sous tous ses déguisements, et jusque dans la personne du coryphée de la paix armée, de l'ordonnateur des fortifications de Paris et des fortifications de la rue de Poitiers ; enfin, traçant le programme d'une démocratie sage, laborieuse, point bruyante, point dépensière, et faisant tout cela, prêchant, traquant, combattant, écrivant, disant, le coeur ému, mais le calme au front et le sourire aux lèvres.	He never ceased defending in a loud and intelligible voice the unsung rights of the producers, the consumers, the workers: hunting down monopolies and abuses even in their most inaccessible positions; firing his sharp arrows and his avenging parables in the face of tax collectors, customs officials, powerful bankers, silk, woollen, and iron manufacturers; preaching the Gospel of material abundance and liberty, of peace and well-being; making economic science enjoyable and easy to understand for lazy minds and those stuck in a mental rut; fighting socialism in all its different guises, even in the person of the chorus masters of the armed peace, of the organiser of the fortifications of Paris (Adolphe Thiers) and the fortifications of the rue de Poitiers (where the Party of Order had its HQ); finally, mapping out the program of a democratic (party) which was wise, hard working, not at all demanding or big spending, and doing all this by preaching, pursuing (abuses), fighting, writing, and speaking, with his heart full of emotion but with a calm face and a smile on his lips.

After briefly reviewing the five "little pamphlets" Fonteyraud concluded that in the middle of a Revolution which had overturned France yet again, Bastiat had firmly "planted the flag of political economy" on the political barricades. 2147 Bastiat had once written a "Little Arsenal" of ideas to be used in the battle against protectionism. 2148 In these pamphlets we see a veritable arsenal of ideas which he assembled in the struggle against socialism and other forms of statism, or what Fonteyraud correctly called "l'intervention à outrance de l'Etat" (State intervention pushed to the extreme):

M. Bastiat en plantant ainsi, au sommet de l'idée philosophique du juste , le drapeau de l'économie politique, déchiré par les balles du socialisme et par les ciseaux de la douane, a fait acte de bon citoyen autant que de penseur original. A un moment où il se dépense tant de sophismes et de vilain langage à propos d'erreurs, ce n'est pas un petit mérite que de dépenser en faveur de la vérité infiniment d'esprit et de savoir.

So, by planting the flag of political economy on the summit of the philosophical idea of what is just , a flag which had been shredded by the bullets of socialism and the knives of the Customs Service, Monsieur Bastiat had declared himself to be just as good a citizen as he was an original thinker. At a time when he was exhausting himself (opposing) the errors of so many sophisms and (other) appalling language, it was no small merit to do so in favour of the truth with such boundless spirit and wisdom.

M. Bastiat a eu ce rare mérite. Peut-être aura-t-il encore celui de faire, par la verve insinuante de son style, l'éducation de notre pays et d'ouvrir les yeux aux optimistes de toute couleur.

Bastiat had this rare skill. Perhaps he will still have enough of it, by dint of the clever eloquence of his style, to educate our country and to open the eyes of optimists of all persuasions.

Bastiat helpfully identified the specific targets of his formidable pen in two of his Electoral Manifestos which he wrote for his supporters back in Mugron when he was standing for re-election in 1849, an excerpt of which we include below. 2149 He wrote several other anti-socialist essays and articles after this which are also listed below.

The "Small Pamphlets" included the following titles. The order of publication is provided by his editor Prosper Paillottet in the Oeuvres complètes , vol. 4, p. 274. We have added the price for each pamphlet from an advertisement we found in the back of one of the Guillaumin books. The Paris Chamber of Commerce estimated that average wage per day for an ordinary worker in Paris at the time was about 3 fr. 80 c., 2150 so, fr example, the cost for a worker who purchased the pamphlet Damn Money! and the State for 40 c. was nearly 11% of their daily wage.

Propriété et Loi, suivi de Justice et Fraternité (40 c.) - "Propriété et loi" (Property and Law), JDE, 15 May 1848, in CW2, pp. 43-59, and "Justice et fraternité" (Justice and Fraternity) JDE, 15 June 1848, in CW2, pp. 60-81. " Propriété et loi" was directed at Louis Blanc and critiques of property in general. "Justice et fraternité" was directed against Pierre Leroux.

Protectionisme et Communisme. Lettre à M. Thiers (35 c.) - Protectionnisme et communisme (Protectionism and Communism. A Letter to M. Thiers) (Jan. 1849), in CW2, pp. 235-65, was directed at the conservative and protectionist Mimerel committee whom Bastiat accused of adopting communist ideas

Capital et Rente (35 c.) - (Capital and Rent) (Feb. 1849), in CW4, below, pp 000, was directed at Proudhon.

Paix et Liberté, ou le Budget républicain (60 c.) - (Peace and Liberty, or the Repubican Budget) (February 1849. n.p.), in CW2, pp. 282-327, was directed at critics of his proposed budget cuts

Incompatibilités parlementaires (40 c.) - ( Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest (March 1850), in CW2, pp. 366-400, was directed at bureaucrats and civil servants.

Maudit argent! - L'État (40 c.) - "Maudit argent!" (Damn Money!) 15 Avril 1849, in CW4, below, pp. 000, was directed at general misperceptions about the nature of money and "L'État" (The State) (JDD, 25 Sept. 1848), in CW2, pp. 93-104, was against the radical "Montagnard" socialist faction in the Assembly.

Gratuité du Crédit. Correspondence entrer MM. F. Bastiat et Proudhon (1 fr. 75 c.) - (Free Credit. Correspondence between Bastiat and Proudhon) (Oct. 1849 - Feb. 1850), in CW4, below, pp. 000, was directed again at Proudhon

Baccalauréat et Socialisme (60 c.) - ( Baccalaureate and Socialism ) (early 1850), in CW2, pp. 185-234, was written to oppose a bill before the Chamber in early 1850 on education reform which was supported by the conservative Adolphe Thiers

Spoliation et Loi (40 c.) - in Spoliation et loi. - Mélanges. "Spoliation et loi" (Plunder and Law), JDE, 15 May 1850, in CW2, pp. 266-76, was written against Louis Blanc and the Luxembourg Commission

La Loi (60 c.) - "La Loi" (The Law) (Mugron, July 1850), in CW2, pp. 107-46, was written against Louis Blanc and his 18th century predecessors including most notably Rousseau

Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas, ou l'Économie politique en une leçon (60 c.) -(What is Seen and What is Not Seen, or Political Economy in One Lesson) (July 1850), in CW3, pp. 401-52, was directed against all those who misunderstood the operation of the free market

Other anti-socialist essays he wrote during this period include:

"Individualisme et fraternité" (Individualism and Fraternity) (c. June 1848), in CW2, pp. 82-92, was directed against Louis Blanc.

"Propriété et spoliation" (Property and Plunder), ( Journal des débats , 24 July 1848), in CW2, pp. 147-184, was directed against Victor Considérant and against critics of ownership of land and the charging of rent.

Chap. VIII. "Propriété, Communauté" (Private Property and Communal Property) in Harmonies économiques (written mid 1849 and published in first edition of EH in Jan. 1850), in CW5 (forthcoming), was a direct appeal to socialists by FB, explicitly mentions Proudhon's maxim "propriété, c'est le vol" (property is theft)

"Le capital" (Capital), Almanach Républicain pour 1849 (Paris: Pagnerre, 1849)., in CW4, below, pp. 000, was written to appeal to ordinary people who were influenced by the ideas of Proudhon and Blanc concerning capital and the charging of interest on loans.

In his "Statement of Electoral Principles" in April 1849 2151 Bastiat chronicles for the sake of his potential voters his solid anti-socialist credentials a part of which we include below. He explained to his sceptical supporters the political dilemma a classical liberal like himself faced when caught between the left and the right, "on some occasions I had to vote with the left and on others with the right; with the left when it defended liberty and the Republic, with the right when it defended order and security." He also reminded them that he had been a most unusual political representative in that he had been active in two very different types of struggles to defend liberty and oppose socialism and statism, direct action on the streets of Paris, as well as vigorous intellectual debate through his writing. In his own words he stated:

Nommé membre et vice-président du comité des Finances, il fut bientôt manifeste que nous aurions à résister à une opinion alors fort accréditée parce qu'elle est fort séduisante. Sous prétexte de donner satisfaction au peuple, on voulait investir d'une puissance exorbitante le Gouvernement révolutionnaire ; on voulait que l'État suspendît le remboursement des caisses d'Épargne et des Bons du Trésor ; qu'il s'emparât des chemins de fer, des assurances, des transports. Le ministère poussait dans cette voie, qui ne me semble autre chose que la spoliation régularisée par la loi et exécutée par l'impôt. J'ose dire que j'ai contribué à préserver mon pays d'une telle calamité.	I was nominated as member and vice president of the finance committee, to which committee it was soon clear that we would have to fight against an extremely seductive proposal much vaunted at the time. On the grounds of satisfying popular demand, some people wanted to bestow an inordinate degree of power on the revolutionary government. They wanted the state to suspend the reimbursement of the savings bank and treasury bonds and take over the railways, insurance, and transport systems. The government was pushing in this direction, which does not appear to me to be anything other than plunder regularized by law and executed through taxes . I dare to say that I have contributed to preserving my country from such a calamity.
Cependant une collision effroyable était menaçante. Le travail vrai des ateliers particuliers était remplacé par le travail mensonger des ateliers nationaux. Le peuple de Paris organisé et armé était le jouet d'utopistes ignorants et d'instigateurs de troubles. L'Assemblée, forcée de détruire une à une, par ses votes, ces illusions trompeuses, prévoyait le choc et n'avait guère, pour y résister, que la force morale qu'elle tenait de vous. Convaincu qu'il ne suffisait pas de voter, mais qu'il fallait éclairer les masses, je fondai un autre journal qui aspirait à parler le simple langage du bon sens, et que, par ce motif, j'intitulai Jacques Bonhomme, Il ne cessait de réclamer la dissolution, à tout prix, des forces insurrectionnelles. La veille même des Journées de Juin, il contenait un article de moi sur les ateliers nationaux. Cet article, placardé sur tous les murs de Paris, fit quelque sensation. Pour répondre à certaines imputations, je le fis reproduire dans les journaux du Département.	However, a frightful collision was threaten ing . The genuine work carried out by individual workshops was replaced by the bogus production of the national workshops. The organized and armed people of Paris were the plaything of ignorant utopians and fomenters of disorder. The Assembly, forced to destroy these deceptive illusions one by one through its votes, foresaw the storm but had few means of resisting it other than the moral strength that it received from you. Convinced that voting was not enough , the masses needed to be enlightened , I founded another newspaper which aimed to speak the simple language of good sense and which, for this reason, I entitled Jacques Bonhomme . It never stopped calling for the disbanding of the forces of insurrection, whatever the cost. On the eve of the June Days, it contained an article by me on the national workshops. This article, plastered over all the walls of Paris, was something of a sensation. To reply to certain charges, I had it reproduced in the newspapers in the D épartement.

La tempête éclata le 24 juin. Entré des premiers dans le faubourg Saint-Antoine, après l'enlèvement des formidables barricades qui en défendaient l'accès, j'y accomplis une double et pénible tâche : Sauver des malheureux qu'on allait fusiller sur des indices incertains ; pénétrer dans les quartiers les plus écartés pour y concourir au désarmement. Cette dernière partie de ma mission volontaire, accomplie au bruit de la fusillade, n'était pas sans danger. Chaque chambre pouvait cacher un piège ; chaque fenêtre, chaque soupirail pouvait masquer un fusil.	The storm broke on 24 June. One of the first to enter the Faubourg Saint Antoine following the removal of the formidable barricades which protected access to it, I accomplished a twin and difficult task, to save those unfortunate people who were going to be shot on unreliable evidence and to penetrate into the most far-flung districts to help in the disarmament. This latter part of my voluntary mission, accomplished under gunfire, was not without danger. Each room might have hidden a trap, each window or basement window a rifle.
Après la victoire, j'ai prêté un concours loyal à l'administration du Général Cavaignac, que je tiens pour un des plus nobles caractères que la Révolution ait fait surgir. Néanmoins, j'ai résisté à tout ce qui m'a paru mesure arbitraire, car je sais que l'exagération dans le succès le compromet. L'empire sur soi-même, la modération en tous sens, telle a été ma règle, ou plutôt mon instinct. Au faubourg Saint-Antoine, d'une main je désarmais les insurgés, de l'autre je sauvais les prisonniers. C'est le symbole de ma conduite parlementaire.	Following victory, I gave loyal assistance to the administration of General Cavaignac, whom I hold to be one of the noblest characters brought to the fore by the Revolution. Nevertheless, I resisted anything I considered to be an arbitrary measure as I know that any exaggeration about success compromises it. Self-control and moderation in every sense have been my rule or rather my instinct. In the Faubourg Saint Antoine, I disarmed insurgents with one hand and saved prisoners with the other. This has been the symbol of my conduct in parliament.
Vers cette époque, j'ai été atteint d'une maladie de poitrine qui, se combinant avec l'immensité de l'enceinte de nos délibérations, m'a interdit la tribune. Je ne suis pas pour cela resté oisif. La vraie cause des maux et des dangers de la société résidait, selon moi, dans un certain nombre d'idées erronées, pour lesquelles ces classes qui ont pour elle le nombre et la force s'étaient malheureusement enthousiasmées. Il n'est pas une de ces erreurs que je n'aie combattues. Certes, je savais que l'action qu'on cherche à exercer sur les causes est toujours très lente, qu'elle ne suffit pas quand le danger fait explosion. Mais pourriez-vous me reprocher d'avoir travaillé pour l'avenir, après avoir fait pour le présent tout ce qu'il m'a été possible de faire ?	Around this time, I was stricken with a chest ailment which, combined with the huge size of our debating chamber, barred me from the tribune. I did not remain idle for all that. The true cause of society's ills and dangers lies, in my opinion, in a certain number of mistaken ideas, in favor of which those classes who have number and strength on their side unfortunately became enamored. There is not one of these errors that I have not combated. Of course, I knew that the action that one seeks to exercise over causes is always very slow and that such action is inadequate when the danger explodes. But can you criticise me for having worked for the future, after having done for the present all that I possibly could?
Aux doctrines de Louis Blanc, j'ai opposé un écrit intitulé : Individualisme et Fraternité . La Propriété est menacée dans son principe même ; on cherche à tourner contre elle la législation : je fais la brochure : Propriété et loi. On attaque cette forme de Propriété particulière qui consiste dans l'appropriation individuelle du sol : je fais la brochure : Propriété et spoliation, laquelle, selon les économistes anglais et américains, a jeté quelque lumière sur la difficile question de la rente des terres.	To the doctrines of Louis Blanc I opposed a treatise entitled Individualism and Fraternity . When the very principle of ownership was threatened and efforts were made to direct the legislation against it, I wrote the brochure Property and Law . The form of individual property which consists in the individual appropriation of land was under attack. So I wrote the brochure Property and Plunder , which, according to English and American economists, shed some light on the vexatious question of rent from land .
On veut fonder la fraternité sur la contrainte légale ; je fais la brochure : Justice et Fraternité. On ameute le travail contre le capital ; on berce le Peuple de la chimère de la Gratuité du crédit ; je fais la brochure : Capital et rente. Le communisme nous déborde. Je l'attaque dans sa manifestation la plus pratique, par la brochure : Protectionisme et Communisme. L'École purement révolutionnaire veut faire intervenir l'État en toutes choses et ramener ainsi l'accroissement indéfini des impôts ; je fais la brochure intitulée : l'État, spécialement dirigée contre le manifeste montagnard.	People wished to found fraternity on legal coercion, so I wrote the brochure Justice and Fraternity . Rivalry was stirred up between labor and capital; the people were deluded with the illusion of Free Credit . I wrote the brochure Capital and Rent . Communism was overwhelming us so I attacked it in its most practical manifestation, through the brochure Protectionism and Communism . The purely revolutionary school wanted the state to intervene in every matter and thus bring back a continuous increase in taxes. I wrote the brochure entitled The State , which was particularly directed against the manifesto of the Montagnards.
Il m'est démontré qu'une des causes de l'instabilité du Pouvoir et de l'envahissement désordonné de la fausse politique, c'est la guerre des Portefeuilles ; je fais la brochure : Incompatibilités parlementaires. Il m'apparaît que presque toutes les erreurs économiques qui désolent ce pays proviennent d'une fausse notion sur les fonctions du numéraire ; je fais la brochure : Maudit argent. Je vois qu'on va procéder à la réforme financière par des procédés illogiques et incomplets ; je fais la brochure : Paix et liberté, ou le Budget Républicain.	It was proved to me that one of the causes of the instability of government and the disorientating intrusion of false politics was the struggle for office. I wrote the brochure P arliamentary Conflicts of Interest . I was convinced that almost all the economic errors that plague this country arise from a false concept of the functions of money. I wrote the brochure Damned Money . I saw that financial reform was going to be carried out using illogical and inadequate procedures. I wrote the brochure Peace and Liberty, or the Republican Budget .
Ainsi, dans la rue par l'action, dans les esprits par la controverse, je n'ai pas laissé échapper une occasion, autant que ma santé me l'a permis, de combattre l'erreur, qu'elle vînt du Socialisme ou du Communisme, de la Montagne ou de la Plaine. Voilà pourquoi j'ai dû voter quelquefois avec la gauche, quelquefois avec la droite ; avec la gauche quand elle défendait la liberté et la république, avec la droite quand elle défendait l'ordre et la sécurité.	In this way, through action in the street or appealing to the mind through controversy/debate, as far as my health allowed, I did not let a single opportunity slip to combat error, whether arising from socialism or communism, the Montagne or the Plains. This is why on some occasions I had to vote with the left and on others with the right; with the left when it defended liberty and the Republic, with the right when it defended order and security.

The "Apparatus" or Structure of Exchange

As a true nineteenth century social theorist Bastiat made use of several mechanical or astronomical metaphors to describe the structure and operation of social, economic, and political institutions, structures, and processes. These included the idea that society was like a clock or a mechanism (with wheels, springs, and movements), or a machine or an engine (with a motor driven by steam and other physical forces), or like a mechanical or scientific apparatus of some kind, or like orbiting planets which moved under the influence of gravity. 2152 Thus, individuals were described as pursuing their self-interest which was likened to "un mobile interne" (an internal driving force), and society as a whole was described as being driven by "un moteur social" (a social engine or motor), and both government institutions and markets were compared to complex machines or apparatuses which functioned in particular ways in order to satisfy certain needs.

Bastiat also spoke about the individuals (mainly socialists and Rousseau-ian legislators) who wanted to reorganise or plan society "artificially" as if it really were an engine or mechanism and they were the "mechanics," "engineers," and "inventors" of "the social mechanism" or society, while the ordinary workers and consumers were like so many cogs and wheels with which they could use to build it. 2153 Interestingly, he thought of himself and the other economists as the equivalent of the astronomer Laplace or the mathematician Newton who observed the operation of the planets and other physical objects, learned the laws which governed their behaviour, and had the good sense not to tinker with the great "Providential plan" which would ensure the "harmonious" and just operation of the social universe, if only it were left free to do so.

In other sections of this volume we discuss his use of the metaphors of "le mécanisme social" (the social mechanism); "les forces perturbatrices" (disturbing forces) and "les forces réparatrices" (restorative forces), and "l'harmonie" (harmony) and "la discordance" (disharmony). Here we discuss his use of the metaphor of "l'appareil" (apparatus). 2154

Bastiat used the word "l'appareil" frequently in his writings (60) and it could be translated quite differently depending upon the context in which it appeared. He used it in reference to the following things:

human biology, as in the eye which he described as "l'harmonieux mécanisme de cet admirable appareil" (the harmonious mechanism of this admirable organ) 2155 , or in "l'appareil pulmonaire" (the pulmonary system) 2156
the law, as in "l'appareil de la sanction légale" (the system of legal sanctions) or "l'appareil légal" (the legal system) 2157
human intelligence and moral behaviour, as in "cet appareil complexe et merveilleux appelé l'intelligence" (this complex and marvellous faculty called intelligence), 2158 and in "cet appareil (un système complet de Peines et de Récompenses fatales) à la fois correctif et progressif" (this apparatus, this complete system of inevitable pain and rewards, which is correcting and progressive at the same time) 2159
war and the military, as in "l'appareil de la guerre" (the apparatus of war), 2160 and "le dispendieux et dangereux appareil militaire et diplomatique" (the expensive and dangerous military and diplomatic apparatus) 2161
the government and bureaucracy, as in "le vaste appareil gouvernemental" (the vast apparatus (edifice) of government), 2162 and my favourite,"cet appareil de magistrature, police, gendarmerie et prison au service du spoliateur" (this apparatus of the courts, police, gendarmerie, and prisons, all in the service of the plundering class) 2163
but above all he used it reference to economics, such as "l'appareil commercial" (the apparatus of commerce) and "l'appareil de l'échange" (the apparatus of exchange or trade)

Before his work on Economic Harmonies , Bastiat's use of the idea of "l'appareil" was either innocuous, as in his references to biological organs such as the eye, or strongly negative in his references to military, governmental, or bureaucratic structures or apparatuses. However, in the book he began to use the term in a much more positive, economic sense for the first time, especially in Chapter IV on "Exchange," where he frequently used the terms "l'appareil commercial" (the apparatus of commerce) and "l'appareil de l'échange" (the apparatus of exchange or trade). It is not clear why he had this change of heart but the term must have seemed to be a useful one to him when he was writing this chapter, probably over the summer of 1849 in the seclusion of the hunting lodge at Butard.

Both Stirling and FEE translated "l'appareil de l'échange" as the "machinery" of exchange (the apparatus of exchange or trade). Concerning "l'appareil commercial" FEE translated it as commercial "machinery," "mechanism," or "apparatus," while Stirling consistently used the term commercial "apparatus." Another possible translation is the word "system" as in "the system of trade, or the trading system." We have translated both as "apparatus" to retain Bastiat's consistent use of the term.

However, Bastiat means more by "apparatus" than the physical objects which make trade or commerce possible or easier, what he called "la partie matérielle" (the material part) such as building a bridge across a river, paving a road across the countryside, or the increasing density of populations living in towns and cities, but also "la partie morale" (the moral or human part). The human component of the apparatus of trade and commerce can improve opportunities for mutually beneficial trade by doing a number of things: 2164

(Ils) savent mieux se partager les occupations, unir leurs forces, s'associer pour fonder des écoles et des musées, bâtir des églises, pourvoir à leur sécurité, établir des banques ou des compagnies d'assurances, en un mot, se procurer des jouissances communes avec une beaucoup moins forte proportion d'efforts pour chacun.

(They) are more capable of engaging in the division of labour, associating to found schools and museums, building churches, providing for their security, establishing banks or insurance companies, in a word acquiring common advantages for far less individual effort.

A third factor in the functioning of the "apparatus of exchange" is money and credit, or as Bastiat put it "Ce que j'appelle l'appareil de l'échange, c'est la monnaie, les billets à ordre, les billets de banque et même les banquiers." (What I call the apparatus of exchange is money, promissory notes, banks notes, and even bankers). 2165

Thus what Bastiat seems to be arguing is that the relatively simple act of engaging in trade is in fact a much more complex affair which involves new technology, capital investment, the division of labour, the actions of skilled people such as traders and bankers, and a set of institutions which protect life and property, and provide banking and insurance services for all those involved. In other words, he has given Destutt de Tracy's idea that society itself is made up of a series of exchanges a new twist, namely that acts of exchange encourage cooperative behaviour and the formation of institutions which come to be known as "Society."

Ceteris paribus, or other things being equal

Bastiat was one of the first economists in the Paris group in the 1840s to regularly use the important economic expression "ceteris paribus" 2166 (other things being equal) and its related phrase "toutes choses égales d'ailleurs" (all other things being equal) in his explanations of economic phenomena. 2167 According to Reutlinger et al. 2168 the Latin phrase "ceteris paribus" had entered English economic thought in the 17th century in William Petty's Treatise of Taxes and Contributions (1662), who used it in a discussion of the relative prices of silver and corn, and was taken up by Bernard Mandeville in the early 18th century in "The Fable of the Bees" (1714) to describe changes in fashion and manners. It was sparingly used by English political economists in the early 19th century such as Malthus, Bentham, James Mill, Nassau Senior, and McCulloch, 2169 but it was not until J.S. Mill's the Principles of Political Economy (1848) that it became a central part of classical economic theory. It is instructive to compare how Bastiat and Mill used this key term at much the same time, namely in the late 1840s, before it became more widely used.

The Bentham-James Mill-John Stuart Mill connection is an interesting one to consider, although exactly what Bastiat knew of their work is uncertain. Bentham used the term several times, mostly in his legal writings, many of which did not appear in print until Bowring's edition of his works between 1838 and 1843. James Mill used it in an article on "Beggars" in the 1824 Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica in which he uses the concept to link the opportunity cost of war to the impoverishment of the people and the growth in the number of beggars on the streets following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. As he noted:

Of all the causes of beggary, war may undoubtedly be assumed as one of the most extraordinary. We have already seen in what manner the people converted by it into soldiers swell the ranks of mendicity; but this is only a small part of the deplorable effects. It brings the condition of the whole of the labouring mass down nearer to the mendicant level; and, of course, a new and additional portion down to it altogether. This it does by the consumption which it produces. Exactly in proportion as money is spent upon war, exactly in that proportion is the means of employing labour, that is, of buoying up the condition of the people, destroyed; exactly in that proportion must the people, cæteris paribus , sink. These are conclusions which may be regarded as scientific, and which will never be called in dispute except by those who are ignorant of the subject. It is not impossible for war to be accidentally accompanied with circumstances which counter-balance this tendency, even in respect to wealth; but this is exceedingly rare. The great men very often gain by war: the little almost always lose. (Emphasis added.) 2170

His son John Stuart Mill began using the term in some newspaper articles in 1823 such as this one on "Malthus's Measure of Value" in the Morning Chronicle (5 Sept. 1823):

When we say that value depends upon labour, we mean, that according as the quantity of labour expended in producing a commodity is increased or diminished, ceteris paribus , its value rises or falls. In like manner, if we say that value depends, wholly or partially, upon profits, it is implied, that when profits rise values shall rise; when profits fall, values shall fall. 2171

And again three years later in a speech on "The British Constitution" when, sounding very much like his father (as quoted above), he lamented the great loss of life suffered by the British during the Napoleonic Wars, such as "the poor privates" who were sent home "to loiter about Chelsea hospital with one leg," while those like Sir Arthur Wellesley reaped profits and accolades and "empty praise":

They talk of the last war, and seem to think it highly honourable to our Constitution that having first got us into what they call an arduous struggle, it afterwards at the expense of many myriads of lives got us out again. But let me ask, what was gained by the last war, and who gained it? We knocked down one despot, and set up a score; this was their concern not ours. Then as to the substantial part of the gain, the money and glory. The generals and admirals and colonels and lieutenant colonels and all the rest of them got money, and most of them a little glory, some a great deal. The poor privates who took the disagreeable part of the business, and who were sent home when it was over to loiter about Chelsea hospital with one leg or follow the plough with two, they got no glory; any more than those at home who paid the piper. The contractors who had the fingering of the loans got no glory, but they got what was much better, many millions of pounds sterling which made them very comfortable at our expense. Sir, I grudge nobody his glory, if he would pay for it himself. I have a great respect for Sir Arthur Wellesley, and ceteris paribus I would much rather that he should be, as he is, a hero and a duke, than not: but when I consider that every feather in his cap has cost the nation more than he and his whole lineage would fetch if they were sold for lumber, I own that I much regret the solid pudding which we threw away in order that he might obtain empty praise. (Emphasis added.)

His next use of "ceteris paribus" was in a couple of articles on money, on "Paper Currency and Commercial Distress" in 1826, and then on "The Currency Juggle" in 1833. In the latter he uses it in a discussion of an inflationary expansion of the money supply which he lamented had been recognised by philosophers like Smith and Hume but had been unfortunately neglected by economists since then:

The important truth, that currency is lowered ( cæteris paribus ) in value, by being augmented in quantity, was known solely to speculative philosophers, to Locke and Hume.

After a hiatus of ten years Mill returned to using the concept with some passing references to it in his book on A System of Logic (1843) and then several times in his Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1844), before taking it up in earnest with 17 references in his Principles of Political Economy (1848). A typical example of his use of the term in Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1844) is the following discussion of a carpenter's labour:

To this it was, or might have been, answered, that according to this classification, a carpenter's labour at his trade is productive labour, but the same individual's labour in learning his trade was unproductive labour. Yet it is obvious that, on both occasions, his labour tended exclusively to what is allowed to be production: the one was equally indispensable with the other, to the ultimate result. Further, if we adopted the above definition, we should be obliged to say that a nation whose artisans were twice as skilful as those of another nation, was not, ceteris paribus , more wealthy; although it is evident that every one of the results of wealth, and everything for the sake of which wealth is desired, would be possessed by the former country in a higher degree than by the latter. 2172

Other early users of the term in English, in an economic sense, included the populariser of free market ideas Harriet Martineau who used it in her Illustrations of Political Economy (1834). In "The Moral of Many Fables" she states that "If home producers can compete with foreign producers, they need no protection, as, ceteris paribus , buying at hand is preferable to buying at a distance. Free competition cannot fail to benefit all parties." 2173 Her work was known to Molinari who reviewed a French translation in the JDE but Bastiat does not cite her work. 2174

In the French speaking world, J.B. Say preferred to use the phrase "toutes choses d'ailleurs égales" in his Traité d'économie politique (4 times) which the American translator Princep in his 1822 edition translated as "ceteris paribus" for some reason. In the Cours complet (1826) Say used the phrase "cœteris paribus" only once and the phrase "toutes choses d'ailleurs égales" six times and it is likely that it is from Say or possibly Malthus, both of whom Bastiat read closely, that Bastiat may have picked it up. Very few other contemporaries of Bastiat did the same at this time.

Bastiat used the Latin phrase six times in his writings and the French equivalent "toutes choses égales d'ailleurs" (all other things being equal) 12 times. He was thus one of the first economists in the Guillaumin network to regularly use the phrase. His first use of "toutes choses égales d'ailleurs" occurred in April 1834 in a memo on the Customs Service; 2175 his first use of "ceteris paribus" occurred in November 1846 in a letter to the editors of La National newspaper concerning the impact of "good" and "bad" taxes on the economy 2176 and there are half a dozen uses of the term in Economic Harmonies (1850). In this volume Bastiat uses the phrase in the following four articles and essays:

From "On Competition" (JDE, May 1846): 2177

Toutes choses égales d'ailleurs , il y a plus de profits aux travaux dangereux qu'à ceux qui ne le sont pas; aux états qui exigent un long apprentissage et des déboursés longtemps improducti f s, ce qui suppose, dans la famille, le long exercice de certaines vertus, qu'à ceux où suffit la force musculaire; aux professions qui réclament la culture de l'esprit et font naître des goûts délicats, qu'aux métiers où il ne faut que des bras. Tout cela n'est-il pas juste? Or la concurrence établit nécessairement ces distinctions : la société n'a pas besoin qu'un Fourier ou un père Enfantin en décident.

All other things being equal , moreover, there is more profit in dangerous projects than in ones that are not, in trades that require long apprenticeships , and outlays that are unproductive for long periods of time, which assumes the long-term exercise within the family of certain virtues , than in trades where physical strength is all that is needed, or in occupations that require development of the mind a nd give rise to refined tastes than in those that just require manual labor. Is all this not just ? Well, c ompetition of necessity establishes these distinctions; society does not need a Fourier or a father-figure like Enfantin to decide this.

From Capital and Rent (Feb. 1849): 2178

D'après quelle loi s'établit le taux de ces services rémunératoires du prêt ? D'après la loi générale qui règle l'équivalence de tous les services, c'est-à-dire d'après la loi de l'offre et de la demande. Plus une chose est facile à se procurer, moins on rend service en la cédant ou prêtant. L'homme qui me donne un verre d'eau, dans les Pyrénées, ne me rend pas un aussi grand service que celui qui me céderait un verre d'eau, dans le désert de Sahara. S'il y a beaucoup de rabots, de sacs de blé, de maisons dans un pays, on en obtient l'usage ( cæteris paribus ) à des conditions plus favorables que s'il y en a peu, par la simple raison que le prêteur rend en ce cas un moindre service relatif.

What law governs the rate for these repayment services on the loans? The general law that governs the equivalence of all services, that is to say, the law of supply and demand. The easier it is to acquire an item, the less of a service is provided in selling or lending it. A man who gives me a glass of water in the Pyrenees is not providing me with as great a service as one who lets me have a glass of water in the Sahara desert. If there are a great many planes or sacks of wheat or houses in a region, you can obtain the use of them ( coeteris paribus ) on more favorable conditions than if they are scarce, for the simple reason that the lender is providing less of a service relatively speaking .

From Damn Money! (April, 1849): 2179

— Ainsi, selon vous, les trésors qu'on trouve en Californie n'accroîtront pas la richesse du monde ?

— Je ne crois pas qu'ils ajoutent beaucoup aux jouissances, aux satisfactions réelles de l'humanité prise dans son ensemble. Si l'or de la Californie ne fait que remplacer dans le monde celui qui se perd et se détruit, cela peut avoir son utilité. S'il en augmente la masse, il la dépréciera. Les chercheurs d'or seront plus riches qu'ils n'eussent été sans cela. Mais ceux entre les mains de qui se trouvera l'or actuel au moment de la dépréciation, se procureront moins de satisfactions à somme égale. Je ne puis voir là un accroissement, mais un déplacement de la vraie richesse, telle que je l'ai définie.

— Tout cela est fort subtil. Mais vous aurez bien de la peine à me faire comprendre que je ne suis pas plus riche, toutes choses égales d'ailleurs , si j'ai deux écus, que si je n'en ai qu'un.

— Aussi n'est-ce pas ce que je dis.

ABC: So, according to you, the treasure that is being found in California is not increasing the world's wealth?

ABC: All of this is very subtle. But it will be very difficult for you to get me to understand that I am not wealthier, all other things being equal , if I have two écus instead of one.

Economist F*: This is not what I am saying.

From "Abundance" (1850): 2180

On dira peut-être qu'il ne suffit pas que les produits abondent ; qu'il faut encore qu'ils soient équitablement répartis. Rien n'est plus vrai. Mais ne confondons pas les questions. Quand nous défendons l'abondance, quand nos adversaires la décrient, les uns et les autres nous sous-entendons ces mots : cæteris paribus , toutes choses égales d'ailleurs , l'équité dans la répartition étant supposée la même.

Perhaps it might be said that it is not enough for products to be abundant ; they also need to be distributed justly. . Nothing is truer than this. But let us not confuse matters. When we support abundance while our opponents decry it, both sides understand these words: coeteris paribus , all other things being equal, with equity in distribution being assumed to be the same .

We will conclude this discussion of Bastiat's use of the the idea of ceteris paribus with an example of how he applied it to the problem of population growth and the impact of population density on economic development, a topic which occupied him in several essays in this volume. It comes from a letter he wrote to Fontenay during his final months at the spa town of Les Eaux-Bonnes in which he argues that an increasing density of population actually increases the possibilities for greater production instead of reducing them: 2181

Quant à la population, il est incompréhensible que M. Clément m'attaque sur un sujet que je n'ai pas encore abordé ! Et au fond, nier cet axiome : La densité de la population est une facilité de production, c'est nier toute la puissance de l'échange et de la division du travail. De plus c'est nier des faits qui crèvent les yeux. — Sans doute la population s'arrange naturellement de manière à produire le plus possible ; et pour cela, selon l'occurrence, elle diverge ou converge, elle obéit à une double tendance de dissémination et de concentration ; mais plus elle augmente, cœteris paribus , — c'est-à-dire à égalité de vertus, de prévoyance, de dignité, — plus les services se divisent, se rendent facilement, plus chacun tire parti de ses moindres qualités spéciales, etc…

As for population, it is incomprehensible that M. Clément can attack me on a subject that I have not yet tackled! And basically, to deny the axiom that the density of the population is an advantage for production is to deny all the power of trade and the division of labor . What is more, it is to deny facts that are blindingly obvious. Doubtless, populations naturally organize themselves so as to produce as much as possible, and to do this they divide or merge as circumstances require; they obey a double tendency to spread out and to concentrate, but the more they increase, ceteris paribus , that is to say, all their virtues, forward planning, and dignity being equal, the more services become specialised and are more easily provided, the more each person is rewarded for the least of his particular qualities, etc. …

Thus, it appears that Bastiat, like Mill in the English-speaking world, was an independent early adopter of the phrase and it reveals the depth and growing sophistication of his thinking about economic problems and their solution.

A final interesting observation can be made about some comments J.S. Mill made in his essay "On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Philosophical Investigation in that Science" which appeared in the London and Westminster Review (Oct., 1836) which have some striking similarities to Bastiat's ideas about "disturbing factors" which upset the operation of the free market, and his theory of "the seen and the unseen." Their connection with "ceteris paribus" lies in Mill's attempts to identify the effects of multiple causes which influence a given state of society by examining one while holding the others constant (i.e. "other things being equal" at least temporarily), and to warn the observer to be on the lookout for causes which "are not absolutely hidden, perhaps, from any one, but are commonly seen through a mist," or which are only "partial views" of a complex society. As Mill put it:

(The speculative politician) must make a large allowance for the disturbing influence of unforeseen causes, and must carefully watch the result of every experiment, in order that any residuum of facts which his principles did not lead him to expect, and do not enable him to explain, may become the subject of a fresh analysis, and furnish the occasion for a consequent enlargement or correction of his general views. …

With all the precautions which have been indicated there will still be some danger of falling into partial views; but we shall at least have taken the best securities against it. All that we can do more, is to endeavour to be impartial critics of our own theories, and to free ourselves, as far as we are able, from that reluctance from which few inquirers are altogether exempt, to admit the reality or relevancy of any facts which they have not previously either taken into, or left a place open for in, their systems. …

Effects are commonly determined by a concurrence of causes. If we have overlooked any one cause, we may reason justly from all the others, and only be the further wrong. Our premises will be true, and our reasoning correct, and yet the result of no value in the particular case. There is, therefore, almost always room for a modest doubt as to our practical conclusions. …

The principles which we have now stated are by no means alien to common apprehension: they are not absolutely hidden, perhaps, from any one, but are commonly seen through a mist. We might have presented the latter part of them in a phraseology in which they would have seemed the most familiar of truisms: we might have cautioned inquirers against too extensive generalization, and reminded them that there are exceptions to all rules. … The error, when there is error, does not arise from generalizing too extensively; that is, from including too wide a range of particular cases in a single proposition. Doubtless, a man often asserts of an entire class what is only true of a part of it; but his error generally consists not in making too wide an assertion, but in making the wrong kind of assertion: he predicated an actual result, when he should only have predicated a tendency to that result—a power acting with a certain intensity in that direction. … There are two laws, each possibly acting in the whole hundred cases, and bringing about a common effect by their conjunct operation. If the force which, being the less conspicuous of the two, is called the disturbing force, prevails sufficiently over the other force in some one case, to constitute that case what is commonly called an exception, the same disturbing force probably acts as a modifying cause in many other cases which no one will call exceptions. 2182

Disturbing and Restorative Factors

Central to Bastiat's economic theory is the idea that, if left unmolested by government intervention or violence by other individuals, human societies have a tendency to follow a path towards economic development which was "pacifique, régulier et progressif" (peaceful, steady, and progressive). 2183 He believed that society would reach a "just" and "harmonious" state of equilibrium as a result of the operation of the natural economic laws, which the economists had identified and studied, as well as the behaviour of human beings who had a common and observable nature. The natural economic laws which the economists had identified included such things as "the law of population growth" and the "law of supply and demand." The nature of human beings which affected their economic behaviour included such things as self-interest (which Bastiat believed was "le mobile interne" (the internal driving force) of human action), the desire to avoid hard work wherever possible, to economise on the use of their scarce resources, and to satisfy their needs by working and trading with others. Of course, he was aware that societies rarely pursued the peaceful, steady, and progressive path towards economic development without interruption, and this is where his theory of "les causes/forces perturbatrices" (disturbing factors or forces) came into play to explain these deviations from peace and prosperity. Also related to this was his countervailing theory of "les causes/forces réparatrices" (restorative factors or forces) which gradually took effect to move the world back towards its "just" and "harmonious" state.

One source for Bastiat's thinking on this topic came from the mathematical work of Laplace 2184 in accounting for the perturbations in the orbits of Saturn, Jupiter, and the moon which seemed to violate the idea of some presumed "l'harmonie céleste" (celestial harmony). In the gravitational tug of war between the planetary giants of Jupiter and Saturn and the smaller objects in space it appeared that the disturbing forces exerted by the giants would pluck the smaller objects from their course and send them crashing into the sun. Laplace's mathematical analysis of these "celestial mechanics" showed that the perturbations oscillated in a predicable way and that "restorative forces" were at work to keep them in orbit. Bastiat applied these Laplacian ideas for the first time to economics in his "Letter to Lamartine" written in February 1845.

Among "les forces perturbatrices" (disturbing forces) which upset the harmony of the free market Bastiat included war, slavery, theocratic plunder, high and unequal taxes, government regulations, economic privileges, industrial subsidies, and tariffs. This idea was so important that Bastiat intended to devote a chapter to it in his treatise Economic Harmonies which was never completed, 2185 and an entire volume to follow it on "A History of Plunder" or what have also been entitled with some justification "Economic Disharmonies." 2186 He first began talking about disturbing forces in the seminal article he wrote in response to Lamartine's defence of the idea of the "right to a job" in February 1845 on the eve of his coming to Paris to meet with the Economists. Bastiat's reply to the charge that workers were unemployed and poor through no fault of their own and "society" had an obligation to assist them, was to argue that they were poor because of the disturbing forces previously introduced by the state into the smooth functioning of the free market through war, tariffs and taxes on food, and restrictions which hampered the growth of industry. Increasing taxes and regulations to help some of the poor would be at the expence of the broader society of workers and consumers and would not solve the original problem caused by high taxes and too many regulations. If these taxes and regulations were cut, Bastiat believed, there were self-correcting mechanisms within the free market system, what he called "les forces réparatrices" (repairing or restorative forces) or "la force curative" (the curative or healing force), 2187 driven ultimately by the motive of self-interest, whereby the market would begin to restore economic equilibrium after it had been upset by "les forces perturbatrices" (disturbing forces). As he pointed out to Lamartine:

L'économie des sociétés a eu aussi ses Laplace. S'il y a des perturbations sociales, ils ont aussi constaté l'existence de forces providentielles qui ramènent tout à l'équilibre, et ils ont trouvé que ces forces réparatrices se proportionnent aux forces perturbatrices, parce qu'elles en proviennent. Ravis d'admiration devant cette harmonie du monde moral, ils ont dû se passionner pour l'œuvre divine et répugner plus que les autres hommes à tout ce qui peut la troubler. Aussi n'a-t-on jamais vu, que je sache, les séductions de l'intérêt privé balancer dans leur cœur cet éternel objet de leur admiration et de leur amour.

Thus he was firmly convinced that economic "liberty tended to restore equilibrium" only if it were allowed to function. As he stated in EH1 Chapter VIII "Private Property and Communal Property" the pursuit of individual self-interest and the operation of natural economic laws was like a form of internal "gravitation" which would propel society towards greater equality, economic progress, and harmony in only it were left free to do so: 2188

Quand nous admirons la loi providentielle des transactions, quand nous disons que les intérêts concordent, quand nous en concluons que leur gravitation naturelle tend à réaliser l'égalité relative et le progrès général, apparemment c'est de l'action de ces lois et non de leur perturbation que nous attendons l'harmonie. Quand nous disons : laissez faire, apparemment nous entendons dire : laissez agir ces lois, et non pas : laissez troubler ces lois.

When we admire the providential law governing transactions, when we say that interests are in agreement, when we conclude from this that their natural gravitation tends to achieve relative equality and general progress, it is clearly from the action of these laws and not from their disruption that we expect harmony. When we say: laissez faire, we clearly mean to say: let these laws act, and not let these laws be disrupted.

Bastiat did not return to the topic until he was preparing his draft chapters "On Population" and "Competition" sometime during 1849 for publication in EH1 in early 1850. He added several important sentences on disturbing forces which were not in the original 1846 JDE articles. For example, to the article "On Population" he added the following passage: 2189

La guerre, l'esclavage, les impostures théocratiques, les priviléges, les monopoles, les restrictions, les abus de l'impôt, voilà les manifestations les plus saillantes de la spoliation. On comprend quelle influence des forces perturbatrices d'une aussi vaste étendue ont dû avoir et ont encore, par leur présence ou leurs traces profondes, sur l'inégalité des conditions ; nous essayerons plus tard d'en mesurer l'énorme portée.

War, slavery, theocratic deception, privilege, monopoly, trade restrictions, tax abuses, are all the most obvious examples of plunder. It is easy to understand the influence that such wide-ranging disturbing forces must have had and still have on the inequality of situations by their very presence or the deep-rooted traces they leave. Later, we will endeavor to measure their huge effect.

In the chapter on "Competition" he added the following passage: 2190

J'expose maintenant des lois générales que je crois harmoniques, et j'ai la confiance que le lecteur commence à se douter aussi que ces lois existent, qu'elles agissent dans le sens de la communauté et par conséquent de l'égalité. Mais je n'ai pas nié que l'action de ces lois ne fût profondément troublée par des causes perturbatrices . Si donc nous rencontrons en ce moment un fait choquant d'inégalité, comment le pourrions-nous juger avant de connaître et les lois régulières de l'ordre social et les causes perturbatrices de ces lois ?

There was another kind of distortion or disturbance which Bastiat talked about which took place in capital and labor markets as a result of government intervention in the economy, namely when "la population et le travail (sont) législativement déplacés" (people and labour are legislatively displaced or dislocated). 2191 As a consequence of prohibiting or taxing foreign imports entire industries are built behind the protection of the tariff wall drawing in capital and labour where they would not have gone if the wall were not there. Capital for the protected industries like woollen manufacturers is diverted from other industries such as farming. There has been no increase in the amount of productive capital. Some workers in the new industries might benefit from wages (the seen) but others lose out because they have to pay higher prices for clothes (the unseen). As he stated in a speech for the Free Trade Association in Lyon in August 1847: 2192

Donc, d'où sort ce capital ? Le soleil ou la lune l'ont-ils envoyé mêlé à leurs rayons, et ces rayons ont-ils fourni au creuset l'or et l'argent, emblèmes de ces astres ? ou bien l'a-t-on trouvé au fond de l'urne d'où est sortie la loi restrictive ? Rien de semblable. Ce capital n'a pas une origine mystérieuse ou miraculeuse. Il a déserté d'autres industries, par exemple, la fabrication des soieries. N'importe d'où il soit sorti, et il est positivement sorti de quelque part, de l'agriculture, du commerce et des chemins de fer, là, il a certainement découragé l'industrie, le travail et les salaires, justement dans la même proportion où il les a encouragés dans la fabrication du drap. — En sorte que vous voyez, Messieurs, que le capital ou une certaine portion de capital ayant été simplement déplacé, sans accroissement quelconque, la part du salaire reste parfaitement la même. Il est impossible de voir, dans ce pur remue-ménage (passez-moi la vulgarité du mot), aucun profit pour la classe ouvrière. Mais, a-t-elle perdu ? Non, elle n'a pas perdu du côté des salaires (si ce n'est par les inconvénients qu'entraîne la perturbation, inconvénients qu'on ne remarque pas quand il s'agit d'établir un abus, mais dont on fait grand bruit et auxquels les protectionnistes s'attachent avec des dents de boule-dogues quand il est question de l'extirper) ; la classe ouvrière n'a rien perdu ni gagné du côté du salaire, puisque le capital n'a été augmenté ni diminué, mais seulement déplacé. Mais reste toujours cette cherté du drap que j'ai constatée tout à l'heure, que je vous ai signalée comme l'effet immédiat, inévitable, incontestable de la mesure ; et à présent, je vous le demande, à cette perte, à cette injustice qui frappe l'ouvrier, où est la compensation ? Si quelqu'un en sait une, qu'il me la signale.

So where does this capital come from? Have the sun and moon sent it down mixed with their rays and have these rays poured gold and silver, the symbols of these two heavenly bodies, into the crucible? … It has been taken from other industries, silk manufacture, for example. No matter where it has come from, it has definitely come from somewhere, from farming, commerce, or the railways, where it has certainly discouraged industry, labor, and rates of pay , in exactly the same proportion that it has encouraged these things in woolen cloth manufacture. So that you see, Gentlemen, that since capital or a certain proportion of capital has simply been displaced , without any increase whatever, the share of pay remains exactly the same. It is impossible to see in this pure jiggery-pokery (forgive me this homely expression) any benefit for the working class. But has it lost anything? No, it has lost nothing from the point of view of pay (other than the disadvantages produced by the upheaval, which are not noticed when it is a question of establishing an abuse but which are trumpeted far and wide and to which protectionists cling like bulldogs when it is a question of eliminating one); the working class has neither gained nor lost with regard to pay since capital has neither been increased nor decreased, but merely displaced . But there still remains the high price of woolen cloth that I noted just now and that I pointed out as being the immediate, inevitable and indisputable effect of the measure, and now I put the question to you, where is the compensation for this loss and injustice inflicted on workers? If anyone has the answer, please let me know.

Great Market: Society is one Great Market or Bazaar

Building upon Destutt de Tracy's view that society could be understood as "nothing but a continual succession of exchanges," 2193 Bastiat came to the conclusion that society as a whole was just one big market place or bazaar. As a result of growing trade and the potential to expand this even further with policies of free trade which were in the air in the 1840s there was increasingly what he called "le marché général du monde" (the general market place of the world), or what we might call today a "global market." Marvelling at the bounty of goods imported from all over the world was a common rhetorical device used by free traders at this time. It was probably invented by Adam Smith who used it to good effect in his story of the ordinary worker's woollen jacket and later adopted in another form and made very popular by an orator of the Anti-Corn Law League, William J. Fox (1786-1864). 2194

In Smith's telling of the story he makes the point that "that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people" such as "the most common artificer or day-labourer." He goes on to say: 2195

Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or day-labourer in a civilized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people of whose industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation, exceeds all computation. The woollen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country! how much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world! What a variety of labour too is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen! To say nothing of such complicated machines as the ship of the sailor, the mill of the fuller, or even the loom of the weaver, let us consider only what a variety of labour is requisite in order to form that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool. The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore, the feller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smelting-house, the brick-maker, the brick-layer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the mill-wright, the forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in order to produce them. Were we to examine, in the same manner, all the different parts of his dress and household furniture, the coarse linen shirt which he wears next his skin, the shoes which cover his feet, the bed which he lies on, and all the different parts which compose it, the kitchen-grate at which he prepares his victuals, the coals which he makes use of for that purpose, dug from the bowels of the earth, and brought to him perhaps by a long sea and a long land carriage, all the other utensils of his kitchen, all the furniture of his table, the knives and forks, the earthen or pewter plates upon which he serves up and divides his victuals, the different hands employed in preparing his [14] bread and his beer, the glass window which lets in the heat and the light, and keeps out the wind and the rain, with all the knowledge and art requisite for preparing that beautiful and happy invention, without which these northern parts of the world could scarce have afforded a very comfortable habitation, together with the tools of all the different workmen employed in producing those different conveniencies; if we examine, I say, all these things, and consider what a variety of labour is employed about each of them, we shall be sensible that without the assistance and co-operation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilized country could not be provided, even according to, what we very falsely imagine, the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated. Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.

By the 1840s when the Anti-Corn Law League was in full swing William Fox used a similar story to mock the anti-free trade large landowners who, like everybody else in England, were already heavily dependent on goods made by foreigners, even before free trade had become government policy in 1846. On 25 January 1844 he have a speech at Covent Garden Theatre which become so popular that it was reprinted and circulated as part of the Anti-Corn Law League's propaganda. Bastiat quoted from this speech at length in his book Cobden and the League (1845) and highlighted it by italicizing the names of the countries from which all the products came from. This is the original version from Fox's speech (emphasis added):

... It is a favourite theme, this independence of foreigners. One would imagine that the patriotism of the landlord's breast must be most intense. Yet he seems to forget that he is employing guano to manure his fields; that he is spreading a foreign surface over his English soil, through which every atom of corn is to grow; becoming thereby polluted with the dependence upon foreigners which he professes to abjure.

To what is he left, this disclaimer against foreigners and advocate of dependence upon home? Trace him through his career. This was very admirably done by an honourable gentleman, who just now addressed you, at the Salisbury contest. His opponent urged this plea, and Mr. Bouverie stripped him, as it were, from head to foot, that he had not an article of dress upon him which did not render him in some degree dependent upon foreigners. We will pursue this subject, and trace his whole life. What is the career of the man whose possessions are in broad acres? Why, a French cook dresses his dinner for him, and a Swiss valet dresses him for dinner; he hands down his lady, decked with pearls that never grew in the shell of a British oyster; and her waving plume of ostrich-feathers certainly never formed the tail of a barn-door fowl. The viands of his table are from all the countries of the world; his wines are from the banks of the Rhine and the Rhone . In his conservatory, he regales his sight with the blossoms of South-American flowers. In his smoking room, he gratifies his scent with the weed of North America . His favourite horse is of Arabian blood; his pet dog of the St. Bernard 's breed. His gallery is rich with pictures from the Flemish school, and his statues from Greece . For his amusements, he goes to hear Italian singers warble German music, followed by a French ballet. If he rises to judicial honours, the ermine which decorates his shoulders is a production that was never before on the back of a British beast. His very mind is not English in its attainments; it is a mere picnic of foreign contributions. His poems and philosophy are from Greece and Rome ; his geometry is from Alexandria ; his arithmetic is from Arabia ; and his religion from Palestine . In his cradle, in his infancy, he rubbed his gums with coral from Oriental oceans; and when he dies, his monument will be sculptured in marble from the quarries of Carrara . 2196

Not surprisingly Bastiat also liked to talk about "le grande marché" (the great market or market place, or "the great market place of society" as FEE translates it), 2197 as in "le grand marché où toutes les classes portent leurs services respectifs, où s'échangent les travaux de diverses natures" (the great market place to which all the classes bring their respective services and in which labor of a variety of kinds is exchanged). 2198 In his speeches for the Free Trade Association he liked to use a more colorful expression, that of a "bazaar," which suggested something more exotic, oriental, and perhaps more unstructured than the traditional market places of London or Paris. He talked about "un vaste bazar" (a vast bazaar). Like Fox, he described the world market in this way, stating in September 1846 that "Le monde, au point de vue économique, peut être considéré comme un vaste bazar où chacun de nous apporte ses services et reçoit en retour" (From the economic point of view, the world can be considered to be a vast bazaar to which each of us can bring our services and receive others in return); 2199 or in his unpublished note from 1849 on "The Mutuality of Services" where he talks about society in a way reminiscent of Destutt de Tracy, that "la société peut être considérée comme un immense bazar où chacun va d'abord déposer ses produits, en faire reconnaître et fixer la valeur" (society may be thought of as a huge bazaar to which everyone initially brings their products, and has their value acknowledged and set). 2200

In the latter sketch, probably written at the time when Bastiat was engaged in his debate with Proudhon over interest and rent, 2201 he responds to another of Proudhon's plans to create a permanent "Société de l'Exposition" (Exposition Company) to enable workers to better buy and sell their goods and labor. It would be modelled on the Great Exposition which was being planned for London in 1851 but run and organised by workers themselves. Proudhon predicted that this would become "un magnifique bazar" (a magnificent bazaar) where workers could display their wares themselves, cut out the parasitic middlemen such as retailers and merchants, and bring more order to the chaos of the free market. 2202 Bastiat's response to Proudhon was that this is exactly what the free market was already providing with the expanding global market and free trade, thereby creating what he called "ce bazar d'échange" (this trading bazaar). To quote his conclusion from his note:

Nous avons donc exactement ce que demandait M. Proudhon. Nous avons ce bazar d'échange, dont on a tant ri ; et la société, plus ingénieuse que M. Proudhon, nous le donne en nous épargnant le dérangement matériel d'y transporter nos marchandises. Pour cela, elle a inventé la monnaie, moyennant quoi elle réalise l'entrepôt à domicile.

We thus have exactly what Mr. Proudhon was asking for. We have this trading bazaar, which has been so laughed at, and society, which is more ingenious than Mr. Proudhon, gives us this bazaar while sparing us the inconvenience of having to physically take our goods to it. To achieve this, it has invented money, by means of which it creates an entrepôt (trading post) in (one's own) home.

Interestingly, Bastiat wrote his own version of William Fox's paean to global trade with his story of the simple "un menuisier de village" (village carpenter) in his article on "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (January 1848) which he also used as a chapter in EH1. Here he marvels at how economically interdependent every individual is, depending on others for the building of the roads, the food supply, and teaching their children, as well as on foreign trade since, taking the example of an item of clothing, "Americans need to have produced cotton, Indians indigo, Frenchmen wool and linen, and Brazilians leather." 2203 He attributes this extraordinary bounty and the extensive coordination of activity to "le mécanisme social" (the social mechanism) which became an important part of his economic and social theory. 2204

Prenons un homme appartenant à une classe modeste de la société, un menuisier de village, par exemple, et observons tous les services qu'il rend '_ société et tous ceux qu'il en reçoit; nous ne tarderons pas à re frappés de l'énorme disproportion apparente.	Let us take a man who belongs to a modest class in society, a village carpenter, for example, and let us observe all the services he provides to society and all those he receives from it; it will not take us long to be struck by the enormous apparent disproportion.
Cet homme passe sa journée à raboter des planches, monter des bois de lits, fabriquer des tables et des armoires; il se plaint de sa condition, et cependant que reçoit-il en réalité de cette société, en échange de son travail?	This man spends his day sanding planks and making tables and wardrobes; he complains about his situation and yet what does he receive from this same society in return for his work?
D'abord, tous les jours en se levant, il s'habille et il n'a personnellement fait aucune des nombreuses pièces de son vêtement. Or, pour . que ces vêtements, tout simples qu'ils sont, soient à sa disposition, il faut qu'une énorme quantité de travail, d'industrie, de transports, d'inventions ingénieuses, aient été accomplis. Il faut que des Américains aient produit du coton, que des Indiens aient produit de l'indigo, que des Français aient produit de la laine et du lin, que des Brésiliens aient produit des cuirs, que tous ces matériaux aient été transportés en certains lieux, qu'ils y aient été ouvrés, filés, tissés, teints, etc.	First of all, each day when he gets up he dresses, and he has not personally made any of the many items of his outfit. However, for these garments, however simple, to be at his disposal, an enormous amount of work, industry, transport, and ingenious invention needs to have been accomplished. Americans need to have produced cotton, Indians indigo, Frenchmen wool and linen, and Brazilians leather. All these materials need to have been transported to a variety of towns, worked, spun, woven, dyed, etc.
Ensuite il déjeune. Pour que le pain qu'il mange lui arrive tous les matins, il faut que des terres aient été défrichées, closes, labourées, fumées, ensemencées; il faut que les récoltes aient été préservées avec soin du pillage; il faut qu'une certaine sécurité ait régné au milieu d'une innombrable multitude; il faut que le froment ait été récolté, broyé, pétri et préparé; il faut que le fer, l'acier, le bois, la pierre, aient été convertis par le travail en instruments de travail; que certains hommes se soient emparés de la force des animaux, d'autres du poids d'une chute d'eau, etc.; toutes choses dont chacune, prise isolément, suppose une masse incalculable de travail mies en jeu, non-seulement dans l'espace, mais dans le temps.	He then has breakfast. In order for the bread he eats to arrive each morning, land had to be cleared, fenced, ploughed, fertilized, and sown. Harvests had to be stored and protected from pillage. A degree of security had to reign over an immense multitude of people. Wheat had to be harvested, ground, kneaded, and prepared. Iron, steel, wood, and stone had to be changed by human labor into tools. Some men had to make use of the strength of animals, others the weight of a waterfall, etc.; all things each of which, taken singly, implies an incalculable mass of labor put to work , not only in space but also in time.
Cet homme ne passera pas la journée sans employer un peu de sucre, un peu d'huile, quelques ustensiles.	This man will not spend his day without using a little sugar, a little oil, or a few utensils.
Il enverra son fils à l'école, et là l'enfant recevra une instruction, qui, quoique bornée, n'e'n suppose pas moins des recherches, des études antérieures, des connaissances dont l'imagination est effrayée.	He will send his son to school to receive instruction, which although limited, nonetheless implies research, previous studies, and knowledge which would startle the imagination.
Il sort; il trouve une rue pavée et éclairée.	He goes out and finds a road that is paved and lit.
On lui conteste une propriété : il trouvera des avocats pour défendre ses droits, des juges pour l'y maintenir, des officiers de justice pour faire exécuter la sentence; toutes choses qui supposent encore des Connaissances acquises, par conséquent des lumières et des moyens d'existence.	His ownership of a piece of property is contested; he will find lawyers to defend his rights, judges to maintain them, officers of the court to carry out the judgment, all of which once again imply acquired knowledge, and consequently understanding and a certain standard of living.
Il va à l'église: elle est un monument prodigieux, et le livre qu'il y porte est un monument peut-être plus prodigieux encore de l'intelligence humaine. On lui enseigne la morale, on éclaire son esprit, un élève son âme; et, pour que tout cela se fasse, il faut qu'un autre homme ait pu recueillir dans une bibliothèque, dans des séminaires, toutes les sources de la tradition humaine, et pour cela qu'il ait pu vivre sans rien faire pour pourvoir directement aux besoins de son corps.	He goes to church; it is a prodigious monument and the book he carries is a monument to human intelligence perhaps more prodigious still. He is taught morality, his mind is enlightened, his soul elevated, and in order for all this to happen, another man had to be able to go to libraries and seminaries and draw on all the sources of the human tradition; he had to have been able to live without taking direct care of his bodily needs.
Si notre menuisier [artisan in EH1, and EH2] entreprend un voyage, il trouve que, pour lui épargner du temps et diminuer sa peine, d'autres hommes ont aplani, nivelé le sol, comblé des vallées, abaissé des montagnes, amoindri tous les frottements, placé des véhicules à roues sur des blocs de grès ou des bandes de fer, dompté les chevaux ou la vapeur, etc.	If our craftsman sets out on a journey, he finds that, to save him time and increase his comfort, other men have flattened and leveled the ground, filled in the valleys, lowered the mountains, spanned the rivers, increased the smooth passage on the route, set wheeled vehicles on paving stones or iron rails, and mastered the use of horses, steam, etc.
Il est impossible de ne pas être frappé de la disproportion véritablement incommensurable qui existe entre les satisfactions que cet homme puise dans la société et celles qu'il pourrait se donner s'il était réduit à ses propres forces. J'ose dire que, dans une seule journée, il consomme des choses qu'il ne pourrait produire lui—même dans dix siècles.	It is impossible not to be struck by the truly immeasurable disproportion that exists between the satisfactions drawn by this man from society and those he would be able to provide for himself if he were to be limited to his own resources. I am bold enough to say that in a single day, he consumes things he would not be able to produce by himself in ten centuries.
Ce qui rend le phénomène plus étrange encore, c'est que tous les autres hommes sont dans le même cas que lui. Chacun de ceux qui composent la société a absorbé des millions de fois plus qu'il n'aurait pu produire; et cependant ils ne se sont rien dérobé mutuellement. Et si l'on regarde les choses de près, on s'aperçoit que ce menuisier a payé en services tous les services qui lui ont été rendus. S'il tenait ses comptes avec une rigoureuse exactitude, on se convaincrait qu'il n'a rien reçu sans le payer au moyen de sa modeste industrie ; que quiconque a été employé à son service, dans le temps ou dans l'espace, a reçu ou recevra sa rémunération.	What makes the phenomenon stranger still is that all other men are in the same situation as he. Each one of those who make up society has absorbed a million times more than he would have been able to produce; nevertheless they have not robbed each other of anything. And if we examine things more closely, we see that this carpenter has paid in services for all the services he has been rendered. If he kept his accounts with rigorous accuracy we would be convinced that he has received nothing that he has not paid for by means of his modest industry, and that whoever has been employed in his service, either at any time or in a given period, has received or will receive his remuneration.
Il faut donc que le mécanisme social soit bien ingénieux, bien puissant, puisqu'il conduit à ce singulier résultat, que chaque homme, même celui que le sort a placé dans la condition la plus humble, a plus de satisfactions en un jour qu'il n'en pourrait produire en plusieurs siècles.	For this reason, the social mechanism needs to be either very ingenious or very powerful since it leads to this strange result, that each man, even he whom fate has placed in the humblest of conditions, receives more satisfaction in a single day than he could produce in several centuries.
Ce n'est pas tout, et ce mécanisme social paraîtra bien plus ingénieux encore, si le lecteur veut bien tourner ses regards sur lui-même.	That is not all, and this social mechanism will appear still more ingenious, if the reader would just consider his own case.

It would appear that Bastiat's story has much in common with Leonard Read's famous story of "I, Pencil" (1958), so it would not be out of place to call his "I, Carpenter" as a mark of respect to Read. 2205

Harmony and Disharmony

Introduction: The Harmony of the Providential Plan

The idea of "harmony" and "disharmony" in the social and economic realm was a central component of Bastiat's social theory, in which he referred to some version or other of the words "harmony" or "harmonious" over 500 times in his work. Since Voltaire popularised the work of Newton in France in 1738 2206 it was a commonplace to believe that the universe was a mechanism which was governed by natural laws like that of gravitation which produced "une harmonie céleste" (a celestial harmony) or what he also called "des harmonies de la mécanique céleste" (the harmonies of the celestial machine or mechanism). Closer to Bastiat's own time he was very well aware of the work of the French mathematicians and astronomers Laplace in the first decade of the 19th century and François Arago in the 1840s. 2207 From seeing the important role discoverable natural laws played in the harmonious operation of the stars, or "des harmonieuses et simples lois de la Providence" (harmonious and simple laws of Providence), it was only a short mental jump for a deist like Bastiat to seeing them at work in the social realm as well. This is very clearly stated in the concluding paragraph of Bastiat's essay "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (Jan. 1848) where he also makes the important observation that in the social universe the "atoms" which obey these laws are thinking, acting, and choosing individuals: 2208

Ne condamnons pas ainsi l'humanité avant d'en avoir étudié les lois, les forces, les énergies, les tendances. Depuis qu'il eut reconnu l'attraction, Newton ne prononçait plus le nom de Dieu sans se découvrir. Autant l'intelligence est au-dessus de la matière, autant le monde social est au-dessus de celui qu'admirait Newton, car la mécanique céleste obéit à des lois dont elle n'a pas la conscience. Combien plus-de raison aurons-nous de nous incliner devant la Sagesse éternelle à l'aspect de la mécanique sociale, où vit aussi la pensée universelle, mens agitat molem, mais qui présente de plus ce phénomène extraordinaire que chaque atome est un être animé, pensant, doué de cette énergie merveilleuse, de ce principe de tente moralité, de toute dignité, de tout progrès, attribut exclusif de l'homme, la liberté!

Let us not condemn the human race in this way before having examined its laws, forces, energies, and tendencies. From the time he recognized gravity, Newton no longer pronounced the name of God without taking his hat off. Just as much as "the mind is above matter," the social world is above the (physical) one admired by Newton, for celestial mechanics obey laws of which it is not aware. How much more reason (then) would we have to bow down before eternal wisdom (and also universal thought) as we contemplate the social mechanism (and see there how) "the mind moves matter" (mens agitat molem). Here is displayed the extraordinary phenomenon that each atom (in this social mechanism) is a living, thinking being, endowed with that marvelous energy, with that source of all morality, of all dignity, of all progress, an attribute which is exclusive to man, namely FREEDOM!

Bastiat believed that it was part of "le plan providentiel" (the providential plan) that human beings were endowed with certain patterns of behaviour or internal drives (les mobiles) such as the pursuit of self-interest, the avoidance of pain or hardship and the seeking of pleasure or well-being, free will, the ability to plan for the future, and to choose from among alternatives that are presented to them. Or in other words, that mankind had a certain "nature." These were all part of the natural laws which governed human behaviour and made economies operate in the way that they did. His conclusion was that if human beings were allowed to go about their lives freely and in the absence of government or other forms of coercion the result would be a "harmonious society." In a very revealing passage in the essay on "Capital and Rent" (Feb. 1849) he links Newton and Laplace, the cogs and wheels of the social mechanism, the "mobile" or driving force of society, and the providential plan in his paean to the benefits of leisure: 2209

Mais voyez ! le loisir n'est-il pas un ressort essentiel dans la mécanique sociale ? sans lui, il n'y aurait jamais eu dans le monde ni de Newton, ni de Pascal, ni de Fénelon ; l'humanité ne connaîtrait ni les arts, ni les sciences, ni ces merveilleuses inventions préparées, à l'origine, par des investigations de pure curiosité ; la pensée serait inerte, l'homme ne serait pas perfectible. D'un autre côté, si le loisir ne se pouvait expliquer que par la spoliation et l'oppression, s'il était un bien dont on ne peut jouir qu'injustement et aux dépens d'autrui, il n'y aurait pas de milieu entre ces deux maux : ou l'humanité serait réduite à croupir dans la vie végétative et stationnaire, dans l'ignorance éternelle, par l'absence d'un des rouages de son mécanisme ; ou bien, elle devrait conquérir ce rouage au prix d'une inévitable injustice et offrir de toute nécessité le triste spectacle, sous une forme ou une autre, de l'antique classification des êtres humains en Maîtres et en Esclaves. Je défie qu'on me signale, dans cette hypothèse, une autre alternative. Nous serions réduits à contempler le plan providentiel qui gouverne la société avec le regret de penser qu'il présente une déplorable lacune. Le mobile du progrès y serait oublié, ou, ce qui est pis, ce mobile ne serait autre que l'injustice elle-même. — Mais non, Dieu n'a pas laissé une telle lacune dans son œuvre de prédilection. Gardons-nous de méconnaître sa sagesse et sa puissance ; que ceux dont les méditations incomplètes ne peuvent expliquer la légitimité du loisir, imitent du moins cet astronome qui disait : À tel point du ciel, il doit exister une planète qu'on finira par découvrir, car sans elle le monde céleste n'est pas harmonie, mais discordance.

By expressing myself in this way, I know that I am upsetting a great many preconceived ideas, but look, is not leisure an essential spring in the social mechanism? Without it there would never have been any Newtons, Pascals, or Fénélons in the world; the human race would have no knowledge of art, the sciences, nor any of the marvelous inventions originally made by investigation out of pure curiosity. Thought would be inert, and man would not have the ability to advance. On the other hand, if leisure could be explained only as a function of plunder and oppression, if it were a benefit that could be enjoyed only unjustly and at the expense of others, there would be no middle way between two evils: either the human race would be reduced to squatting in a vegetative and immobile life, in eternal ignorance because one of the cog wheels in its mechanism was missing, or it would have to conquer this cog wheel at the price of inevitable injustice and be obliged to offer the world the sorry sight in one form or another of the division of human beings into masters and slaves as in classical times. I challenge anyone to suggest an alternative outcome within the terms of this analysis. We would be reduced to contemplating the providential plan that orders society with the regretful thought that something is very sadly missing. The driving force of progress would either have been forgotten, or what is worse, this driving force would constitute nothing other than injustice itself. But no, God has not left out an element like this from his creation. Let us be careful to acknowledge fully his wisdom and power. Let those whose imperfect thinking fails to explain the legitimacy of leisure at least echo that astronomer who said: "At a certain point in the heavens there has to be a planet which we will one day discover, for without it the celestial world is not harmony but disharmony."

The Harmony of Natural Laws

In addition to the astronomical and Providential sources of his thinking about harmony there is the strong tradition within French political economy of natural law both as a justification for the ownership of property and for the freedom to produce and trade with others. This notion of natural law was more than a moral or legal justification for certain practices and institutions but also a explanation of how those practices and institutions arose in the course of history and how they operated in the present. We can trace ideas about the existence of natural laws within economics in France back to the Physiocrats such as François Quesnay, the work of Jean-Baptiste Say, and many of the Paris school of economists with whom Bastiat worked, especially Gustave de Molinari. The latter developed the most complete and elaborate theory of the natural laws which governed the economic realm in his popular book Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare which had as its subtitle the very revealing sentence "entretiens sur les lois économiques et défense de la propriété" (discussions about economic laws and the defence of property) 2210 and then in later works such as Les Lois naturelles de l'économie politique (1887) in which he summarised his life's work on this topic. 2211 Molinari believed that there were at least six major "natural laws of economics" on which he elaborated at some length over many decades. 2212 Bastiat belonged in this tradition with his ideas about the economic natural laws such as the law of supply and demand and Malthusian population growth.

Bastiat may well have also been influenced by Scottish thinkers like Adam Ferguson who understood how complex social and economic structures might emerge as "the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design" simply by allowing the "harmonious laws" which governed society to come into play. 2213 Bastiat did not quote Ferguson directly but Ferguson was well known to the Paris economists as his book on The History of Civil Society was translated into French shortly after it appeared and his work was praised in an entry on him in the JDE. 2214 It is not hard to hear echoes of Ferguson's ideas about spontaneous and harmonious orders in Bastiat's well known discussion of the feeding of Paris: 2215

En entrant dans Paris, que je suis venu visiter, je me disais : Il y a là un million d'êtres humains qui mourraient tous en peu de jours si des approvisionnements de toute nature n'affluaient vers cette vaste métropole. L'imagination s'effraie quand elle veut apprécier l'immense multiplicité d'objets qui doivent entrer demain par ses barrières, sous peine que la vie de ses habitants ne s'éteigne dans les convulsions de la famine, de l'émeute et du pillage. Et cependant tous dorment en ce moment sans que leur paisible sommeil soit troublé un seul instant par l'idée d'une aussi effroyable perspective. D'un autre côté, quatre-vingts départements ont travaillé aujourd'hui, sans se concerter, sans s'entendre, à l'approvisionnement de Paris. Comment chaque jour amène-t-il ce qu'il faut, rien de plus, rien de moins, sur ce gigantesque marché ? Quelle est donc l'ingénieuse et secrète puissance qui préside à l'étonnante régularité de mouvements si compliqués, régularité en laquelle chacun a une foi si insouciante, quoiqu'il y aille du bien-être et de la vie ? Cette puissance, c'est un principe absolu, le principe de la liberté des transactions. Nous avons foi en cette lumière intime que la Providence a placée au cœur de tous les hommes, à qui elle a confié la conservation et l'amélioration indéfinie de notre espèce, l'intérêt, puisqu'il faut l'appeler par son nom, si actif, si vigilant, si prévoyant, quand il est libre dans son action. Où en seriez-vous, habitants de Paris, si un ministre s'avisait de substituer à cette puissance les combinaisons de son génie, quelque supérieur qu'on le suppose ? s'il imaginait de soumettre à sa direction suprême ce prodigieux mécanisme, d'en réunir tous les ressorts en ses mains, de décider par qui, où, comment, à quelles conditions chaque chose doit être produite, transportée, échangée et consommée ?

On entering Paris, which I had come to visit, I said to myself: Here there are a million human beings who would all die in a few days if supplies of all sorts did not flood into this huge metropolis. The mind boggles when it tries to assess the huge variety of objects that have to enter through its gates tomorrow if the lives of its inhabitants are not to be snuffed out in convulsions of famine, uprisings, and pillage. And in the meantime everyone is asleep, without their peaceful slumber being troubled for an instant by the thought of such a frightful prospect. On the other hand, eighty departments have worked today without being in concert and without agreement to supply Paris. How does it happen that every day what is needed and no more or less is brought to this gigantic market? What is thus the ingenious and secret power that presides over the astonishing regularity of such complicated movements, a regularity in which everyone has such blind faith, although well-being and life depend on it? This power is an absolute principle, the principle of free commerce. We have faith in this intimate light that Providence has placed in the hearts of all men to whom it has entrusted the indefinite preservation and progress of our species, self-interest, for we must give it its name, that is so active, vigilant, and farsighted when it is free to act. Where would you be, you inhabitants of Paris, if a minister took it into his head to substitute the arrangements he had thought up, however superior they are thought to be, for this power? Or if he took it into his head to subject this stupendous mechanism to his supreme management, to gather together all these economic activities in his own hands, to decide by whom, how, or under what conditions each object has to be produced, transported, traded and consumed?

As is clear from this passage and the one above on leisure, Bastiat believed that Providence (sometimes God) had created an ordered and harmonious world which operated according to discoverable natural laws, such as gravitation, and then stepped back to let it operate on its own. The human equivalent of gravitation was for Bastiat "le moteur social" (the social driving force) of self-interest. 2216 There is no evidence to think that Bastiat thought Providence or God had intervened in human life at any time since then. The world which had been created was more of a stately Newtonian clockwork-like universe (or mechanism) with regular behaviour which could be studied and from which "natural laws" governing its operation could be discovered by social theorists like economists. One might term this a theory of "harmonious design" rather than of "intelligent design." From our perspective today, this view of a rather static and not dynamic universe is rather naive as the universe is known to be a violent and "disharmonious" place where stars are torn from their orbits and ejected out of their galaxy, stars collapse and then explode, that some massive stars form black holes out of which nothing can escape, space is filled with intense radiation which kills all life forms, and planets with life can be pounded with meteors which wipe them out periodically. But from Bastiat's perspective in mid-nineteenth century France the Newtonian and Laplacian theory of celestial order and harmony seemed a logical and scientifically advanced one.

Harmonies Social and Economic

Of the over 500 uses of the word "harmony" and related terms we can identify the following key expressions. In addition to many general references to things being "en harmonie" (in harmony) with each other, Bastiat used the words "harmonique," or "harmonieux" or "harmonieuse" (harmonious) in reference to orders, organisations, associations, human development, individual interests, and laws being "harmonious." Most notably, he used the expressions "l'harmonie sociale" or "les harmonies sociales" (social harmony or harmonies), and "les harmonies économique" (economic harmonies always in the plural) to describe the social and economic theory he was working on before his untimely and premature death.

Concerning the word "harmonique" (harmonious) his first two uses of the word occur in the very important pair of articles which he wrote on the eve of his arrival in Paris in May 1845, which show the advanced state of his thinking on this topic before he came into contact with the Paris economists. The first use can be found in his unpublished review of Dunoyer's book De la liberté du travail probably in January or February 1845 where he says: 2217

Il (le socialisme) consiste à rejeter du gouvernement du monde moral tout dessein providentiel; à supposer que du jeu des organes sociaux, de l'action et de la réaction libre des intérêts humains, ne résulte pas une organisation merveilleuse, harmonique, et progressive …

It (socialism) consists in rejecting any providential designs in the governance of the moral world; in supposing that a marvelous, harmonious, and progressive order cannot result from the to and fro of social groups and the free action and reaction of human interests …

His second use comes from an article we have mentioned several times as being a kind of show case of Bastiat's orignal and provocative ideas which he brought with him to Paris, namely his critique of Lamartine for having strayed from the straight and narrow path of free market orthodoxy. Here he is chastising Lamartine for advocating coercive, state charity instead of a completely free and voluntary system to aid needy workers: 2218

Ensuite, l'économie politique distingue la charité volontaire de la charité légale ou forcée. L'une, par cela même qu'elle est volontaire, se rattache au principe de la liberté et entre comme élément harmonique dans le jeu des lois sociales ; l'autre, parce qu'elle est forcée, appartient aux écoles qui ont adopté la doctrine de la contrainte, et inflige au corps social des maux inévitables.

Other important uses of "harmonique" occur often with respect to "les lois harmoniques" (harmonious laws) or "les lois naturelles harmoniques" (harmonious natural laws) as in his opening "Address to the Youth of France" in EH1 (probably written late 1849) where he defines liberty as "la liberté ou le libre jeu des lois harmoniques, que Dieu a préparées pour le développement et le progrès de l'humanité" (liberty, or the free play of the harmonious laws which God has prepared for the development and progress of humanity), 2219 or "Enfin j'appellerai l'attention du lecteur sur les obstacles artificiels que rencontre le développement pacifique, régulier et progressif des sociétés humaines. De ces deux idées : Lois naturelles harmoniques, causes artificielles perturbatrices, se déduira la solution du Problème social" (Finally, I will draw the reader's attention to the artificial obstacles that the peaceful, regular, and progressive development of human societies encounter. From these two concepts, harmonious natural laws and artificial disturbing factors (causes artificielles perturbatrices), the resolution of the social problem will be deduced.) 2220

However, Bastiat's two most important concepts relating to harmony are "les harmonies sociales" (social harmonies) and "les harmonies économiques" (economic harmonies) 2221 and his affiliated ideas of "discordance" and "dissonance" (disharmony and dissonance) which he often paired with them. As early as June 1845, the month after he arrived in Paris, Bastiat was planning a large work with the title of "Social Harmonies" as he explained to his close friend and neighbour Félix Coudroy back in Mugron: 2222

Si mon petit traité, Sophismes économiques , réussit, nous pourrions le faire suivre d'un autre intitulé : Harmonies sociales . Il aurait la plus grande utilité, parce qu'il satisferait le penchant de notre époque à rechercher des organisations, des harmonies artificielles, en lui montrant la beauté, l'ordre et le principe progressif dans les harmonies naturelles et providentielles.

If my small treatise, Economic Sophisms , is a success (it was published in January 1846), we might follow it with another entitled Social Harmonies. It would be of great use because it would satisfy the tendency of our epoch to look for (socialist) organizations and artificial harmonies by showing it the beauty, order, and progressive principle in natural and providential harmonies.

Details about his planned book on "social harmonies" can be gleaned from scattered remarks in letters he wrote to his friends and supporters, and occasionally in some of his own writings. He first began work on the project in the fall of 1847 when he gave some lectures at the Taranne Hall in Paris to some Law and Medical students, using the first volume of his Economic Sophisms as the text book. In another letter to Félix written in August 1847 he described his plans for the course of lectures to present his ideas on "l'harmonie des lois sociales" (the harmony of social laws) and where he suggests he and Félix had been discussing this for some time: 2223

(A) partir de novembre prochain, je ferai à cette jeunesse un cours, non d'économie politique pure, mais d'économie sociale, en prenant ce mot dans l'acception que nous lui donnons, Harmonie des lois sociales.

(F)rom next November I will be giving a course (of lectures) to these young people (at the School of Law), not on pure political economy but on social economics, using this in the meaning we have given it, the "Harmony of Social Laws."

Sometime during the fall when his lectures were underway he wrote an ironic letter to himself in the form of a "Draft Preface" to the book he hoped to write. In this letter Bastiat chastises himself for having been too preoccupied with only one aspect of freedom, namely free trade or what he disparagingly called this "l'uniforme croûte de pain sec" (single crust of dry bread as food), and having neglected the broader social picture. To rectify this he wanted to apply the ideas of J.B. Say, Charles Comte, and Charles Dunoyer, to a study of "toutes les libertés" (all forms of freedom) in a very ambitious research project in liberal social theory. 2224

In July 1847 in a letter to Richard Cobden, to whom he often confided his private thoughts and hopes as he felt many of his Parisian colleagues did not fully understand or appreciate what he was attempting to do, he stated that his book on "la vraie théorie sociale" (real social theory) would contain 12 chapters on some very broad topics: 2225

ce que je considère comme la vraie théorie sociale, sous ces douze chapitres : Besoins, production, propriété, concurrence, population, liberté, égalité, responsabilité, solidarité, fraternité, unité, rôle de l'opinion publique

>what I consider to be the true/real social theory in the following twelve chapters: "Needs," "Production," "Property," "Competition," "Population," "Liberty," "Equality," "Responsibility," "Solidarity," "Fraternity," "Unity," and "The Role of Public Opinion" …

At the same time as he was giving these lectures at the School of Law in late 1847 he was preparing the second volume of his Economic Sophisms which would appear in January 1848. The two opening chapters which were undated but possibly also written at this time, dealt with the nature of plunder. Bastiat's friend and editor Paillottet reveals in a footnote that Bastiat also planned to write another volume on the history of plunder.

In their "Foreword" to the expanded second edition of EH which they published 6 months after Bastiat's death, Fontenay and Paillottet concluded that Bastiat was planning to write "at least" three volumes which would be made up of a volume on "Social Harmonies," one on "Economic Harmonies," and one on plunder which might have been fittingly entitled "Social and Economic Disharmonies."

Bastiat himself seems to have been torn over how he should approach writing the books given the very severe time constraints placed upon him by his parliamentary duties and his worsening health. In an undated note quoted by Fontenay and Paillottet Bastiat discusses the problem he faced in organising the project: 2226

J'avais d'abord pensé à commencer par l'exposition des Harmonies Économiques, et par conséquent à ne traiter que des sujets purement économiques: Valeur, Propriété, Richesse, Concurrence, Salaire, Population, Monnaie , Crédit, etc. — Plus tard, si j'en avais eu le temps et la force, j'aurais appelé l'attention du lecteur sur un sujet plus vaste: les Harmonies sociales. C'est là que j'aurais parlé de la Constitution humaine, du Moteur social, de la Responsabilité, de la Solidarité, etc.. L'œuvre ainsi conçue était commencée, quand je me suis aperçu qu'il était mieux de fondre ensemble que de séparer ces deux ordres de considérations. Mais alors la logique voulait que l'étude de l'homme précédât les recherches économiques. Il n'était plus temps ; puisse-je réparer ce défaut dans une autre édition! ...

I had at first thought of beginning with an exposition of the Economic Harmonies, and therefore only dealing with purely economic subjects, such as value, property, wealth, competition, wages, population, money, credit, etc. Later, if I had had the time and the energy, I would have brought to the attention of the reader a much bigger subject (un sujet plus vaste), namely the Social Harmonies. There I would have spoken about human nature (la Constitution humaine), the driving force of society, (individual) responsibility, (social) solidarity, etc. I had commenced work on the project conceived in this way when I realised that it would have been better to merge them together rather than treating these two different kinds of matters separately. But then logic demanded that the study of man should precede research into economic matters. There no longer enough time; perhaps I can fix this error in a future edition!

It would appear that he planned to write a very large volume on "social harmonies" to explain the big picture and a companion volume to explain the nature, origins, and history of the "social disharmonies" which disturbed or disrupted those harmonies. But as his health was failing and time was running out he realised he had to limit himself to an important subset of this larger project and this eventually became the "economic harmonies." He only managed to finish and publish in his lifetime the first volume of EH which he wrote over the summer of 1849 and which appeared in print in early 1850. His friends cobbled together what unfinished papers and chapters they could find in his effects and published "vol. 2" (EH2) in July 1851 six months after Bastiat's death.

An interesting question to ask is how much of this ambitious project had Bastiat conceived while he was still living in Mugron before he came to Paris in May 1845 and how much of it evolved as he became involved in the free trade movement and the circle of economists who were part of the Guillaumin network. Perhaps the idea had been germinating in his mind over the previous 20 years of intense reading of economics in his home town of Mugron?

What did he mean by "social harmonies"?

One of the best examples of what Bastiat meant by "social harmony" (singular) can be found in a passage in the new introduction to his essay "On Competition" which was originally published in May 1846 in the JDE which he revised over the summer of 1849 and became Chapter X of EH1. 2227 He takes the example of what he calls two "indomitable forces," individual self-interest and competition which, individually could cause conflict and social disharmony but, when combined together in a free society, create "Social Harmony." 2228

… Dieu, qui a mis dans l'individualité l'intérêt personnel qui, comme un aimant, attire toujours tout à lui, Dieu, dis-je, a placé aussi, au sein de l'ordre social, un autre ressort auquel il a confié le soin de conserver à ses bienfaits leur destination primitive : la gratuité, la communauté. Ce ressort, c'est la Concurrence.

… God, who has placed in individuals the self-interest that, like a magnet, constantly draws everything to itself, this God, I say, has also placed within the social order another mainspring (ressort) to which he has entrusted the care of maintaining his gifts such that they conform to their original objective: to be freely available (la gratuité) and common to all (la communauté). This mainspring is Competition.

Ainsi l'Intérêt personnel est cette indomptable force individualiste qui nous fait chercher le progrès, qui nous le fait découvrir, qui nous y pousse l'aiguillon dans le flanc, mais qui nous porte aussi à le monopoliser. La Concurrence est cette force humanitaire non moins indomptable qui arrache le progrès, à mesure qu'il se réalise, des mains de l'individualité, pour en faire l'héritage commun de la grande famille humaine. Ces deux forces qu'on peut critiquer, quand on les considère isolément, constituent dans leur ensemble, par le jeu de leurs combinaisons, l'Harmonie sociale.

Thus, Self-interest is this indomitable individual force that drives us to seek progress, makes us achieve it, and spurs us on, but which also makes us inclined to monopolize it. Competition is the no less indomitable humanitarian force that snatches progress as it is achieved from the hands of individuals in order to make it part of the common heritage of the great human family. These two forces, which can be criticized when considered separately, constitute Social Harmony when taken together because of their interplay when (acting) in combination.

In another passage in a chapter on "Producers and Consumers" which appeared in EH2 Bastiat describes what he calls "la loi essentielle de l'harmonie sociale" (the essential law of social harmony), namely that man is perfectible, that the standard of living will continue to improve over time, and that more and more people will approach this increasingly common, higher standard of living: 2229

Si le niveau de l'humanité ne s'élève pas sans cesse, l'homme n'est pas perfectible.	If the standard of living (niveau) of the human race does not increase constantly, man is not perfectible.
Si la tendance sociale n'est pas une approximation constante de tous les hommes vers ce niveau progressif, les lois économiques ne sont pas harmoniques.	If the tendency of society is not the continual approach of all men to this improving standard of living, the laws of economics are not harmonious.
Or comment le niveau humain peut-il s'élever si chaque quantité donnée de travail ne donne pas une proportion toujours croissante de satisfactions, phénomène qui ne peut s'expliquer que par la transformation de l'utilité onéreuse en utilité gratuite ?	Well, how can the standard of living of the human race rise if each given quantity of labor does not provide an ever-increasing proportion of satisfaction, a phenomenon that can be explained only by the transformation of cost-bearing/onerous utility into free/gratuitous utility?
Et, d'un autre côté, comment cette utilité, devenue gratuite, rapprocherait-elle tous les hommes d'un commun niveau, si en même temps elle ne devenait commune ?	And on the other hand, how would the utility that has become free/gratuitous bring everyone closer to the same standard of living if it did not at the same time become common to all?
Voilà donc la loi essentielle de l'harmonie sociale.	This is therefore the essential law of social harmony.

He makes a similar comment in a passage in the article on "Population" in the JDE (Oct. 1846) where he equates "the social harmonies" with equal access for all people to the benefits of progress and a rising standard of living: 2230

La théorie que nous venons d'exposer succinctement conduit à ce résultat pratique, que les meilleures formes de la philanthropie, les meilleures institutions sociales sont celles qui, agissant dans le sens du plan providentiel tel que les harmonies sociales nous le révèlent, à savoir, l'égalité dans le progrès, font descendre dans toutes les couches de l'humanité, et spécialement dans la dernière, la connaissance, la raison, la moralité, la prévoyance.

The theory that we have just set out briefly leads to the practical result that the best forms of philanthropy and the best social institutions are those that, when they operate in line with the Providential plan as revealed to us by the social harmonies, that is to say, equality in progress (l'égalité dans le progrès = equal progress for all), spread knowledge, reason, morality, and foresight throughout all of the social strata of humanity, especially the lowest.

What did he mean by "economic harmonies"?

By "economic harmonies" Bastiat meant that subset of "harmonies" which were part of the broader framework of "social harmonies" discussed above. These would include what he described as "purely economic subjects, such as value, property, wealth, competition, wages, population, money, credit." They were also meant as a companion volume to his Economic Sophisms which he described in a letter to Cobden in June 1846 as "un petit livre intitulé : Harmonies économiques . Il ferait le pendant de l'autre; le premier démolit, le second édifierait" (a small book entitled Economic Harmonies . It will make a pair with the other; the first knocks down and the second would build up). 2231 He made a similar comment to Cobden a year later where he described the book on Economic Harmonies as providing "the positive point of view" and the Economic Sophisms "the negative point of view." 2232

He offered another explanation of his purpose in the conclusion to Part I of the article on "Economic Harmonies" which appeared in the JDE in Sept. 1848. 2233 He wanted to demonstrate to others the "sublime and reassuring harmonies in the play of natural laws governing society", to use this "one true, simple, and fruitful notion … to resolve some of the problems that still arouse controversy: competition, mechanization, foreign trade, luxury, capital, rent," and to "show the relationships, or rather the harmonies, of political economy with the other moral and social sciences."

Qu'ils me pardonnent; que ce soit la vérité elle-même qui me presse ou que je sois dupe d'une illusion, toujours est-il que je sens le besoin de concentrer dans un faisceau des idées que je n'ai pu faire accepter jusqu'ici pour les avoir présentées éparses et par lambeaux. Il me semble que j'aperçois dans le jeu des lois naturelles de la société de sublimes et consolantes harmonies. Ce que je vois ou crois voir, ne dois-je pas essayer de le montrer à d'autres, afin de rallier ainsi autour d'une pensée de concorde et de fraternité bien des intelligences égarées, bien des cœurs aigris? Si, quand le vaisseau adoré de la patrie est battu parla tempête, je parais m'éloigner quelquefois, pour me recueillir, du poste auquel j'ai été appelé, c'est que mes faibles mains sont inutiles à la manœuvre. Est-ce d'ailleurs trahir mon mandat que de réfléchir sur les causes de la tempête elle-même, et m'efforcer [108] d'agir sur ces causes? Et puis, ce que je ne ferais pas aujourd'hui, qui sait s'il me serait donné de le faire demain?

I hope they will forgive me! Whether it is truth itself that harries me or just that I am the victim of delusion, I still feel the need to concentrate on a range of ideas for which I have not been able to gain acceptance up to now because I have presented them in dribs and drabs. I think that I discern sublime and reassuring harmonies in the play of natural laws governing society. Should I not try to show others what I see or think I see, in rallying a great many mistaken minds and embittered hearts around a way of thinking based upon concord and fraternity? If I appear to drift away from the post to which I have been called in order to gather my thoughts, at a time when the beloved ship of State is buffeted by storms, it is because my weak hands cannot help hold the tiller. Besides, am I betraying my mission when I reflect on the causes of the storm itself and endeavor to act on these causes? What is more, if I do not do this now, who knows whether I will have the opportunity to do it later?

Je commencerai par établir quelques notions économiques. M'aidant des travaux de mes devanciers, je m'efforcerai de résumer la Science dans un principe vrai, simple et fécond, qu'elle entrevit dès l'origine, dont elle s'est constamment approchée et dont peut-être le moment est venu de fixer la formule. Ensuite, à la clarté de ce flambeau, j'essayerai de résoudre quelques-uns des problèmes encore controversés, concurrence, machines, commerce extérieur, luxe, capital, rente, etc. Enfin, je montrerai [signalerai in EH1] les relations ou plutôt les harmonies de l'économie politique avec les autres sciences morales et sociales, en jetant un coup d'œil sur les graves sujets exprimés par ces mots : Intérêt personnel, Propriété, Liberté, Responsabilité, Solidarité, Egalité, Fraternité, Unité.

I will start by setting out a few economic notions. With the help of the work carried out by my predecessors, I will endeavor to epitomize this mode of explanation in one true, simple, and fruitful notion, one that it foresaw from the outset and to which it has constantly drawn near, with the time perhaps having come to establish its wording definitively. Then by this beacon, I will try to resolve some of the problems that still arouse controversy: competition, mechanization, foreign trade, luxury, capital, rent, etc. I will show the relationships, or rather the harmonies, of political economy with the other moral and social sciences by casting a glance on the serious matters encapsulated in the following words: Self-Interest, Property, Liberty, Responsibility, Solidarity, Equality, Fraternity, and Unity.

And there is his moving last ditch attempt to explain what he wanted to do in the Conclusion to EH1 when he must have known in his heart that he would never live to see the project completed. In this passage he ties together several of his key ideas on harmony and disharmony, property and plunder, freedom and oppression: 2234

Nous avons vu toutes les Harmonies sociales contenues en germe dans ces deux principes : Propriété, Liberté. — Nous verrons que toutes les dissonances sociales ne sont que le développement de ces deux autres principes antagoniques aux premiers : Spoliation, Oppression.	We have seen the germs of all the Social Harmonies encapsulated in the following two principles: PROPERTY and FREEDOM. We will see that all social disharmony (toutes les dissonances sociales) is merely the development of two other principles that conflict with the first: PLUNDER and OPPRESSION.
Et même, les mots Propriété, Liberté n'expriment que deux aspects de la même idée. Au point de vue économique, la liberté se rapporte à l'acte de produire, la Propriété aux produits. — Et puisque la Valeur a sa raison d'être dans l'acte humain, on peut dire que la liberté implique et comprend la Propriété. — Il en est de même de l'Oppression à l'égard de la Spoliation.	And likewise the words Property and Freedom express only two aspects of the same idea. From the point of view of economics, Freedom relates to the act of producing and Property to the products. And since Value owes its very reason for existing to human activity, it may be said that Freedom implies and encompasses Property. This is also true of Oppression with regard to Plunder.
Liberté ! voilà, en définitive, le principe harmonique. Oppression ! voilà le principe dissonant ; la lutte de ces deux puissances remplit les annales du genre humain.	Freedom! This is the definitive principle of harmony (le principe harmonique). Oppression! This is the principle of disharmony (le principe dissonant), and the struggle between these two forces fills the annals of the human race.

We have attempted to reconstruct what Bastiat's multi-volume magnum opus on "Harmonies and Disharmonies" might have looked like had he lived long enough to complete it. It will be included in our CW5 which will contain the Economic Harmonies book.

Bastiat's Theory of Disharmony

As a counterpoint to his theory of harmony Bastiat also had a theory of its opposite, namely "disharmony." He used several words to describe this, such as "la discordance" (disharmony), "la dissonance" (dissonance, or discord), "la perturbation" (disturbance, disruption), and "l'antagonisme" (antagonism, or opposition). He often paired "l'harmonie" with either "la discordance" or "la dissonance" as its opposite. He also paired "la perturbation" with its opposite, as in the expressions "les forces perturbatrices" (disturbing forces) and "les forces réparatrices" (restorative or repairing forces). 2235

The bulk of the references to disharmony occur in his book Economic Harmonies for the obvious reason that he was able to contrast it with the main topic of his interest. However, there were a few references before he began work in earnest on his book, such as this one from the Introduction to his book on Cobden and the League (July 1845) where it is very clear from the context that what caused disharmony was the use of violence to enforce a protectionist trade policy: 2236

Si la Balance du commerce est vraie en théorie ; si, dans l'échange international, un peuple perd nécessairement ce que l'autre gagne ; s'ils s'enrichissent aux dépens les uns des autres, si le bénéfice de chacun est l'excédant de ses ventes sur ses achats, je comprends qu'ils s'efforcent tous à la fois de mettre de leur côté la bonne chance, l'exportation ; je conçois leur ardente rivalité, je m'explique les guerres de débouchés. Prohiber par la force le produit étranger, imposer à l'étranger par la force le produit national, c'est la politique qui découle logiquement du principe. Il y a plus, le bien-être des nations étant à ce prix, et l'homme étant invinciblement poussé à rechercher le bien-être, on peut gémir de ce qu'il a plu à la Providence de faire entrer dans le plan de la création deux lois discordantes qui se heurtent avec tant de violence ; mais on ne saurait raisonnablement reprocher au fort d'obéir à ces lois en opprimant le faible, puisque l'oppression, dans cette hypothèse, est de droit divin et qu'il est contre nature, impossible, contradictoire que ce soit le faible qui opprime le fort.

If the balance of trade is true in theory, if in international trade one nation necessarily loses what another gains, if nations become wealthy at each others' expense, if the profits of each lie in an excess of sales over purchases, I understand that they all endeavor at the same time to procure good luck or exports for themselves, I understand their ardent rivalry and find an explanation for the war for markets. To prohibit foreign products by force and impose on foreigners our products by force is a policy that is a logical result of this principle. What is more, since the well-being of nations is at this price and man is ineluctably impelled to seek well-being, we may complain that Providence was happy to introduce into the plan of creation two disharmonious laws (deux lois discordantes) that conflict so violently with each other. However, we cannot reasonably criticise the strong for obeying these laws by oppressing the weak, since oppression, in this scenario, is the result of divine right and it would be unnatural, impossible, and contradictory for the weak to oppress the strong.

This was repeated in a very similar fashion five years later in his address "To the Youth of France" where he states a lack of harmony in the world clearly shows a lack of liberty and justice due to the actions of oppressors and plunders: 2237

Si les lois providentielles sont harmoniques, c'est quand elles agissent librement, sans quoi elles ne seraient pas harmoniques par elles-mêmes. Lors donc que nous remarquons un défaut d'harmonie dans le monde, il ne peut correspondre qu'à un défaut de liberté, à une justice absente. Oppresseurs, spoliateurs, contempteurs de la justice, vous ne pouvez donc entrer dans l'harmonie universelle, puisque c'est vous qui la troublez.

If the laws of Providence are harmonious, it is when they act freely, otherwise they would not be harmonious of themselves. Therefore, when we note a lack of harmony in the world it can only be the result of a lack of freedom or of justice that is absent. Oppressors, plunderers, those who hold justice in contempt, you can never be part of universal harmony since you are the people who are upsetting it.

An early explicit pairing of harmony and disharmony can be found in his "Second Letter to Lamartine" (JDE, Oct. 1846) in which he again criticises Lamartine for straying from the free trade fold and supporting price controls on food during emergencies: 2238

C'est pour moi une bien douce consolation que la doctrine de la liberté ne me montre qu'harmonie entre ces divers intérêts ; et, avec votre âme, vous devez être bien malheureux, puisque vous ne voyez entre eux qu'une irrémédiable dissonance.

I find it very comforting that the doctrine of freedom reveals to me only harmony among these various interests and, with your soul, you must be very unhappy, since you see in them just an unavoidable disharmony (dissonance).

Fundamental to Bastiat's view of harmony of the free market was that the interests of individuals were not inherently "disharmonious" or in conflict with each. His proviso was that these interests had to be "bien compris" (rightly understood) or "légitimes" (legitimate), otherwise they would clash and produce disharmony. In his pamphlet "Baccalaureate and Socialism" (early 1850) he stated: 2239

Les intérêts des hommes, bien compris, sont harmoniques, et la lumière qui les leur fait comprendre brille d'un éclat toujours plus vif. Donc les efforts individuels et collectifs, l'expérience, les tâtonnements, les déceptions même, la concurrence, en un mot, la Liberté — font graviter les hommes vers cette Unité, qui est l'expression des lois de leur nature, et la réalisation du bien général.

Properly understood, the interests of men are harmonious and the light that enables men to understand them shines with an ever more brilliant glow. Therefore, individual and collective efforts, experience, stumbling (trial and error), and even deceptions, competition—in a word, freedom—make men gravitate toward this unity (of interests) that is an expression of the laws of their nature and the achievement of the general good.

By "rightly understood interests," Bastiat realised that individuals were fallible and would make mistakes, but because they were thinking beings capable of planning and choosing between alternatives, they were able to correct their mistakes, better understand what their true interests were, and act accordingly. Thus, the disharmony caused by poor decisions was self-correcting.

In the Introduction to EH1, his address "To the Youth of France," (written late 1849) he asserts that "tous les intérêts légitimes sont harmoniques" (all legitimate interests are harmonious) and that this idea was "l'idée dominante de cet écrit" (the dominant idea of this work). By "legitimate interests," Bastiat meant any activity which was undertaken without coercion or fraud, which was engaged in voluntarily by both parties to an exchange, and where the property rights of each individual were respected. Interests which were pursued by means of force or fraud were illegitimate in his view and caused considerable disruption and disharmony to the social order. However, he realised that this notion was rejected by the socialist critics of his day who argued the opposite, that men's interests were "naturally antagonistic" and hence a cause of disharmony. This lead to a stark choice for efforts to solve "le problème social" (the social problem or question), if interests were naturally harmonious then individual liberty and the free market could be trusted to solve it; if interests were naturally antagonistic or disharmonious, then force had to used to prevent further antagonism and disharmony: 2240

Non, certes ; mais je voudrais vous mettre sur la voie de cette vérité : Tous les intérêts légitimes sont harmoniques. C'est l'idée dominante de cet écrit, et il est impossible d'en méconnaitre l'importance. ...	Certainly not, but I would like to set you on the path to this truth: All legitimate interests are harmonious. This is the dominant idea in this book, and it is impossible not to recognize its importance. …
Or cette solution (to "le problème social"), vous le comprendrez aisément, doit être toute différente selon que les intérêts sont naturellement harmoniques ou antagoniques.	Well, this solution (to the social problem), as you will easily understand, has to be very different, depending on whether interests are [naturally] in harmony (harmoniques) or in conflict (antagoniques).
Dans le premier cas, il faut la demander à la Liberté ; dans le second, à la Contrainte. Dans l'un, il suffit de ne pas contrarier ; dans l'autre, il faut nécessairement contrarier.	In the first case, we must call for Freedom, in the second, for Coercion (contrainte). In the first case, it is enough not to interfere with other people (contrarier), in the other, you have of necessity to interfere with other people.
Mais la Liberté n'a qu'une forme. Quand on est bien convaincu que chacune des molécules qui composent un liquide porte en elle-même la force d'où résulte le niveau général, on en conclut qu'il n'y a pas de moyen plus simple et plus sûr pour obtenir ce niveau que de ne pas s'en mêler. Tous ceux donc qui adopteront ce point de départ : Les intérêts sont harmoniques, seront aussi d'accord sur la solution pratique du problème social : s'abstenir de contrarier et de déplacer les intérêts.	But Freedom has just one form. When people are fully convinced that each of the molecules that make up a liquid carry within itself the force that results in (reaching) a general level (le niveau général = niveau also translated as standard of living, which is suggested here as well as solution to the social problem), they conclude that there is no simpler or surer means of obtaining this level than to leave it alone [mêler = not to meddle in it]. All those, therefore, who adopt the thesis, Interests are harmonious, will also agree on the practical solution to the social problem: refrain from interfering with and disrupting (déplacer) these interests.
La Contrainte peut se manifester, au contraire, par des formes et selon des vues en nombre infini. Les écoles qui partent de cette donnée : Les intérêts sont antagoniques, n'ont donc encore rien fait pour la solution du problème, si ce n'est qu'elles ont exclu la Liberté. Il leur reste encore à chercher, parmi les formes infinies de la Contrainte, quelle est la bonne, si tant est qu'une le soit. Et puis, pour dernière difficulté, il leur restera à faire accepter universellement par des hommes, par des agents libres, cette forme préférée de la Contrainte.	By contrast, Coercion may assume an infinite number of forms and points of view. The schools of thought that start from the assumption that Interests are in conflict (antagoniques), have therefore not yet done anything to solve this problem except for excluding Freedom. It still remains for them to identify from the infinite number of forms of Coercion the one that is right, if there can indeed be one. Then, as a final difficulty, they will still have to have this preferred form of Coercion universally accepted by the people, by these free agents (des agents libres = these free and acting beings).

Of course, Bastiat was acutely aware that society was not harmonious in the way it functioned, given the glaring facts of the existence of poverty, war, slavery, and various other forms of oppression, not to mention the social and political problems which gave rise to the recent Revolution of February 1848, facts which the socialist critics of political economy in his day frequently pointed out.

Bastiat had several responses to this line of criticism. Firstly, he argued that there was a tendency for societies to be harmonious ("les grandes tendances sociales sont harmoniques") but nothing inevitable about this occurring because men had free will, were fallible, and often made mistakes. However, if left free to act and make choices, men would correct their mistakes and they individually and society in general would more towards a more harmonious situation. In other words, there existed a self-correcting mechanism which elsewhere he described as "les forces restoratives" (restorative forces). 2241 In a new passage which he added to the JDE essay on "Des besoins de l'homme" for the chapter in EH1 he observed that: 2242

Pour que l'harmonie fût sans dissonance, il faudrait ou que l'homme n'eût pas de libre arbitre, ou qu'il fût infaillible. Nous disons seulement ceci: les grandes tendances sociales sont harmoniques, en ce que, toute erreur menant à une déception et tout vice à un châtiment, les dissonances tendent incessamment à disparaître.

For harmony to exist with no disharmony it would be necessary either for man to have no free will or for him to be infallible. We will just say this: the major social tendencies are harmonious, in that since all error leads to disappointment and all vice to punishment, disharmony tends to disappear quickly.

Since Bastiat was very witty and loved to play with words, as we can see so ably demonstrated in many of his "Economic Sophisms", it is not surprising that he came up with a clever phrase to encapsulate how free societies were self-correcting. In this case it is "une dissonance harmonique" or a "harmonious disharmony." 2243 By this he meant that when people make poor decisions and suffer some temporary "disharmony" or discomfort as a result, they have an incentive to correct their behaviour and restore economic "harmony" to their lives. In other words, the disharmony acts as a corrective to its own existence and eventually helps bring about the restoration of harmony, acting somewhat like Schumpeter's notion of "creative destruction" or what might here be called "harmonising disharmonies."

Secondly, he believed that many people erred in not understanding their "rightly understood interests" and how they were not inherently antagonistic with the interests of others (see the discussion above).

Thirdly, that people had been duped by the sophistical arguments put forward by numerous vested interests which sought government subsidies, monopolies, and protection for their particular industries at the expence of taxpayers and consumers. The political struggles which this system of privilege created led to enormous antagonism and disharmony within society as people jostled for the ear of the King or the Chamber of Deputies to get their special interests protected by "la grande fabrique de lois" (the great law factory) in Paris. 2244 Dispelling these "sophisms" was of course the purpose behind the two volumes of Economic Sophisms which Bastiat published between 1845 and 1848. The key sophism Bastiat had identified, what he called "the root stock sophism" was Montaigne's claim that "the gain of one is the loss of another," in other words that the economy was a zero sum game where someone could gain only at the expence of another person. 2245

His final and perhaps most important response, was to agree with the socialists that ruling elites, like the "oligarchy" which ruled England and "la classe électorale" (the voting or electoral class) which controlled France before 1848, ruthlessly plundered their own people by institionalising plunder, or what Bastiat called "la spoliation légale" (legal plunder). 2246 Until this system of plunder was removed, disharmony and antagonism would remain an intrinsic part of English and French society. Hence his great interest in writing another, possibly third book, on The History of Plunder " to expose and denounce the cause of all theses disharmonies. In his view war and legal plunder were the two "disturbing factors" which did the most to create and entrench disharmony in society. An idea of what he had in mind for this book can be found in the opening chapter of ES2 "The Physiology of Plunder" (written late 1847), his address "To the Youth of France" in the opening to EH1 and the Conclusion (both written in mid or late 1849), as well as a number of pamphlets such as Property and Plunder (July 1848). 2247

Paillottet tells us in a footnote that Bastiat had told him on the eve of his death how important he thought this project was: 2248

Un travail bien important à faire, pour l'économie politique, c'est d'écrire l'histoire de la Spoliation. C'est une longue histoire dans laquelle, dès l'origine, apparaissent les conquêtes, les migrations des peuples, les invasions et tous les funestes excès de la force aux prises avec la justice. De tout cela il reste encore aujourd'hui des traces vivantes, et c'est une grande difficulté pour la solution des questions posées dans notre siècle. On n'arrivera pas à cette solution tant qu'on n'aura pas bien constaté en quoi et comment l'injustice, faisant sa part au milieu de nous, s'est impatronisée dans nos mœurs et dans nos lois.

A very important task to be done for political economy is to write the history of plunder. It is a long history in which, from the outset, there appeared conquests, the migrations of peoples, invasions, and all the disastrous excesses of force in conflict with justice. Living traces of all this still remain today and cause great difficulty for the solution of the questions raised in our century. We will not reach this solution as long as we have not clearly noted in what and how injustice, when making a place for itself amongst us, has gained a foothold in our customs and our laws.

But of course he did not live long enough to see his books on Social and Economic Harmonies completed, let alone another volume on the History of Plunder . This volume might rank alongside Lord Acton's much anticipated History of Liberty as one of the most important classical liberal books never written. 2249

Human Action

Scattered throughout Bastiat's writings are many intriguing statements which prefigure some key ideas of the Austrian School of economic thought which emerged during the 1870s as represented by Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and in the twentieth century by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard. We say "prefigure" because he did not present a coherent Austrian theory of subjective value theory, time preference, or the business cycle, but he did have an understanding of other things like the fact that only individuals choose, that exchange is fundamental to the economic order, that utility is based upon subjective evaluations, that the price system is important in giving direction to what is produced, that money is not neutral, and that social institutions are often the result of human action and not "artificially" designed. We have indicated in the footnotes when Bastiat expresses a view which is close to that of the Austrian school. This happens frequently enough to suggest that this is not an accident, but that he was slowly moving in their direction some 20 years ahead of his time. More detail of this line of thinking will be given in volume 5 of the Collected Works which will contain his treatise Economic Harmonies .

In the mid-twentieth century economists like Joseph Schumpeter and Hayek had little which was good to say about Bastiat as a theorist other than he was a very good economic journalist and popularizer of economic ideas. 2250 In the 1950s and 1960s Murray Rothbard realized he had been underestimated and began arguing for a reassessment of his contributions to economic thought, seeing Bastiat as an important "transition figure" between the classical school and the Austrian school. 2251 More recently a younger generation of Austrian economists, such as Joseph Salerno, Mark Thornton, Tom DiLorenzo, and Jörg Guido Hülsmann, have identified many Austrian insights in Bastiat's thinking and have claimed him as one of their own. 2252 They all thought Bastiat had insights about economics which were Austrian in nature and ahead of their time. Interestingly, there is also now a group which argues that Bastiat was a Public Choice theorist of some kind, such as James Dorn, Stringham, Bryan Caplan, and Mike Munger. 2253

However, the floodgates of the Bastiat renaissance were opened at the bicentennial conference on Bastiat held in Mugron in June 2001 where 14 papers were given re-evaluating the work of Bastiat 200 years after his birth. These were published in a special edition of Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines (June 2001) edited by Pierre Garello. 2254 The general consensus which comes out of this conference is that Bastiat was an Austrian to all intents and purposes - that "he was a praxeologist ahead of his time" (Bramoullé), and "very Austrian indeed" (Thornton) are two typical comments.

However, here we will limit our remarks to Bastiat's understanding of the notion of "human action" which is key to Mises' formulation of the Austrian approach.

Bastiat refers several times to humans as "un être actif" (an acting or active being), "un agent" (an agent, or actor), "un agent intelligent" (an intelligent or thinking actor), and to their behaviour in the economic world as "l'action humaine" (human action) or "l'action de l'homme" (the action of human beings, or human action), and to the guiding principle behind it all as "le principe actif" or "le principe d'activité" (the principle of action). Less common were expressions such as "l'être agissant" (acting being) or "l'homme agissant" (acting man) which only appear in the notes he left behind for inclusion in EH2. These ideas were beginning to come together in the Economic Harmonies which he began writing in earnest in 1848 with the essays "Natural and Artificial Organization" (Jan. 1848) and the opening chapters "Economic Harmonies I, II, III" (Sept. 1848, and number IV in December 1848. 2255 For example, in "Natural and Artificial Organization," the essay which would eventually begin Economic Harmonies , he notes that "il faut pourtant bien reconnaître que la société est une organisation qui a pour élément un agent intelligent, moral, doué de libre arbitre et perfectible. Si vous en ôtez la liberté, ce n'est plus qu'un triste et grossier mécanisme." (one must nevertheless recognize that society is an organization whose components are intelligent and moral actors endowed with free will, and are capable of being perfectible. If you take freedom away from this actor, he becomes merely a sad and sorry mechanism). 2256

In "Economic Harmonies IV" (Dec. 1848) he begins the article with the statement which includes his first use of the term "le principe actif" (the action principle or the principle of action):

J'ai dit, en commençant cet écrit, que l'économie politique avait pour objet l' homme , considéré au point de vue de ses besoins et des moyens par lesquels il lui est donné d'y pourvoir.	At the beginning of this work , I said that the object of political economy is man , considered from the point of view of his needs and the means by which it is given to him to meet them.
Il est donc naturel de commencer par étudier l'homme et son organisation.	It is therefore natural to start by examining man and his nature.
Mais nous avons vu aussi qu'il n'est pas un être solitaire; si ses besoins et ses satisfactions , en vertu de la nature de la sensibilité, sont inséparables de son être, il n'en est pas de même de ses efforts , qui naissent du principe actif . Ceux-ci sont susceptibles de transmission. En un mot, les hommes travaillent les uns pour les autres.	But we have also seen that he is not a solitary being; while his needs and his satisfactions , given the nature of his sensations , are inseparable from his being, this is not true of his efforts , which arise from the principle of action . Efforts can be transferred . In a word, men work for each other's benefit.

He would use this term again in the chapters on "Exchange" and "On Value" in EH1.

Also in "Economic Harmonies IV" he uses for the first time the phrase "l'action humaine" (human action), as in the following statement which is interesting because it also contains a suggestion of his growing appreciation of the subjective nature of values: 2257

L'action humaine, laquelle ne peut jamais arriver à créer de la matière, constitue seule le service que l'homme isolé se rend à lui-même ou que les hommes en société se rendent les uns aux autres, et c'est la libre appréciation de ces services qui est le fondement de la valeur ; …

Human action, which can never create matter, is the sole constituent of the service that a man in isolation can render (to) himself or that men living in society can render (to) e ach other, and it is the freely (given) appraisal of these services that is the basis of value . …

There are 8 uses of the term "l'action humaine" (human action) in total, all of which occur in the articles and chapters which would make up EH. The other version of this concept which he used was "l'action de l'homme" which he also began using in 1848 in his First Letter on Property and Plunder written to Considerant and then in EH. Here he contrasts "l'action de l'homme" with "l'action de la nature" (the action of nature). 2258 A third version he used was the plural form of "les actions humaines" (human actions) which he used to refer to specific and numerous instances of human activity but also in the abstract sense of "human action" in general. An example of the latter more Austrian use can be found in EH2 Chapter XVIII "Disturbing Factors" where he says "l'intérêt personnel, dans la sphère économique, est le mobile des actions humaines et le grand ressort de la société" (in the sphere of economics, self-interest is the driving force of human actions and the great spring (driving force) of society.)

The two very intriguing terms with very strong Austrian associations, expressions such as "l'être agissant" (acting being) or "l'homme agissant" (acting man), only appear once each in his writings, in unfinished notes and sketches which Paillottet and Fontenay gathered together for the additional reconstructed chapters which appeared in EH2 in 1851. This suggests they were concepts relatively new to his thinking and which he was grappling with just before he died. The former appeared in some additional notes appended to chapter XX "Responsibility": 2259

Toute action humaine, — faisant jaillir une série de conséquences bonnes ou mauvaises, dont les unes retombent sur l'auteur même de l'acte, et dont les autres vont affecter sa famille, ses proches, ses concitoyens et quelquefois l'humanité tout entière, — met, pour ainsi dire, en vibration deux cordes dont les sons rendent des oracles : la Responsabilité et la Solidarité.	All human action that produces a series of good or harmful consequences, of which some affect the actual author of the action and others affect his family, his relations and fellow-citizens, and on occasion the entire human race, causes two cords to vibrate, so to speak, whose notes produce the oracles which we know as Responsibility and Solidarity.
La responsabilité, c'est l'enchaînement naturel qui existe, relativement à l'être agissant, entre l'acte et ses conséquences ; c'est un système complet de Peines et de Récompenses fatales, qu'aucun homme n'a inventé, qui agit avec toute la régularité des grandes lois naturelles, et que nous pouvons par conséquent regarder comme d'institution divine. Elle a évidemment pour objet de restreindre le nombre des actions funestes, de multiplier celui des actions utiles.	Responsibility is the natural link that exists between an action and its consequences with regard to the acting being (person who acts). It is a complete and inexorable system of punishments and rewards, which no human (person) invented, one which acts with all the regularity of great natural laws and which we may consequently consider a divine institution. Its obvious object is to limit the number of disastrous actions and to increase the number of useful ones.
Cet appareil à la fois correctif et progressif, à la fois rémunérateur et vengeur, est si simple, si près de nous, tellement identifié avec tout notre être, si perpétuellement en action, que non-seulement nous ne pouvons le nier, mais qu'il est, comme le mal, un de ces phénomènes sans lesquels toute vie est pour nous inintelligible."	This structure (appareil), at once corrective and progressive, which hands out both rewards and retribution, is so simple and close to us, so intimately identified with our entire being, so perpetually in action that not only can we not deny it but, like evil, it is one of the phenomena without which all life would be unintelligible to us.

The second phrase "l'homme agissant" (acting man) was used in a posthumously published chapter in EH2 on "Le Moteur social" (The Social Motor, or the Engine which drives Society), which was probably written in 1849 or 1850: 2260

Jamais l'idée ne leur (Nos publicistes) vient que l'humanité est un corps vivant, sentant, voulant et agissant selon des lois qu'il ne s'agit pas d'inventer, puisqu'elles existent, et encore moins d'imposer, mais d'étudier ; qu'elle est une agglomération d'êtres en tout semblables à eux-mêmes, qui ne leur sont nullement inférieurs ni subordonnées ; qui sont doués, et d'impulsion pour agir, et d'intelligence pour choisir ; qui sentent en eux, de toutes parts, les atteintes de la Responsabilité et de la Solidarité ; et enfin, que de tous ces phénomènes, résulte un ensemble de rapports existants par eux-mêmes, que la science n'a pas à créer, comme ils l'imaginent, mais à observer.

The idea never enters their heads (political writers like Rousseau) that mankind is a living body, feeling, wanting, and acting in accordance with laws that are not a question of inventing, since they already exist, and still less of imposing on sociedty, but rather a question of studying them. They do not see that mankind is made up of a mass/agglomeration of beings similar to themselves in all respects; who are in no way inferior or subordinate to them, and are endowed with both an incentive to act and the intelligence to choose. They feel within themselves on every side the effects/demands of responsibility and solidarity and in a word, from all these phenomena there results a set of relationships which already exist in their own right, that science does not have to create, as they imagine, but has to observe.

In this same chapter, Bastiat brought many of these proto-Austrian ideas together in the following paragraph: 2261

Ce mobile interne, impérissable, universel, qui réside en toute individualité et la constitue être actif, cette tendance de tout homme à rechercher le bonheur, à éviter le malheur, ce produit, cet effet, ce complément nécessaire de la sensibilité, sans lequel elle ne serait qu'un inexplicable fléau, ce phénomène primordial qui est l'origine de toutes les actions humaines, cette force attractive et répulsive que nous avons nommée le grand ressort de le Mécanique sociale, a eu pour détracteurs la plupart des publicistes ; et c'est certes une des plus étranges aberrations que puissent présenter les annales de la science.

This internal, indestructible and universal driving force (mobile interne) that is within each individual and makes him an acting being (être actif), this tendency in everyone to seek happiness and avoid misfortune, this product, this effect, this necessary complement to the faculty of sensation, without which it (sensation) would be just an inexplicable scourge, this primordial phenomenon that is the origin of all human action (les actions humaines), this force of attraction and repulsion which we have called the mainspring of the social mechanism has had the majority of political writers as its detractors, and this is certainly one of the strangest aberrations that the annals of science can produce.

Bastiat's proof of the truth of his understanding of human action is also quite Austrian, or rather Misesian, in that he thinks that it is a self-evident truth which comes from a combination of self-inspection and observation of the world around one - or what Mises called "apodictic truths."

The real thing which is the subject matter of praxeology, human action, stems from the same source as human reasoning. Action and reason are congeneric and homogeneous; they may even be called two different aspects of the same thing. That reason has the power to make clear through pure ratiocination the essential features of action is a consequence of the fact that action is an offshoot of reason. The theorems attained by correct praxeological reasoning are not only perfectly certain and incontestable, like the correct mathematical theorems. They refer, moreover, with the full rigidity of their apodictic certainty and incontestability to the reality of action as it appears in life and history. Praxeology conveys exact and precise knowledge of real things. 2262

Bastiat's version of this argument appears in "Economic Harmonies IV" where he states in a very similar fashion that: 2263

Quand on considère d'une manière générale et, pour ainsi dire, abstraite, l'homme, ses besoins, ses efforts, ses satisfactions, sa constitution, ses penchants, ses tendances, on aboutit à une série d'observations qui paraissent à l'abri du doute et se montrent dans tout l'éclat de l'évidence, chacun en trouvant la preuve en lui-même. C'est au point que l'écrivain ne sait trop comment s'y prendre pour soumettre au public des vérités si palpables et si vulgaires : il craint de provoquer le sourire du dédain. Il lui semble, avec quelque raison , que le lecteur courroucé va jeter le livre, en s'écriant : « Je ne perdrai pas mon temps k apprendre ces trivialités.»

When you consider man, his needs, efforts, satisfactions, constitution, leanings or tendencies in general and in an abstract fashion, so to speak, you arrive at a series of observations that appear to be free of any doubt and which are seen to be blindingly obvious, with each carrying its own proof within it. This is so true that the writer is at a loss as to how to present such palpable and widely known truths to the general public, for fear of arousing a scornful smile. It seems to him quite rightly that the annoyed reader will toss aside the book saying, "I will not waste my time being told such trivialities."

Et cependant ces vérités, tenues pour si incontestables tant qu'elles sont présentées d'une manière générale, que nous souffrons à peine qu'elles nous soient rappelées, ne passent plus que pour des erreurs ridicules, des théories absurdes sitôt que l'on observe l'homme dans le milieu social.

It was to help readers see these self-evident truths that Bastiat used his thought experiments involving Robinson Crusoe to explain the nature of human action in the abstract. 2264 He also used a similar method in some of his Letters to Proudhon where he tell stories about the Carpenter and the Worker in L4, the Borrower and the Lender in L6, the Joiner and the Blacksmith in L10, and the rebuilding of the world by Hellen following the flood in L14. 2265

Leisure: The Importance of Leisure

At the end of Letter 4 to Proudhon Bastiat has some quite lyrical reflections on the importance of leisure in which he argues that there is more to life than just working. This would seem quite unusual for an economist regularly accused of being "heartless (sans entrailles) by the socialists. He goes on to argue that it is only by increasing wealth and capital accumulation that leisure is made possible for an increasing number of people, including the poorest, and how this in turn is so important for the development of a person's emotional and aesthetic life.

This "reflection on leisure" as he called it, is similar to a statement he made in his "Draft Preface to the Harmonies" in Sept. 1847 about his perhaps excessive concentration on the cause of free trade to the exclusion of other aspects of economic and social life, which he likened to eating "a single crust of bread." In an ironic letter written to himself he criticizes himself quite harshly in the following way: 2266

… Il semble que tu t'attaches à mettre sous le boisseau toute clarté qui ne jette sur ce théorème qu'un jour indirect. Il semble que tu t'appliques à refouler dans ton cœur toutes ces flammes sacrées que l'amour de l'humanité y avait allumées.	… You seem very keen on keeping from the light of day any knowledge which does not directly support this preemptive postulate. You seem set on extinguishing in your heart all these sacred flames which a love for humanity once lit there.
Ne crains-tu pas que ton esprit se sèche et se rétrécisse à cette œuvre analytique, à cette éternelle contention toujours concentrée sur un calcul algébrique ?	Are you not afraid that your mind will dry up and wither with all this analytical work, this endless argumentation focused on an algebraic calculation? …
Au lieu de cela, te voilà tout occupé d'éclaircir un seul des problèmes économiques que Smith et Say ont déjà démontré cent fois mieux que tu ne pourras le faire. Te voilà analysant, définissant, calculant, distinguant. Te voilà, le scalpel à la main, cherchant ce qu'il y a au juste au fond de ces mots prix, valeur, utilité, cherté, bon marché, importations, exportations.	Instead of that, there you are, fully occupied with illuminating a single one of the economic problems that Smith and Say have already explained a hundred times better than you could ever do. There you are, analyzing, defining, calculating, and distinguishing. There you are, scalpel in hand, seeking out what there is of worth in the depths of the words price, utility, high prices, low prices, imports, and exports.
Mais, enfin, si ce n'est pour toi, si tu ne crains pas de t'hébéter à l'œuvre, crois-tu avoir choisi, dans l'intérêt de la cause, le meilleur plan qu'il y ait à suivre ? Les peuples ne sont pas gouvernés par des X, mais par des instincts généreux, par des sentiments, par des sympathies. Il fallait leur présenter la chute successive de ces barrières qui parquent les hommes en communes ennemies, en provinces jalouses, en nations guerroyantes. Il fallait leur montrer la fusion des races, des intérêts, des langues, des idées, la vérité triomphant de l'erreur dans le choc des intelligences, les institutions progressives remplaçant le régime du despotisme absolu et des castes héréditaires, les guerres extirpées, les armées dissoutes, la puissance morale remplaçant la force physique, et le genre humain se préparant par l'unité aux destinées qui lui sont réservées. Voilà ce qui eût passionné les masses, et non point tes sèches démonstrations.	But finally, if it is not for you yourself, and if you do not fear becoming dazed by the task, do you think you have chosen the best plan to follow in the interest of the cause? Peoples are not governed by equations but by generous instincts, by sentiment and sympathy. It was necessary to present them with the successive dismantling of the barriers which divide men into mutually hostile communities, into jealous provinces, or into warring nations. It was necessary to show them the merging of races, interests, languages, ideas, and the triumph of truth over error, witnessed in the intellectual shock it effects, with progressive institutions replacing the regime of absolute despotism and hereditary castes, wars eliminated, armies disbanded, moral power replacing physical force, and the human race preparing itself through unity for the destiny reserved for it. This is what would have inflamed the masses, and not your dry proofs.
Et puis, pourquoi te limiter ? pourquoi emprisonner ta pensée ? Il me semble que tu l'as mise au régime cellulaire avec l'uniforme croûte de pain sec pour tout aliment, car te voilà rongeant soir et matin une question d'argent. J'aime autant que toi la liberté commerciale. Mais tous les progrès humains sont-ils renfermés dans cette liberté ? … Mais tu fais comme un mécanicien qui s'évertue à expliquer, sans en rien omettre, tout ce qu'il y a de minutieux détails dans une pièce isolée de la machine. On est tenté de lui crier : Montrez-moi les autres pièces ; faites-les mouvoir ensemble ; elles s'expliquent les unes par les autres…	In any case, why limit yourself? Why imprison your thoughts? It seems to me that you have subjected them to a prison regime of a single crust of dry bread as food, since there you are, chewing night and day on a question of money. I love freedom of trade as much as you do. But is all human progress encapsulated in that freedom? … But you act like a mechanic who makes a virtue of explaining an isolated part of a machine in the smallest detail, not forgetting anything. The temptation is strong to cry out to him, "Show me the other parts; make them work together; each of them explains the others. …

In his debate with Proudhon he returns to the topic of his anguished "Preface" and reflects on how increasing wealth makes leisure possible and why it is necessary important for individuals to escape from "the yoke of inexorable and constant work": 2267

Quelle que soit mon admiration sincère pour les admirables lois de l'économie sociale, quelque temps de ma vie que j'aie consacré à étudier cette science, quelque confiance que m'inspirent ses solutions, je ne suis pas de ceux qui croient qu'elle embrasse toute la destinée humaine. Production, distribution, circulation, consommation des richesses, ce n'est pas tout pour l'homme. Il n'est rien, dans la nature, qui n'ait sa cause finale ; et l'homme aussi doit avoir une autre fin que celle de pourvoir à son existence matérielle. Tout nous le dit. D'où lui viennent et la délicatesse de ses sentiments, et l'ardeur de ses aspirations ; sa puissance d'admirer et de s'extasier ? D'où vient qu'il trouve dans la moindre fleur un sujet de contemplation ? que ses organes saisissent avec tant de vivacité et rapportent à l'âme, comme les abeilles à la ruche, tous les trésors de beauté et d'harmonie que la nature et l'art ont répandus autour de lui ? D'où vient que des larmes mouillent ses yeux au moindre trait de dévouement qu'il entend raconter ? D'où viennent ces flux et des reflux d'affection que son cœur élabore comme il élabore le sang et la vie ? D'où lui viennent son amour de l'humanité et ses élans vers l'infini ? Ce sont là les indices d'une noble destination qui n'est pas circonscrite dans l'étroit domaine de la production industrielle. L'homme a donc une fin. Quelle est-elle ? Ce n'est pas ici le lieu de soulever cette question. Mais quelle qu'elle soit, ce qu'on peut dire, c'est qu'il ne la peut atteindre si, courbé sous le joug d'un travail inexorable et incessant, il ne lui reste aucun loisir pour développer ses organes, ses affections, son intelligence, le sens du beau, ce qu'il y a de plus pur et de plus élevé dans sa nature ; ce qui est en germe chez tous les hommes, mais latent et inerte, faute de loisir, chez un trop grand nombre d'entre eux

He then asks himself, what makes it possible for this general increase in wealth which makes leisure possible? His answer is a veritable "hymn to capital," the accumulation and investment of which enables the expansion of production and the dissemination of wealth to the masses. He calls it "a friend, a benefactor to all men, and particularly to the long suffering classes":

Quelle est la puissance qui allégera pour tous, dans une certaine mesure, le fardeau de la peine ? Qui abrégera les heures de travail ? Qui desserrera les liens de ce joug pesant qui courbe aujourd'hui vers la matière, non-seulement les hommes, mais les femmes et les enfants qui n'y semblaient pas destinés ? — C'est le capital ; le capital qui, sous la forme de roue, d'engrenage, de rail, de chute d'eau, de poids, de voile, de rame, de charrue, prend à sa charge une si grande partie de l'œuvre primitivement accomplie aux dépens de nos nerfs et de nos muscles ; le capital qui fait concourir, de plus en plus, au profit de tous, les forces gratuites de la nature. Le capital est donc l'ami, le bienfaiteur de tous les hommes, et particulièrement des classes souffrantes. Ce qu'elles doivent désirer, c'est qu'il s'accumule, se multiplie, se répande sans compte ni mesure. — Et s'il y a un triste spectacle au monde, — spectacle qu'on ne pourrait définir que par ces mots : suicide matériel, moral et collectif, — c'est de voir ces classes, dans leur égarement, faire au capital une guerre acharnée. — Il ne serait ni plus absurde, ni plus triste, si nous voyions tous les capitalistes du monde se concerter pour paralyser les bras et tuer le travail.

In a short undated piece he wrote on "The Morality of Wealth" 2268 there is another statement similar to the one here on leisure where Bastiat reflects on the point of acquiring wealth in the first place. He begins by criticising the Greeks and Romans (such as the Stoics), and their modern counterparts (such as many socialists), who thought having wealth was immoral or something to be shunned. The key point for Bastiat was how that wealth was acquired, either by voluntary transactions or by plunder, not the amount that one had. He concludes by reversing Montaigne's statement that "one man's gain is another man's loss" with his own that "the morality of wealth is proven by this maxim: the profit of one peson is the profit of another." 2269

Service for Service

The idea that exchange could be understood as "les services réciproques" (the reciprocal exchange of services) or "service pour service" (one service exchanged for another), rather than the exchange of "goods for goods" or "goods for money," became central to Bastiat's understanding of the market and which he would explore in more detail in EH1 Chapter IV "Exchange." He used several combinations of words to describe this relationship, such as the following:

"service pour service" or "service contre service" (service for service)
"l'échange des services" (the exchange of services)
"les services réciproques" or "la réciprocité des services" (the reciprocal (exchange) of services)
"la mutualité des services" (the mutual (exchange) of services) 2270
"l'équivalence des services" (the equivalence of services, or the exchange of equivalent services)

He finally settled on "les services réciproques" (the reciprocal exchange of services), "la mutualité des services" (the mutual exchange of services), and "l'équivalence des services" (the equivalence of services,) to use in his treatise Economic Harmonies where he used them a total of 44 times.

Bastiat's thinking about reciprocal exchanges was strongly influenced by Destutt de Tracy who had argued in 1817 that society itself consisted of an interlocking collection of exchanges: 2271

Maintenant, qu'est-ce donc que la société vue sous cet aspect? Je ne crains point de le dire : la société est purement et uniquement une série continuelle d'échanges; elle n'est jamais autre chose dans aucune époque de sa durée, depuis son commencement le plus informe jusqu'à sa plus grande perfection; et c'est là le plus grand éloge qu'on en puisse faire, car l'échange est une transaction admirable dans laquelle les deux contractans gagnent toujours tous deux : par conséquent la société est une suite non interrompue d'avantages sans cesse renaissans pour tous ses membres. Ceci demande à être expliqué.

Now what is society viewed under this aspect? I do not fear to announce it. Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges. It is never any thing else, in any epoch of its duration, from its commencement the most unformed, to its greatest perfection. And this is the greatest eulogy we can give to it, for exchange is an admirable transaction, in which the two contracting parties always both gain; consequently society is an uninterrupted succession of advantages, unceasingly renewed for all its members. This demands an explanation.

D'abord la société n'est qu'une suite d'échanges: en effet, commençons par les premières conventions sur lesquelles elle est fondée. Tout homme , avant d'entrer dans l'état de société, a, comme nous l'avons vu, tous les droits et nul devoir, pas même celui de ne pas nuire aux autres, et les autr e s sont de même à son égard. Il est évident qu'ils n e pourraient pas vivr e ens emb le, si, par une co n vention formelle ou tacite, ils ne se promettaient pas réciproquement sûreté. Eh bien ! cette convention formelle est un véritable échange. Chacun renonce à une certaine manière d'employer ses forces, et re ç oit en retour le même sacrifice de la part de tous les autres. Une fois la sécurité établie par ce moyen, les hommes ont entre eux une multitude de relations qui viennent toutes se ranger sous une des trois classes suivantes. Elles consistent ou à rendre des services pour recevoir un salaire , ou à troquer une marchandise quelconque contre une autre, ou à exécuter quelque ouvrage en commun. Dans les deux premiers cas, l'échange est manifeste; dans le troisième, il n'est pas moins réel: car, quand plusieurs hommes se réunissent pour travailler en commun, chacun d'eux fait le sacrifice aux autres de ce qu'il aurait pu faire pendant ce temps-là pour son utilité particulière, et il reçoit pour équivalent sa part de l'utilité commune résultante du travail commun. Il échange une manière de s'occuper contre une autre qui lui devient plus avantageuses lui-même que ne l'aurait été la première. Il est donc vrai que la société ne consiste que dans une suite continuelle d'échanges.

First, society is nothing but a succession of exchanges. In effect, let us begin with the first conventions on which it is founded. Every man, before entering into the state of society, has as we have seen all rights and no duty, not even that of not hurting others; and others the same in respect to him. It is evident they could not live together, if by a convention formal or tacit they did not promise each other, reciprocally, surety. Well! this convention is a real exchange; every one renounces a certain manner of employing his force, and receives in return the same sacrifice on the part of all the others. Security once established by this mean, men have a multitude of mutual relations which all arrange themselves under one of the three following classes: they consist either in rendering a service to receive a salary, or in bartering some article of merchandize against another, or in executing some work in common. In the two first cases the exchange is manifest. In the third it is not less real; for when several men unite, to labour in common, each makes a sacrifice to the others of what he could have done during the same time for his own particular utility; and he receives, for an equivalent, his part of the common utility resulting from the common labour. He exchanges one manner of occupying himself against another, which becomes more advantageous to him than the other would have been. It is true then that society consists only in a continual succession of exchanges.

We can trace the evolution of his thinking on this topic during the crucial formative period of 1845-46 when he used a variety of expressions before settling on his preferred terminology. For example, in an unpublished review of Charles Dunoyer's book De la Liberté du travail (before March 1845) he says that "La société, au point de vue économique, est un échange de services rémunérés" (Society, from the economic point of view is an exchange of services which are paid for); 2272 in the article, "On Competition" ( Encyclopédie early 1846, and JDE May 1846) he defines "l'économie politique : c'est la théorie des services que les hommes se rendent les uns aux autres à charge de revanche" (political economy is the theory of services which men render to each each other tit for tat); 2273 in an article "To Artisans and Workers" (18 Sept. 1846) he says "le commerce n'est qu'un ensemble de trocs pour trocs, produits contre produits, services pour services" (commerce is only a collection of barter for barter, products for products, and services for services); 2274 and then in a "Speech for the Free Trade Association" in Sept. 1846 in Paris he says "Le monde, au point de vue économique, peut être considéré comme un vaste bazar où chacun de nous apporte ses services et reçoit en retour" (From the perspective of economics, the world can be considered to be a vast bazaar where each of us brings his services and receives them in return). 2275

By the summer of 1847 when he began giving lectures on economics at the School of Law he settled on the three expressions which he used in his treatise Economic Harmonies : "les services réciproques" (reciprocal services) which he used for the first time in a speech he gave for the French Free Trade Association in Paris (3 July 1847) 2276 and then 15 times in Economic Harmonies; "la mutualité des services" (the mutual or reciprocal exchange of services) which he interestingly borrowed from his arch rival Proudhon and used for the first time in the essay "Property and Plunder" (24 July 1848), 2277 then began using it himself in Capital and Rent (Feb. 1849), and 10 times in Economic Harmonies; and "l'équivalence des services" which he used for the first time in the "Fifth Letter" of the pamphlet Property and Plunder (July 1848) 2278 and then 19 times in Economic Harmonies.

By the time he came to write the pamphlet Capital and Rent (February 1849) his thinking had evolved to the point where he believed that any and all gains from transactions, whether profit, interest, or rent, came from the same essential thing, namely an exchange of services between individuals. In the context of this pamphlet Bastiat is appealing to workers who had been influenced by socialists like Proudhon, and so he takes a phrase used by Proudhon 2279 "la mutualité des services" (the mutuality of services) and adapts it for his own purposes (meaning here "the mutual exchange of services"). Proudhon, unlike his other socialist colleagues such as Considerant and Louis Blanc, approved of some transactions on the free market between equal parties where there was some mutual benefit to the exchange. However, he did did not think this was possible in the case of interest paid on loans. Thus, here Bastiat was trying to turn Proudhon's own argument back on himself in a rhetorical turn of phrase which he was much skilled at, as his Economic Sophisms demonstrate.

Bastiat argues in Capital and Rent that:

À proprement parler, l'Échange c'est la mutualité des services. Les parties se disent entre elles : « Donne-moi ceci, et je te donnerai cela ; » ou bien : « Fais ceci pour moi, et je ferai cela pour toi. » Il est bon de remarquer (car cela jettera un jour nouveau sur la notion de valeur ) que la seconde formule est toujours impliquée dans la première. Quand on dit : « Fais ceci pour moi, et je ferai cela pour toi, » on propose d'échanger service contre service. De même quand on dit : « Donne-moi ceci, et je te donnerai cela, » c'est comme si l'on disait : « Je te cède ceci que j'ai fait, cède-moi cela que tu as fait. » Le travail est passé au lieu d'être actuel ; mais l'Échange n'en est pas moins gouverné par l'appréciation comparée des deux services, en sorte qu'il est très-vrai de dire que le principe de la valeur est dans les services rendus et reçus à l'occasion des produits échangés, plutôt que dans les produits eux-mêmes.

Strictly speaking, Exchange is the mutual exchange of services . The parties say to one another: "Give me this and I will give you that" or "Do this for me and I will do that for you." It should be noted (as this will shed new light on the notion of value ) that the second formula is always implicit in the first. When people say "Do this for me and I will do that for you," they are offering to exchange one service for another. Similarly, when they say: "Give me this and I will give you that" it is as if they were saying "I will hand over to you this item that I have made; hand over to me one that you have made." The work is in the past instead of being in the present, but the Exchange is no less governed by a comparative evaluation of the two services, so that it is very true to say that the principle of value is inherent in the services given and received when products are exchanged rather than in the products themselves.

By the end of 1847 when he wrote the opening chapters for Economic Sophisms Series II he was able to distill what he called "the great social law" governing man into the following statement, that is was "the freely negotiated exchange of one service for another." 2280 Equally pithily, he concluded in one of the draft chapters of Economic Harmonies (date written is unknown) that "la Liberté — ou l'équivalence des services" (Liberty was the exchange of equivalent services). 2281

Another twist in his understanding of "services" is his distinction between "les services réels" (real services) or "services effectifs" (real or actual services), which were exchanged by participants voluntarily in the free market, and "les services fictifs" (false or imaginary services), which were promised by the state or other privileged institutions like the Church to ordinary tax-payers and consumers and not adequately provided (or not even at all) and which were justified by the use of "sophisms," i.e. by false and sophistical arguments. As he explained it in the "Conclusion" to ES1: 2282

Pour voler le public, il faut le tromper. Le tromper, c'est lui persuader qu'on le vole pour son avantage ; c'est lui faire accepter en échange de ses biens des services fictifs, et souvent pis. — De là le Sophisme. — Sophisme théocratique, Sophisme économique, Sophisme politique, Sophisme financier.

In order to steal from the public, it is first necessary to deceive them. To deceive them it is necessary to persuade them that they are being robbed for their own good; it is to make them accept imaginary services and often worse in exchange for their possessions. This gives rise to sophistry. Theocratic sophistry, economic sophistry, political sophistry, and financial sophistry.

Another innovative idea which Bastiat develop alongside his idea of exchange as the mutual exchange of services, is the idea that an exchange is a result of a comparative evaluation of the two services by the two parties involved in any transaction. The "value" which is exchanged when services are given and received is determined by the individuals involved in the transaction rather than residing in the products themselves as some kind of abstract "labor" or "utility." This is one of Bastiat's most original and profound economic insights which went to the heart of the Smithian and Ricardian tradition of economic thought, which asserted that there was something inherent within the objects being exchanged (such as labour or utility) and that this thing could be objectively assessed, measured, and valued. Bastiat's insight was to reject the objectivity of this "value" and to see that it was the subjective valuations, the "appréciation comparée" (comparative evaluation or judgement), of the two parties to the exchange which made exchange both possible and worth while for both parties. He went even further in arguing that all exchanges could be viewed as "exchanges of services," including such things as the payment of interest and rent, a claim which provoked his colleagues in the Political Economy Society, not to mention Proudhon, to strenuously object to this novel formulation and to ultimately reject Bastiat's ideas.

Social Economy

Most of the time when Bastiat used the expression "l'économie sociale" (social economy) he did so as a synonym for the more commonly used "l'économie politique" (political economy). On half a dozen occasions however he used "social economy" to mean something broader than the more limited sphere of "pure political economy" which encompassed the traditional economic matters of production, trade, and the buying and selling goods and services. "Social economy" included all aspects of human activity in the social realm, namely any human activity which was voluntary and involved groups of individuals coming together for social purposes. In other words, what we would today call sociology. As he stated in a letter to his friend and neighbour Félix Coudroy in August 1847 about his plans to give a course of lectures to some students at the Faculty of Law: 2283

à partir de novembre prochain, je ferai à cette jeunesse un cours, non d'économie politique pure, mais d'économie sociale, en prenant ce mot dans l'acception que nous lui donnons, Harmonie des lois sociales.

In the Conclusion to the first series of Economic Sophisms which appeared in January 1846 he makes a similar statement about "le cercle étroit" (the narrow or cramped circle) of traditional political economy which was interested in things like trade restrictions, vested interests ("droits acquis" or acquired rights), economic downturns ("inopportunité" or difficulties or inconveniences), and the debasement of the currency. Here he lists a large number of other topics which fell within the domain of "social economy" such as the numerous socialist schools of thought and their criticisms of society, the problem of luxury, and so on. The following quote provides an interesting list of these other topics which though fell outside the narrow circle of traditional political economy: 2284

Mais l'économie sociale n'est pas renfermée dans ce cercle étroit. Le fouriérisme, le saint-simonisme, le communisme, le mysticisme, le sentimentalisme, la fausse philanthropie, les aspirations affectées vers une égalité et une fraternité chimériques, les questions relatives au luxe, aux salaires, aux machines, à la prétendue tyrannie du capital, aux colonies, aux débouchés, aux conquêtes, à la population, à l'association, à l'émigration, aux impôts, aux emprunts, ont encombré le champ de la science d'une foule d'arguments parasites, de sophismes qui sollicitent la houe et la binette de l'économiste diligent.

But social economy is not limited to this narrow circle. Fourierist doctrine, Saint-Simonian doctrine, communism, mysticism, sentimentalism, bogus philanthropy, affected aspirations to illusionary equality and fraternity, questions relating to luxury, to wages, to machines, to the alleged tyranny of capital, to colonies, markets, conquests, population, association, emigration, taxes and loans: these have cluttered the field of science with a host of parasitic arguments, sophisms that call for the hoe and harrow of a diligent economist.

Also within the purview of social economy was the issue of leisure which he referred to several times in his writing but most especially at the conclusion of his Fourth Letter in the Bastiat-Proudhon debate on Free Credit. 2285 He criticises traditional economic thinking for ignoring the other ends and purposes individuals might have other than providing for their material existence. Leisure was one of these other purposes in life, but in an interesting twist to the argument, he adds an economic dimension to the discussion by saying that more and more people will be able to enjoy wealth as more capital is acquired and their working hours become more productive as a result. This, he argued, could only be provided by a free economy. In earlier societies like the Romans, the only people who could enjoy much leisure for creative purposes were the slave owners:

Perhaps the clearest statement Bastiat made about there being two different kinds of economic activity, and thus two different kinds of economics, social and political, comes in his unfinished chapter on "Private and Public Services" in EH2. Here he argues that society and government are very different entities with entirely different "processes" or ways of functioning when it comes to economic activity or trade. He compares society to a large circle which literally encircles the smaller domain of state activity. The kinds of exchanges and services provided within the circle of "society" are voluntary, cooperative, and competitive; while those that are provided with the circle of "government" are "entirely different in themselves and in their effects" since they are based upon taxation, coercion, and political privilege. 2286

Ainsi considérés en eux-mêmes, dans leur nature propre, à l'état normal, abstraction faite de tout abus, les services publics sont, comme les services privés, de purs échanges.

Thus, considered on their own, with respect to their own nature and normal condition, leaving aside any question of abuse, public services, like private services, are purely forms of exchange.

Mais les procédés par lesquels, dans ces deux formes de l'échange, les services se comparent, se débattent, se transmettent, s'équilibrent et manifestent leur valeur, sont si différents en eux-mêmes et quant à leurs effets, que le lecteur me permettra sans doute de traiter avec quelque étendue ce difficile sujet, un des plus intéressants qui puissent s'offrir aux méditations de l'économiste et de l'homme d'État. À vrai dire, c'est ici qu'est le nœud par lequel la politique se rattache à l'économie sociale. C'est ici qu'on peut marquer l'origine et la portée de cette erreur, la plus funeste qui ait jamais infecté la science, et qui consiste à confondre la société et le gouvernement — la société, ce tout qui embrasse à la fois les services privés et les services publics, et le gouvernement, cette fraction dans laquelle n'entrent que les services publics.

However, the procedures by which services, in these two forms of exchange, are compared, negotiated, transmitted, balanced and come to reveal their value, are so different in themselves and in their effects, that the reader will probably allow me to deal rather broadly with this difficult subject, one of the most interesting offering itself to the reflection of economists and Statesmen alike. Truth to tell this is the knot that ties politics to social economy. It is here that the origin and scope of that error, the most disastrous ever to have infected economic science, can be pinpointed, the mistake which consists in confusing society and government: society, the entity that embraces simultaneously both private and public services and government, the fraction that encompasses public services only.

The source for Bastiat's views on this distinction probably come from Jean-Baptiste Say, who sometimes talked about social economy, via Charles Dunoyer, whose work had a profound impact on Bastiat. In 1830 Dunoyer published a large work entitled Nouveau traité d'économie sociale (A New Treatise on Social Economy) which he later expanded into his magnum opus De la liberté du travail which was published in 1845 and which Bastiat reviewed. 2287 Dunoyer's aim was to expand the study of political economy away from an exclusive focus on the creation and distribution of wealth, which was its inheritance from Adam Smith, towards a new kind of economics which had a "social dimension" and would concern itself with mattes of race, culture, slavery, technology, intellectual development, the economic evolution of society through various stages, class, and industry (broadly understood). The boldness of this approach was to show how all these social factors interacted with each other and how they were in turn affected by economic matters, with the overall intention of showing how they all contributed to the development of a free society, or "LIBERTY" as Dunoyer grandiosely called it. The similarities to Bastiat's plans for his multi-volume work on social theory are readily apparent.

The Social Mechanism and its Driving Force 2288

As a true nineteenth century social theorist Bastiat made use of several mechanical, biological, or astronomical metaphors to describe the structure and operation of social, economic, and political institutions, structures, and processes. These included the idea that society was like a clock or a mechanism (with wheels, springs, and movements), or a machine with an engine or motor (driven by steam or other physical forces), or like a mechanical or scientific apparatus of some kind (with different parts which operated together in a coordinated fashion), or a "celestial mechanism" like orbiting planets which moved under the influence of gravity, normally in a "harmonious" manner but which sometimes could be knocked out of their orbit by some external disturbing factor.

The vocabulary he used to describe this can be divided into various components: the mechanism or machine itself, the power source, the machine's parts, and the designer or operator of the machine. An added complication comes from whether he was discussing society as a whole or the individuals who engaged in voluntary exchanges within that society. Both societies as well as individuals had a "driving force or motor" (la force motrice, le moteur) according to Bastiat.

For the mechanism or machine itself he used the following terms: "le mécanisme social" (the social mechanism), "la mécanique sociale" (the social machine, engine), "le mécanisme de la société" (the mechanism of society), "la machine sociale" (the social machine), and "l'appareil de l'échange" (the apparatus of exchange or trade).

For the power source: "le moteur social," "le mobile social," or "la force motrice de la Société" (the social engine or driving force of society), and "le ressort" (the spring, or the mainspring). 2289

And for the machine's parts: "les rouages," (the cogs and wheels) "les ressorts," (the springs or mainspring) and "les mobiles" (the movement or driving force).

There were two different sets of expressions to describe the designer or operator of the machine depending upon his distinction between "natural and artificial" ways of organising societies. 2290 For the former there was the "natural" organiser which was "Providence" or the natural laws which governed the operation of the world (both physical and economic), and for the latter there was the "artificial" organiser which was "le grand Mécanicien" (the Great Mechanic), "le législateur" (the legislator - especially the Rousseau-ian Legislator), "le Prince" (the Prince), or even "le jardinier" (the gardener). In this volume we have the example of Pancho in the story "Barataria" who is given the opportunity to be a socialist mechanic or engineer who rules the island of Barataria but refuses to do so. 2291

The diversity of expressions Bastiat used suggests his thinking was evolving and he had not yet settled on a single set of expressions to describe what he meant by "social mechanism."

As he stated in the article "Natural and Artificial Organisations" Bastiat believed there were two ways in which societies could be organised, by "artificial" means such as coercion and central planning, or by "natural" means such as voluntary cooperation and exchange in the market. Socialists believed in "artificial kinds of organisation" which could be designed and built by well-meaning social reformers like Louis Blanc or Victor Considerant. The socialists's big mistake he argued was to think that individual human beings were inanimate objects (like metal cogs and wheels, or pieces of putty, or plants and tress) who could be manipulated by a central planner, designer, or "mechanic" and not thinking, choosing, acting individuals with free will. For these reformers, societies or economies were just "les inventions sociales" (social inventions or creations) and individuals were like pieces of putty in their hands which could be molded into any shape they wished, or like bushes which could be clipped into strange shapes by "social gardeners."

Bastiat, on the other hand, believed in "natural kinds of organisation." These types of organisations emerged "providentially" or "spontaneously" (to use Hayek's term) and evolved gradually over time. Their operation could be studied by economists empirically from the outside, or by introspection from the inside (as it were). A big difference with the socialist model of organisation was that Bastiat believed that the "cogs and wheels" which comprised the social mechanism were thinking, choosing, acting individuals with free will and personal interests they were pursuing. As he noted in "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (Jan. 1848): 2292

Ces rouages sont des hommes, c'est-à-dire des êtres capables d'apprendre, de réfléchir, de raisonner, de se tromper, de se rectifier, et par conséquent d'agir sur l'amélioration ou sur la détérioration du mécanisme lui-même. Je dois ajouter aussi que ces ressorts sont capables de satisfaction et de douleur, et c'est en cela qu'ils sont non— seulement les rouages, mais les ressorts du mécanisme. Ils sont plus que cela encore, ils en sont l'objet même et le but, puisque c'est en satisfactions et en douleurs individuelles que tout se résout en définitive.

Its wheels are men, that is to say, beings capable of learning, reflecting, reasoning, making mistakes, rectifying them, and consequently acting to improve or worsen the (operation) of the mechanism itself. They are capable of feeling satisfaction and pain, and this makes them not only cogs and wheels but also the springs of the mechanism. They are also its driving force because the principle of action resides in them. They are still more than that, they are the object of the mechanism itself, and its purpose, since it is in individual satisfactions and pain that everything is finally resolved.

And also: 2293

ce phénomène extraordinaire que chaque atome est un être animé, pensant, doué de cette énergie merveilleuse, de ce principe de tente moralité, de toute dignité, de tout progrès, attribut exclusif de l'homme, la liberté!

the extraordinary phenomenon that each atom (in this social mechanism) is a living, thinking being, endowed with th at marvelous energy , with that source of all morality, of all dignity , of all progress , an attribute which is exclusive to man, namely FREEDOM !

Individuals had "un mobile/force interne" (an internal driving force), which he likened to "a kind of gravitation," which impelled them to do what they did and when taken in the aggregate this in turn created "un mobile social" (a social driving force) or "le moteur social" (the social motor or driving force). He also called it "la force motrice de la Société" (the driving or motive force of society).

The internal driving force for individuals was the desire to avoid pain or harm and to seek pleasure or well-being, in other words to pursue their "l'intérêt personnel" (self-interest). 2294 As he noted in the Chapter on "The Social Motor" in EH2: 2295

This internal, indestructible, and universal driving force that is within each individual and makes him into an acting being, this tendency in everyone to seek happiness and avoid unhappiness, this product, effect and complement essential to the faculty of sensation and without which it would be just an inexplicable scourge, this primordial phenomenon that is the origin of all human action, this force of attraction and repulsion that we have called the driving force of the social mechanism has had the majority of political writers as its detractors, and this is certainly one of the strangest aberrations that the annals of science can produce.

Although Bastiat believed that the primary motive force for individuals was self-interest, he also thought that there was a second "autre mobile" (another motive force) which was an innate feeling of sympathy for others. As he put it in a speech on free trade in September 1847: 2296

Sans doute, la fraternité prend aussi sa source dans un autre ordre d'idées plus élevées. La religion nous en fait un devoir ; elle sait que Dieu a placé dans le cœur de l'homme, avec l'intérêt personnel, un autre mobile : la sympathie. L'un dit : Aimez-vous les uns les autres ; et l'autre : Vous n'avez rien à perdre, vous avez tout à gagner à vous aimer les uns les autres. Et n'est-il pas bien consolant que la science vienne démontrer l'accord de deux forces en apparence si contraires?

No doubt fraternity has as its source another set of ideas which are more elevated. Religion makes it a duty for us. It says that God has placed in the hearts of men, along with self-interest, another driving force, namely sympathy (for others). One says "love one another" and the other says "you have nothing to lose and everything to gain in loving one another." Isn't it very consoling that science is able to demonstrate the agreement/harmony of these two forces so apparently contrary to each other?

The role of the political economists was not to tinker with the social mechanism as the socialists wanted to do, but to study how it worked, what its driving force was, how the different parts contributed to its smooth or harmonious operation, and how external disturbing forces sometimes upset its operation. As he wrote in one of his last articles "Abundance": 2297

C'est une vaste et noble science, en tant qu'exposition, que l'économie politique. Elle scrute les ressorts du mécanisme social et les fonctions de chacun des organes qui constituent ces corps vivants et merveilleux, qu'on nomme des sociétés humaines. Elle étudie les lois générales selon lesquelles le genre humain est appelé à croître en nombre, en richesse, en intelligence, en moralité. Et néanmoins, reconnaissant un libre arbitre social comme un libre arbitre personnel, elle dit comment les lois providentielles peuvent être méconnues ou violées; quelle responsabilité terrible naît de ces expérimentations fatales, et comment la civilisation peut se trouver ainsi arrêtée, retardée, refoulée et pour longtemps étouffée.

In terms of its powers of exposition, political economy is a grand and noble science. It scrutinizes the mainspring of the social mechanism and the functions of all the various organs of that marvelous living body known as human society. It studies the general laws according to which the human race is stimulated to increase in numbers, wealth, knowledge, and morality. However, by recognizing the existence of a social free will like we do the existence of an individual free will, political economy makes clear how providential laws may be misinterpreted or violated, what terrible responsibility arises from these disastrous experiments, and how civilization may, as a result, be halted, set back, buried, and stifled for lengthy periods.

Bastiat was also keenly aware that the same self-interest which drove the social mechanism and impelled men to improve their condition through production and trade also drove them to engage in plunder. It was thus a two edged sword which had to be carefully studied and understood. The socialists's mistake he thought was to think that self-interest inevitably led to war and class conflict and that it could not be directed or harnessed by better laws and institutions to improve mankind's well-being instead.

As he stated in an unfinished sketch for a chapter on War in EH2: 2298

La spoliation par voie de guerre, c'est-à-dire la spoliation toute naïve, toute simple, toute crue, a sa racine dans le cœur humain, dans l'organisation de l'homme, dans ce moteur universel du monde social : l'attrait pour les satisfactions et la répugnance pour la douleur ; en un mot, dans ce mobile que nous portons tous en nous-mêmes : l'intérêt personnel.

Et je ne suis pas fâché de me porter son accusateur. Jusqu'ici on a pu croire que j'avais voué à ce principe un culte idolâtre, que je ne lui attribuais que des conséquences heureuses pour l'humanité, peut-être même que je l'élevais dans mon estime au-dessus du principe sympathique, du dévouement, de l'abnégation. — Non, je ne l'ai pas jugé ; j'ai seulement constaté son existence et son omnipotence. Cette omnipotence, je l'aurais mal appréciée, et je serais en contradiction avec moi-même, quand je signale l'intérêt personnel comme le moteur universel de l'humanité, si je n'en faisais maintenant découler les causes perturbatrices, comme précédemment j'en ai fait sortir les lois harmoniques de l'ordre social.

Plunder by means of war, that is to say totally naïve, simple and crude plunder, has its roots in the human heart, in the organization of mankind, and in the universal driving force (moteur) of the social world: namely our attraction to satisfaction and aversion to pain. In a word, in this driving force (mobile) which we all carry within us: self-interest.

And it does not upset me to step forward for the prosecution. Up to now, it might have been thought that I had given idolatrous devotion to this principle, that I attributed only favorable consequences for the human race to it and perhaps even that I raised it in my estimation to a level above the principles of sympathy for others, devotion, and self-sacrifice. No, I have not passed judgment on it; I have merely noted its existence and omnipotence. I would have assessed this omnipotence incorrectly, and would be contradicting myself in identifying self-interest as the universal driving force of the human race, if I did not now make clear the disturbing factors which flow from it, just as I previously identified the harmonious laws of the social order that (also flow from it).

So, the question he put to his socialist opponents was the following: 2299

Ensuite, ils (publicistes) sont conduits à condamner le principe même d'action des hommes, je veux dire l'intérêt personnel, puisqu'il a amené un tel état de choses. Remarquons que l'homme est organisé de telle façon qu'il recherche la satisfaction et évite la peine; c'est de là, j'en conviens, que naissent tous les maux sociaux, la guerre, l'esclavage, la spoliation, le monopole, le privilège; mais c'est de la aussi que viennent tous les biens, puisque la satisfaction des besoins et la répugnance pour la douleur sont les mobiles de l'homme. La question est donc de savoir si ce mobile qui, d'individu devient social, n'est pas en lui-même un principe de progrès.

Next, they are led to condemn the very principle governing men's action, I mean self-interest , since it has led to such a state of affairs. We should note that man is organized in such a way that he seeks satisfaction and avoids pain; I agree that this is the cause of all social harm s – war, slavery, plunder, monopoly , and privilege - but it is also from this that all good arises, since the satisfaction of needs and aversion to pain are the driving forces (mobiles) for men. The question is therefore to ascertain whether this driving force , which in origin is individual but becomes social, is not itself a principle of progress.

Appendix 2: The French State and Politics (CW4)↩

The French Army and Conscription

The modern mass conscript army was pioneered by the French during the Revolution. A law of August 1793 ordered a "levée en masse" (large scale call up) of all unmarried men aged between 18-25 with no substitution allowed - this was called a "requisition." A law of September 1798 (the Jourdan law) made it obligatory for all males between the ages of 20 and 25 to serve 5 years in the army with no substitution allowed - this was called "conscription" or "levée forcée." Conscription was technically abolished under the Charter of 1814 but when new legislation was enacted in 1818 it filled the army with a mixture of voluntary recruits and others chosen by lot to make up any shortfall in enlistment - this was called "recrutement." It required military service for 12 years, six in the army and six in the reserves. An unwilling conscript could buy their way out by paying a third party to take their place. There were also many categories for exemption which were decided by boards in the local Cantons which were given quotas of recruits to fill each year. The length of service was reduced to 8 years in 1824 and then 7 years in 1832. Some 80,000 new recruits were needed each year to maintain the size of the French Army (Armée de terre) at its full strength of about 400,000 men in the late 1840s. During the Third Republic (1872) service in the army was again made compulsory for all males. Conscription came to an end in France in 1996. 2300

It was a common practice for those conscripted by the drawing of lots ("tirage au sort") to pay for a replacement or substitute to take their place in the ranks. The liberal publisher and journalist Émile de Girardin estimated that about one quarter of the entire French Army consisted of replacements who had been paid fr. 1,800-2,400 to take the place of some young man who had been called up but did not want to serve. The schedule of payments depended on the type of service: fr. 1,800-2,000 for the infantry; 2,000-2,400 for the artillery, cavalry and other specialized forces. This meant that only quite well off men could afford to pay these amounts to avoid army service, thus placing a greater burden on poor agricultural workers and artisans. During the 1848 Revolution there was a pamphlet war calling for the abolition of conscription but this was unsuccessful. 2301 In "The Utopian" (January 1847) Bastiat wanted to disband most of the French immediately and convert it from a standing army into a collection of local militias. In the pamphlet What is Seen and What is Not Seen, or Political Economy in One Lesson (July 1850) Bastiat proposed to cut the size of the French Army by 100,000 men from its total in 1849 of about 390,000 men (a cut of 25.6%). The expenditure on the army in 1849 was fr. 346,319,558. Total government expenditure in 1849 was fr. 1.573 billion with expenditure on the armed forces making up 29.6% of the total budget. Bastiat roughly estimates that 100,000 soldiers cost the French state fr. 100 million.

Assignat

"Assignat" was the name given to the paper currency issued by the National Assembly between 1789 and 1796. They were originally issued as bonds based upon the value of the land confiscated from the church and the nobility("biens national") and were intended to pay off the national debt. Later they became legal tender in 1791. Overissue led to a spectacular hyperinflation which wiped out their value in a few years. The initial number issued in April 1790 was 400 million; in September 1792 2.7 billion were in circulation; and by the beginning of 1796 when they were abandoned there were perhaps 45 billion in circulation. In an effort to control the rise in prices caused by this inflation various attempts were unsuccessfully made to regulate prices such as the "Maximum" in 1793. As a result of this experience Napoleon returned the country to a gold backed currency, the franc, in 1803. 2302

Bank of France

The Bank of France was modeled on the Bank of England and was founded as a private bank in 1800 with Napoleon as one of the shareholders. It was granted a monopoly in issuing currency in 1803. Payment in specie upon demand was suspended twice in the 19th century, both times during revolutions - 1848-1850 and 1870-1875. The banks of the different Départmentes were merged into the Bank of France in 1848 in an attempt to solve the fiscal crisis brought on by the Revolution.

Chamber of Deputies and Elections

During the Restoration (1815-1830) and the July Monarchy (1830-1848) France was ruled by a King, an upper house of Lords (Chamber of Peers), and a lower house of elected representatives (Chamber of Deputies). The Revolution of February 1848 overthrew the Monarchy and suspended the Chamber of Peers replacing them with a republic (the Second Republic) with a single elected body called the National Assembly which for the first year (4 May 1848 - 27 May 1849) was known as the Constituent Assembly as a new constitution was being developed, and then the Legislative Assembly which lasted until Louis Napoleon's coup d'état of December 1851.

Elections to the Chamber of Deputies between 1815 and 1848 were by limited manhood suffrage. Voters were drawn from a small number of people who were at least 30 years old and who paid at least fr. 300 in direct taxes (land tax, door and window tax, tax on businesses) [these requirements were lowered in 1830 to 25 years and fr. 200]. Men could not stand for election unless they were at least 40 years old and paid at least fr. 1,000 in direct taxes [these requirements were lowered in 1830 to 30 years and fr. 500]. These property and tax requirements limited the electorate to a small group of wealthy individuals which numbered only 89,000 in the Restoration, 180,000 in 1831, and about 241,000 in 1846, or about 5% out of a total population of about 36 million people.

In addition, the "Law of the Double Vote" was introduced on 29 June 1820 to benefit the ultra-monarchists who were under threat after the assassination of the Duke de Berry in February 1820. The law was designed to give the wealthiest voters two votes so they could dominate the Chamber of Deputies with their supporters. Between 1820 and 1848, 258 deputies were elected by a small group of individuals who qualified to vote because they paid more than 2-300 francs in direct taxes (this figure varied over time from 90,000 to 240,000). One quarter of the electors, those who paid the largest amount of taxes, elected another 172 deputies (an additional 2 deputies per département). Therefore, those wealthier electors enjoyed the privilege of a double vote. Bastiat referred to this small group as the "classe électorale" (the electoral class). 2303

Deputies were elected to a term of 5 years, one fifth of whom would be elected each year, and were not paid a salary, which meant that only government civil servants (who could sit in the Chamber concurrently with their government job) 2304 or the wealthy were able to afford to run for office. Deputies could not initiate legislation which was a prerogative of the King. The Chamber consisted of 258 Deputies in 1816, 430 in 1820, 459 in 1831, and 460 in 1839. General elections were held in July 1831, June 1834, November 1837, March 1839, July 1842, and August 1846.

The following is a summary of the elections held between 1839 and 1846:

the 5th legislature of the July Monarchy was elected in stages on 2 March and 6 July 1839. The Republican and so-called "third party" coalition won with 240 seats; the Conservative block got 199; and the Legitimists won only 20. King Louis-Philippe lacked a majority and dissolved the government on 16 June 1842.
the 6th legislature of the July Monarchy was elected on 9 July 1842. The Conservatives won with 266 seats; and the "Opposition" won 193. King Louis-Philippe dissolved the government on 16 July 1846.
the 7th legislature of the July Monarchy was elected on 1 August 1846. The Conservatives won with 290 seats; and the Opposition won 168. The government was dissolved when the Revolution of February 1848 broke out.

The February Revolution of 1848 introduced universal manhood suffrage (21 years or older), the Constituent Assembly had 900 members (minimum age of 25). Over 9 million men were eligible to vote and 7.8 million men voted (84% of registered voters) in an election held on 23 and 24 April 1848. The largest block of Deputies were monarchists (290), followed by moderate republicans (230), and extreme republicans and socialists (55). The remainder were unaligned.

Bastiat was elected to the Constituent Assembly in the election of 23 April 1848 to represent the département of Les Landes. 2305 He was the second delegate elected out of 7 with a vote of 56,445. He served on the Comité des finances (Finance Committee) and was elected 8 times as vice-president of the committee (such was the regard of his colleagues for his economic knowledge) and he made periodic reports to the Chamber on Finance Committee matters. He was also asked to join the Committee on Labour but did stay long as he wanted to focus on financial matters.

In the first and only presidential election held on 10-11 December 1848 under the new constitution, 7.4 million people voted making Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Louis Napoleon the President of the Second Republic. General Cavaignac, received 1.4 million votes (19%) to Louis Napoleon's 5.5 million votes (74%).

In the election of 19 January 1849 of the 705 seats, 450 were won by members of the "Party of Order" (an alliance of legitimists and other conservatives), 75 by moderate republicans, and 180 by "the Mountain" (radical democrats and socialists). Left wing protesters were joined by several dozen left-wing Deputies in a demonstration on 13 June which was suppressed upon orders of the President of the Republic, Louis Napoleon. This led to the closing down a several left-wing newspapers and the political clubs.

In the election of 13-14 May 1849 for the Legislative Assembly 6.7 million men voted (out of 9.9 million registered voters). The largest block in the Legislative Assembly was "the party of Order" (monarchists and Bonapartists) (500), the extreme left ("Montagnards" or democratic socialists) (200), and the moderate republicans (80). Bastiat was part of this latter group.

Bastiat was also elected to the Legislative Assembly in the election of 13 May 1849 to represent the département of Les Landes. 2306 He received 25,726 votes out of 49,762. Because of his deteriorating health Bastiat was less able to speak in the Chamber and his attendance fell off. However, he was able to write articles on matters before the Chamber which he distributed.

Fortifications of Paris

In 1840 the President of the Council of Ministers, Adolphe Thiers was concerned that Britain's opposition to French policy to support the Pascha of Egypt might lead to another war. To deter this possibility, he planned to build a massive military wall 33 km (21 miles) in circumference around the city of Paris with 16 star-shaped forts laid out in an outer perimeter beyond the wall. 2307 All people and goods entering or leaving the city had to pass through one of the 17 large entry gates built into the wall. This project was budgeted to cost fr. 150 million and was completed in 1844. The total expenditure would have been much higher if the state had not used the labour of thousands of army conscripts to dig the ditches and build the wall. "Thiers' Wall," as it was known, was strongly opposed by liberals such as the astronomer François Arago and the economist Michel Chevalier, who objected to its construction because it was so expensive, that military technology would soon make it obsolete, and that the wall would one day be used to "imprison" the citizens of Paris if they ever rose up in rebellion to demand much needed political and economic reforms (which they did of course in February 1848, and were duly put down by troops stationed in the forts around Paris). In other words, the wall would result in the "embastillisation" of Paris (the Bastillisation of Paris). 2308

General Councils (conseils généraux de département)

The General Council is a chamber in each French département that deliberates on subjects concerning that département. It has one representative per county (canton) (twenty-eight at the time for Les Landes département, thirty-one today), elected for nine years (six years today). Its functions have varied over time. The Law of 22 December 1789 created an assembly in each département consisting of 36 elected members. In February 1800 this was replaced by members appointed by the government. During the July Monarchy election of members of the Council was again made by election in a reform of 1833 but it was limited by the property and tax paying requirements of the electoral law (only tax payers who paid a minimum amount of direct taxes were allowed to vote). Universal manhood suffrage for Council elections was introduced under the Law of 3 July 1848. Bastiat was elected general councillor in 1833 for the county of Mugron after the reform of 1833 was enacted, a post he held until his death. At that time, the Council deliberations had to be approved by the prefect.

Government Administrative Regions

Administrative regions in descending order of size from largest to smallest: regions were départements, arrondissements (districts"), cantons ("municipalities" or "counties"), and communes ("villages" or "towns").

In the 18th century the Kingdom of France was divided into about 40 provinces which were replaced by the system of 83 départements in 1790, which expanded to 130 in 1809 when Napoleon's Empire had reached its furthest extent. In Bastiat's day there were 86 départements. The old provinces were divided into about 20 administrative Regions which were each in turn divided into about 6 départements each of which was administered by a Prefect ("préfet"). Bastiat's family lived in the city of Bayonne in what had been the province of Guyenne and Gascony and which became the département of Pyrénéees-Atlantiques in the region of Aquitaine (prefectural capital in Bordeaux). The Départements are divided into 3 or 4 districts or arrondissements with a main city or town called a subprefecture which is administered by a Sub-Prefect ("sous-préfet"). Each arrondissement is divided into cantons which are in turn divided into communes. The Départements are administered by a Conseil général (General Council) which is an elected body which has the responsibility of maintaining local schools, roads, and other infrastructure.

The town where Bastiat lived, Mugron, was a commune in the canton of Mugron, in the arrondissement of Dax, in the département of Les Landes, in the region of Aquitaine. He was appointed magistrate (justice of the peace) in the commune of Mugron in 1831, elected to the General Council of the département of Les Landes in 1833 (re-elected in 1839), and on 23 April 1848 he was elected to represent the département of Les Landes in the Constituent Assembly of the Second Republic. He was elected again on 1 August 1849 to represent Les Landes in the first National Assembly of the Republic.

Money

A useful summary is 1 franc = 100 centimes = 20 sous.

French currency in the 19th century was based upon names and denominations which were a mixture of three different traditions, the Roman, the medieval, and the Revolutionary, thus making the names somewhat confusing. A further complication comes from the fact that one has to keep distinct the name of the coin or money unit (e.g. "écu" or "louis") and its denomination or value ("livres" or "sous").

The Roman tradition was based upon silver coins where the highest value coin was the "libra" (Fr = livre; English = pound), followed by the "solidus" (Fr = sol or sou; English shilling), and then the "denarius" (Fr = denier, English = penny) which had the following comparative values 1 livre = 20 sous = 240 deniers. The original value of the "libra" (livre) was one pound of silver. This was a duodecimal or base 12 system.

French currency during the medieval period was based upon a gold coin called the "franc à cheval" (the Frank on horseback) which was minted in order to pay the ransom of King Jean II who had been taken prisoner by the English. Other gold coins also circulated in the medieval period. Under Louis IX (1226-1270) a gold coin known as the "denier d'or à l'écu" (gold denier with a shield) or "écu" for short was popular.

Under the Old Regime Louis XIII in 1640 replaced the old franc with a system based upon three coins: the "louis d'or" (gold Louis), the "louis d'argent" (silver Louis) or "silver écu", and the "liard" (made of copper). During the Old Regime several different types of livres were in circulation, the most common being from the city of Tours known as the "livre tournois". After the bankruptcy of the Banque générale established by John Law as a de facto state bank in 1720 the livre tournois was seriously devalued and then abandoned and a new "livre" worth 0.31 grammes of gold was introduced.

Another coin used in France owes its origin to the Greek "obelos" (obole). In the medieval period it was a copper coin officially worth 1/2 denier. In the Old Regime deniers were often divided into 8ths, where an obole was worth 4/8 denier, a "pite" was 2/8, and a "semi-pite" was 1/8. As monetary devaluation continued to decrease its value the word "obole" came to mean a coin of very little or minimal value.

During the Revolution the French currency was decimalized (metrification using base 10) when a new French Franc was introduced in 1795 which was divisible into 100 centimes. The Law of 7 January 1795 decreed the issuing of paper "assignats" denominated in Francs and using as security the value of the property confiscated from the Church and the nobility. A full decimalization law of 7 April 1795 defined not only the metre, litre, and gramme but also the new French Franc which was fixed at a value of 5 grammes of silver. Another law of 14 April 1796 decreed that the livre tournois and the new France were almost identical in value at about 4.5 grammes of silver.

National Workshops (Ateliers Nationaux)

Louis Blanc was appointed by the Provisional Government to be the president of the "Commission du gouvernement pour les travailleurs" (Government Commission for the Workers) (also known as the Luxembourg Commission) which oversaw the National Workshops program. The National Workshops were created on February 27, 1848, in one of the very first legislative acts of the Provisional government, to create government funded jobs for unemployed workers. They were engaged in a variety of public works schemes and workers got 2 francs a day, which was soon reduced to 1 franc because of the tremendous increase in their numbers (29,000 on March 5; 118,000 on June 15). Workshops were set up in a number of regional centres but the main Workshop was in Paris. The Workshops were regarded by socialists as a key part of the revolution and as a model for the future reform of French society and much of the inspiration came from the writings of the socialist Louis Blanc whose book Organisation du travail (1839) discussed the need for "ateliers sociaux" (social workshops) which would guarantee employment for all workers. The first director of the National Workshops was a young engineer Emile Thomas and Louis Blanc was appointed head of the Luxembourg Commission which had been set up to study the problems of labour and which gradually became a focal point for labour organizations and activity.

Liberals like Bastiat regarded the Workshops as expensive interventions by the government into the operation of the free market which were doomed to failure. He opposed them from the start, and he lobbied against them when he was vice president of the Finance Committee of the Assembly, but ironically he later vociferously defended workers' right to protest against the government and sought to protect them from being shot by the army. In May 1848 the Constituent Assembly formed a committee to discuss the matter as the burden of paying for the National Workshops scheme was becoming too much for the government to bear. Bastiat was one of the speakers, and in his speech he distinguished between the right to work ( droit au travail, where "work" is used as a noun and thus might be rendered as the "right to a job") and the "right to work" ( droit de travailler, where "work" is used as a verb, meaning "the right to engage in work"). He was opposed to the former but supported the latter.

The increasing financial burden of the National Workshops led the Assembly to dissolve them on June 21, prompting some of the workers to riot in the streets of Paris during the so-called "June Days" of 23-26 June. The army under General Cavaignac was used to suppress the rioting resulting in the death of about 1,500 people and the arrest of 15,000 (over 4,000 of whom were sentenced to transportation). The Assembly immediately declared a state of siege (martial law) in Paris and gave Cavaignac full executive power which lasted until October. Publication of Bastiat's second revolutionary magazine, Jacques Bonhomme, was suspended because of the June Days (it appeared between 11 June and 13 July). In it appeared a draft of what was to become his pamphlet "The State." In the second-last issue, which was published the day before the National Workshops were closed by the government and rioting had broken out in the streets of Paris, Bastiat courageously published an article on the front page calling for their dissolution ("To Citizens Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin"). The magazine was forced to close because of the violence in the streets and the imposition of martial law. In a letter written to Julie Marsan on 29 June, Bastiat states that he became involved in the street fighting to attempt to disarm the fighters and to rescue some of the insurgents from being killed by the army (see CW1, pp. 156–57). In the crackdown which followed, Bastiat opposed the arrest and trial of Blanc for his participation in an earlier uprising in May and for being a figurehead of the June revolt.

Tariff Policy

A good summary of the history of French customs and tariff policy can be found in Horace Say's entry "Douane" (Customs) in the DEP . 2309 Say divides his history into three main periods: the abolition of internal French customs and the rationalization of external duties in the earliest phase of the French Revolution (November 1790); the turmoil of the Napoleonic period culminating in the Continental Blockade of 1806 which attempted to ban the entry of British goods into Europe; and the rivalry between the landowning aristocrats of the Restoration period (who wanted protection for grain production and wood products) and the growing manufacturing interests, which resulted in the high tariffs of 1822. Say describes the post-1830 period as one which saw the formation of "a veritable pact of resistance by a coalition of the great landowners, and the protected iron producers and manufacturers" (p. 586) which witnessed two periods of active consolidation of tariff policy with additional legislation passed in 1833-35 and 1847.

Tariff policy during the Revolution had been a chaotic affair. In a decree of 30-31 October 1790 the Constituent Assembly abolished all internal tariffs and duties were abolished thus creating for the first time a largely free internal market in France. External tariffs were cut to a maximum 20% by value although some goods were prohibited entry into the French market. Molinari described the tariff reforms of the Constituent Assembly as a kind of customs union which involved all the provinces of France. Tariffs were completely reorganized by a law of August 1791 which abolished most prohibitions on imported material, abolished tariffs on primary products used by French manufacturers and food for consumers, and reduced tariffs on manufactured goods gradually down to 20-25% by value of the goods imported. The decree of 1 March 1793 annulled all foreign trade treaties and prohibited the importation of a large number of goods, such as textiles, metal goods, and pottery. The decree of 29 September 1793 introduced the notorious "Maximum" or price control legislation which threw the internal French economy into considerable disarray. A decree of 31 January 1795 declared that the tariff of 1791 would be cut by 50% to 90% on many articles. This was reversed by a law of 23 November 1796 in order to increase revenue for the state.

This on-again-off-again tariff regime was changed by the tariff law of 21 November 1806 (the Berlin Decree) which introduced Napoleon's Continental Blockade which was designed to deny British goods access to the European market. Thus, the debate about tariff policy had completely shifted away from any concern with protection of domestic industry and revenue raising and had become an instrument of economic warfare against the British. In some instances tariffs were raised to absurd levels, such as fr. 300 per kilo on imported sugar. During the Restoration in 1816 tariffs on imported cotton, for example, were set at fr. 22 per 100 kilos. In 1821-22 there was a review of tariffs which served to create a protectionist regime around the interests of large land owners and favoured manufacturers.

This process continued under the July Monarchy. The government inquiry into French tariff policy held in October 1834 raised hopes that there might be a reduction in the level of tariffs as the Minister of Commerce, Thiers, was in favor. However, the Inquiry concluded that France should continue its protectionism of industry. The Inquiry resulted in a detailed 3 volume report issued by the Superior Council of Commerce in 1835 based upon the findings of its inquiry held in October 1834. The list of members of the inquiry read like a "who's who" of the protectionists Bastiat mentions and criticizes throughout the Economic Sophisms . See Enquête relative à diverses prohibitions établies à l'entrée des produits étrangers (1835). It was 1,459 pages in length and was printed by the government printing office at taxpayers' expence. The English free trader and key figure in the Anti-Corn Law League Thomas Perronet Thompson (1783-1869) wrote a critique of the French inquiry which was translated and published as Contre-Enquête: par l'Homme aux Quarante Ecus (1834).

The 1835 Report consolidated the protectionist regime and set tariff rates which would last until the 1848 Revolution. French tariffs on manufactured goods such as textiles were very complex. In the case of textiles many goods were prohibited outright in order to protect French manufacturers ("le régime prohibitionniste"). Some products used to manufacture other goods, such as cotton thread used to make lace or tulle, were allowed entry upon payment of a tariff of fr. 7-8 per kilogramme. Most finished goods had prohibitive duties imposed upon them such as fr. 50-100 per piece in the case of cashmere scarves and fr. 550 per 100 kilogramme for wool carpets (this was called "le régime protectionniste"). According to the Budget Papers of 1848 the French state raised fr. 202.1 million from tariffs and import duties out of total receipts of fr. 1,391 million, or 14.5%. See Horace Say, "Douanes, " DEP , vol. 1, pp. 578-604.

The free traders in France were inspired by the success of Richard Cobden's Anti-Corn Law League which was founded in 1838 and which had achieved its aim of abolishing protection for agricultural products by mid-1846. The French "Association pour la liberté des échanges" (Free Trade Association) was founded in February 1846 in Bordeaux with Bastiat as the secretary of the Board and editor of their journal Le Libre-Échange ( November 1846 - April 1848). A push by Bastiat and other free traders to have the French chamber pass similar legislation in 1847 failed. Léon Faucher states that the attempt by the free traders in the Chamber to revise French tariff policy in a more liberal direction failed because they were out-manoeuvred by the protectionists. The opportunity arose when a bill came before the Chamber on 31 March 1847 but the Committee assigned by the Chamber to write a report was stacked with protectionists and the lobbying by the Association for the Defence of National Employment was very effective. France did not begin to loosen its policy of protectionism until the Anglo-France Trade Treaty of 1860 which was signed by Richard Cobden for the British government and Michel Chevalier for the French government.

In Bastiat's day a veritable "army" of public servants worked for the Customs Service. According to Horace Say there were 27,727 individuals (1852 figures) employed, composed of two "divisions" - one of administrative personnel (2,536) and the other of "agents on active service" (24,727). According to the Budget papers for 1848 the Customs Service collected fr. 202 million in customs duties and salt taxes and their administrative and collection costs totalled fr. 26.4 million or 13% of the amount collected. See the Appendix "French Government Finances 1848-1849."

Assessing the average rate of tariffs in different countries is very difficult given the huge variety of products, the manner in which they were taxed (by weight, volume, or price), and whether the tariff was for "fiscal" purposes (to raise revenue for the state) or protectionist purposes (to favour domestic producers at the expense of foreign producers). A useful comparative study of tariff rates in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain in the 19th century is provided by Antonio Tena Jungito who compares average tariff rates of all goods taxed as well as average tariff rates on only protected items (leaving out the usually low rates on items taxed for fiscal purposes only). 2310 From his data we can conclude the following: British aggregate tariff rates (excluding fiscal goods) peaked at about 15% in 1836 and began dropping in 1840 reaching a low point of about 6% in 1847 (the abolition of the Corn Laws was announced in January 1846 and was to come into full effect in 1849), and continuing to drop steadily throughout the rest of the century reaching a plateau of less than 1% between 1880 and 1903. France had an average rate of about 12% in 1836 and it was still around 11% in 1848 before it began to drop steadily reaching 5% in 1857, then spiking briefly to 7.5% in 1858, and dropping steadily again to about 1.5% in 1870 (the Anglo-French Free Trade Treaty was signed in 1860), before again moving steadily upwards to about 8% in 1893. In 1849 the rates were about 6% in Britain and 10% in France. As a point of comparison, in the United States tariff rates fluctuated wildly as the protectionist North and the free trade South fought for control of the Federal government before the Civil War. 2311 In 1832 the Protectionist Tariff imposed an average rate of 33%; the Compromise Tariff of 1833 intended to lower rates to a flat 20%; and the 1846 Tariff created 4 tariff schedules for goods which imposed 100%, 40%, 30%, or 20% depending upon the particular kind of good. The average rate in the U.S. in 1849 was about 23% which is definitely a "protectionist" tariff and not a "fiscal" tariff according to Bastiat's definition (5%).

Taxation

Gabelle

The tax on salt, or "gabelle" as it was known under the old regime was a much hated tax on an item essential for preserving and flavouring food. It was abolished during the Revolution but revived during the Restoration. In 1816 it was set at 30 centimes per kilogramme and in 1847 it raised fr. 70.4 million. During the Revolution of 1848 it was reduced to 10 centimes per kilogramme. According to the Budget Papers of 1848 the French state raised fr. 58.2 million from tariffs on imported salt and fr. 13.4 million from the salt tax on internal sales. Bastiat's proposed cut to 10 centimes in January 1847 in ES2 11 "The Utopian" was the same level adopted by the new government in 1848. 2312

Indirect Taxes

Indirect taxes were levied on drink, salt, sugar, tobacco, gun powder, and other consumer goods. Many of these taxes were abolished in the early years of the Revolution only to be reintroduced by Napoleon who centralized their collection in 1804 by a single administrative body under the name of "droits réunis" (combined duties). In the Restoration the Charter of 1814 promised to abolish both the "droits réunis" and conscription but these promises were not kept. The old indirect taxes were just renamed as "contributions indirectes" (indirect taxes or "contributions") although they were imposed at a slightly reduced rate. In 1848 the state received fr. 307.9 million in indirect "contributions" (taxes) out of a total of fr. 1.371 billion, or 22.4% of all revenue.

Octroi

The "octroi" or the tax on goods brought into a town or city was imposed on consumer goods such as wine, beer, food (except for flour, fruit, milk), firewood, animal fodder, and construction materials. All of these products had to pass through tollgates which had been built on the outskirts of the town or city where they could be inspected and taxed. For example, King Louis XVI had 57 "barrières d'octroi" (tollgates) built around the outskirts of the city of Paris for this purpose. 2313 In 1841 it was estimated that 1,420 communes throughout France imposed the octroi tax upon entry into their cities and towns, raising some fr. 75 million in revenue. The money was used to pay for the maintenance of roads, drains, lighting, and other public infrastructure. Horace Say (1794-1860), the businessman son of the economist Jean-Baptiste Say fought unsuccessfully to have the octroi abolished during the 1840s. They were not abolished until 1943.

In 1845 the city of Paris imposed an octroi (entry tax) on all goods which entered the city which raised fr. 49 million. Of this fr. 26.1 million were levied on wine and other alcoholic drinks which comprised 53% of the total. The tax on wine was the heaviest as a proportion of total value and the most unequally applied. Cheap table wine was taxed at the rate of 80-100% by value whilst superior quality wine was taxed at the rate of 5-6% by value.

"Taxe de quarante-cinq centimes" (the 45 centimes tax)

In the immediate aftermath of the February Revolution the government faced a budget crisis brought on by the decline in tax revenues and by the increased demands being placed upon it by new political groups. Louis-Antoine Pagès (Garnier-Pagès) (1803-1878), a member of the Provisional Government and soon afterwards Mayor of Paris, was able to pass a new "temporary" tax law on March 16, 1848 which increased direct taxes on things such as land, moveable goods, doors and windows, and trading license, by 45%. It was known as the "taxe de quarante-cinq centimes" (the 45 centimes tax) and was deeply unpopular, prompting revolts and protests in the south west of France.

Wine and Spirits Tax.

The wine and spirits tax was eliminated by the revolutionary parliament of 1789 but progressively reinstated during the empire. It comprised four components: (1) a consumption tax (10 percent of the sale price); (2) a license fee paid by the vendor, depending on the number of inhabitants; (3) a tax on circulation, which depended on the département; and (4) an entry duty for the towns of more than four hundred inhabitants, depending on the sale price and the number of inhabitants. This tax raised fr. 104 million in 1848.

Teaching Political Economy in the Universities

The teaching of political economy was of great concern to the Economists around Bastiat. There were very few full-time teaching positions in political economy. Michel Chevalier had a chair at the Collège de France (1840) and Joseph Garnier had one at the École des ponts et chaussées (School of Bridges and Highways) (1846) which was an engineering school. Others taught in small private schools or colleges. Some of the Economists were members of the Institute and thus had some access to funds and publishing opportunities but without a position in the universities it was difficult to teach graduate students and thus build up a school of thought. Both Bastiat and Molinari were able to give some lectures in economics in late 1847, Bastiat at the School of Law and Molinari in a rented hall, but these efforts were interrupted by the outbreak of Revolution in February 1848 and were abandoned. Later in the 19th century the teaching of economics was allowed but only from within the Law Faculties. This meant that most Economists were excluded because they did not have law degrees and the economics that was taught was taught by lawyers for the use of other lawyers many of whom would go onto careers in the government bureaucracies.

During the debate about tariff reform in 1847 the protectionist Mimerel Committee put pressure on the government to force the economists to stop teaching free trade ideas unless they also taught pro-protectionists views, or in other words an economic version of "teaching the debate." Opposition to them reached a peak during the Revolution when the Provisional Government in 1848 closed down Michel Chevalier's chair in political economy at the Collège de France and replaced it with a school for government bureaucrats and administrators. They succeeded temporarily but intense lobbying by the Political Economy Society and their friends like Bastiat in the government had the decision reversed in November that same year. See Bastiat's essay "The War against Chairs of Political Economy" (June 1847) and the accompanying footnotes in CW2, pp. 277-81. 2314

Welfare Office (Bureau de bienfaisance)

Under the Old Regime the Catholic Church had a monopoly on the organisation of public welfare. This was taken away during the Revolution and the Law of 1796 created in its place a system of Welfare Offices (Bureaux de bienfaisance) whose function was to distribute assistance to the poor, orphaned children, and the sick. Money from a tax on the sale of tickets to various forms of entertainment was used to fund the Offices. In 1847 there were 9,336 Welfare Offices in communes across France covering about 16.5 million inhabitants out of a total population of 36 million people. Money raised for distribution to the poor was about 15 million francs per annum for the period 1843-1847. The bulk of the money was used to buy food. Smaller amounts were used to buy cloths and fuel for heating. In 1847 1,185,632 individuals were given assistances amounting to 14fr. 20c. on average. 2315

Bibliography↩↩

Bibliographical Note on the Works Cited in This Volume

In the text, Bastiat cites or alludes to many literary, political, and economic works, especially those published during the debates about free trade and protection, and the rise of socialism which took place between 1844 and 1850. We have listed these works with a full citation in the bibliography of primary sources. In the glossaries, if a work is cited, we have given only the title of the work and the date when it was first published, for example, Chevalier, Les fortifications de Paris (1841).

In the bibliography of primary sources, we have tried, if possible, to cite editions published during Bastiat's lifetime. For example, Bastiat cited Jeremy Bentham quite frequently but used the French editions published by Étienne Dumont in the early nineteenth century and not the English-language editions. Thus we cite in the footnotes the 1816 edition of the "Traité des sophismes politiques," published in Geneva and not the Bowring English edition published in 1838–43.

Bastiat was sometimes quite cavalier in citing the sources he used, such as the works of Rousseau, and did not provide page numbers. He also quoted from memory and sometimes got the quotation slightly wrong. We have checked his quotations against the original, and have indicated in the footnotes where Bastiat strays from the original text.

For background information about key concepts and biographical details of political figures and authors, we have frequently consulted the Dictionnaire de l'économie politique (1852–53). Bastiat was closely connected to the group of classical liberal political economists in Paris during the 1840s: he was a member of the Société d'économie politique (founded 1842); he wrote many articles for Le Journal des économistes (founded 1841), including many of his economic sophisms before they were turned into books; he was even offered the job of editing the journal, which he turned down because he wanted to focus on his free trade campaign. The authors who wrote for the Dictionnaire de l'économie politique knew Bastiat personally and professionally, and their articles have provided a great deal of information about his life, ideas, and political activities.

In some cases Bastiat does not quote an author or authors directly but paraphrases their ideas in his own words. For example, in his newspaper articles he refers to speeches in the Chamber of Deputies given by protectionists and mentions pamphlets they have written. Wherever possible we have tried to track down these speeches and pamphlets, but we have not always been able to do so. For speeches and votes which Bastiat made in the Constituent and National Assemblies after the February Revolution of 1848, we have used the official Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée Nationale Constituante (4 Mai 1848–27 Mai 1849) (abbreviated to CRANC) and the Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée Nationale Législative (28 Mai 1849–1 Déc. 1851) (abbreviated to CRANL) to find information about Bastiat's legislative activities.

Since Bastiat makes so many references to the amounts the French government raised in taxes and spent on various programs, we have constructed a composite budget of French government finances for the years 1848 and 1849 when Bastiat was active in politics, most notably serving as vice president of the Finance Committee of the National Assembly. This can be found in "French Government's Budgets for Fiscal Years 1848 and 1849," in Appendix 4 , in CW3, pp. 509-16. The data have been taken from L'Annuaire de l'économie politique et de la statistique and other sources (see appendix 4, pp. 496–503). Whenever Bastiat mentions a figure concerning government taxation or expenditure, we have checked this against the official data and have found him to be very accurate. Articles in the Dictionnaire de l'économie politique also provide considerable amounts of economic data on matters concerning government expenditure and policy. The details are discussed in the footnotes.

We have also consulted the 1835 edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française in order to understand some of the nuances of the French language as it was used in Bastiat's day. This has been especially helpful in appreciating some of the many puns, jokes, and plays on words in which Bastiat liked to indulge.

Primary Sources

Newspapers and Journals

Le Censeur, ou examen des actes et des ouvrages qui tendent à détruire ou à consolider la constitution de l'État (1814-15) . Editors Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer.

Le Censeur européen ou Examen de diverses questions de droit public et de divers ouvrages littéraires et scientifiques, considérés dans leurs rapports avec le progrès de la civilisation. (1817 to 1819). Editors Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer.

La Chalosse: Journal de l'arrondissement de Saint-Sever (11 Dec. 1836-26 March 1876).

L'Économiste belge (1855-68) appeared under a variety of names: L'Économiste belge, Journal des réformes économiques et administratives , publié par M. G. de Molinari (Bruxelles: Imprimerie de Korn. Verbruggen) (1855-1858). From 1859 it was entitled: L'Économiste belge, Organe des intérêts de l'industrie et du commerce. Directeur-gérant: M. G. de Molinari (Bruxelles: Ch. Vanderauwera, 1859-1862). From 1863: L'Économiste belge, Organe des intérêts politiques et économiques des consommateurs. Directeur-gérant: M. G. de Molinari (Bruxelles et Leipzig: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven, 1863-1868).

Jacques Bonhomme (1848). Editor J. Lobet. (Paris: Impr. de Napoléon Chaix). (11 June to 13 July, with a break between 24 June and 9 July).

Le Mémorial bordelais: feuille politique, littéraire et maritime (1814-1862).

Le Journal des débats politiques et littéraires . Paris, 1814-1944.

Journal des économistes: revue mensuelle de l'économie politique, des questions agricoles, manufacturières et commerciales. The journal of the Société d'économie politique (Political Economy Society) and appeared from December 1841- 1940.

Le Libre-échange: Journal du travail agricole, industriel et commercial. Journal of the Association pour la liberté des échanges (?? 1846-16 April 1848). 72 issues appeared. Edited by Bastiat until 13 February 1848, then by Charles Coquelin.

La République française (Paris: Impr. de Napoléon Chaix, 26 February– 28 March 1848). Edited by Bastiat, Hippolyte Castille, and Gustave de Molinari, it appeared daily in thirty issues between 26 February and 28 March. Accessed via BNF: Bibliothèque Nationale de France. La République française [Texte imprimé]: journal quotidien. 26 févr.–28 mars 1848 (no. 1–30). Publication: 1848. Notice no.: FRBNF32853034.

La Ruche populaire . Première Tribune et Revue Mensuelle rédigée et publiée par des ouvriers sous la direction de François Duquenne. Ouvrier imprimeur. La Ruche populaire. A monthly magazine published between 1839 and 1849.

Official Government Documents

Collection complete des lois, decrets, ordonnances, reglemens et avis du Conseil d'Etat …. Année 1841 , par J.B. Duvergier. Volume 41 (Paris: Chez A. Guyot et Scribe, 1841).

Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée Nationale Constituante (4 May 1848 - 27 May 1849) . 10 vols. Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée Nationale. Exposés des motifs et projets de lois présentés par le gouvernement; rapports de Mm. les Représentants (Paris: Imprimerie de l'Assemblée national, 1848-1850). Henceforth CRANC.

Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée Nationale Législative (28 May 1849 - 2 December 1852) . 17 vols. (28 Mai 1849 - 1 Déc. 1851). Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée Nationale Législative. Exposés des motifs et projets de lois présentés par le gouvernement; rapports de Mm. les Représentants (Paris: Imprimerie de l'Assemblée national, 1849-1852). Henceforth CRANL.

Dictionnaire des parlementaires français comprenant tous les Membres des Assemblées françaises et tous les Ministres français, depuis le 1er mai 1789 jusqu'au 1er mai 1889. Vol. I. A-Cay, publié sous la direction de MM. Adolphe Robert et Gaston Cougny (Paris: Bourloton, 1889-1891). 5 vols.

Ministère des Travaux publics. Administration générale des Ponts et chaussées et des mines. Lois des 27 juin 1833, 3 juin 1834, 30 juin 1835, 14 mai, 2 et 25 juin, 12 et 19 juillet 1837, 21 juin et 3 juillet 1838. Situation des travaux au 31 décembre 1838. (Paris: Imprimerie royale, mai 1839).

Procès-verbal des séances de la Commission instituée pour examiner les impôts sur les boissons (1830). Paris 23 August, 1830.

Procès-verbal des séances de la chambre des pairs: sessions de 1846 . Tome quatrième, juin - juillet 1846, nos. 55-68 (Paris: Crapelet, 1846).

Procés-verbaux de la chambre des députés. Session de 1837. Vol. 6, Part 1, Juin et Juillet 1837. Annexes no. 249 à 269 (Paris: A. Henry, 1837).

Projet de réforme postale, par un directeur comptable des postes. 23 février 1846 (Impr. de Robin, (s. d.)).

Statistique de la France, publiée par France Ministère de l'Intérieur, de l'Agriculture et du Commerce. Tomes IIIe et IVe de la Statistique agricole du Royaume. (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1841).

Table analytique par ordre alphabétique de matières et de noms de personnes du Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée nationale législative (28 mai 1849 - 2 décembre 1851) et des documents imprimés par son ordre. Rédigée aux Archives du Corps législatifs (Paris: Henri et Charles Noblet, Imprimeurs de l'Assemblée nationale, 1852).

Economic Reference Works

Annales de la Société d'Économie politique, publiées sous la direction de Alphonse Courtois fils, secrétaire perpetual. 15 vols. Paris: Guillaumin, 1889. Vol. 1, 1846–1853.

Annuaire de l'économie politique et de la statistique. (1844-1899). Editors: Gilbert-Urbain Guillaumin (1844-1864), Joseph Garnier (1848).

Dictionnaire de l'Économie Politique, contenant l'exposition des principes de la science, l'opinion des écrivains qui ont le plus contribué à sa fondation et à ses progrès, la Bibliographie générale de l'économie politique par noms d'auteurs et par ordre de matières, avec des notices biographiques et une appréciation raisonnée des principaux ouvrages, publié sous la direction de MM. Charles Coquelin et Guillaumin (Paris: Librairie de Guillaumin et Cie, 1852-1853), 2 vols.

Nouveau Dictionnaire d'Économie Politique , publié sous la direction de M. Léon Say et de M. Joseph Chailley. Deuxième édition (Paris: Librairie de Guillaumin et Cie, 1900), 2 vols. [1st ed. 1891-92].

Collected Works by Bastiat

Oeuvres complètes de Frédéric Bastiat, mises en ordre, revues et annotées d'après les manuscrits de l'auteur (Paris: Guillaumin, 1854-55). 6 vols. Edited by Prosper Paillottet with the assistance of Roger de Fontenay, but they are not credited on the title page. A listing of the volumes are as follows:

Vol. 1: Correspondance et mélanges (1855)
Vol. 2: Le Libre-Échange (1855)
Vol. 3: Cobden et la Ligue ou L'agitation anglaise pour la liberté des échanges (1854)
Vol. 4: Sophismes économiques. Petits pamphlets I (1854)
Vol. 5: Sophismes économiques. Petits pamphlets II (1854)
Vol. 6: Harmonies économiques (1855)

Oeuvres complètes de Frédéric Bastiat, mises en ordre, revues et annotées d'après les manuscrits de l'auteur. Deuxième Édition. Ed. Prosper Paillottet and with a "Notice sur la vie et les écrits de Frédéric Bastiat" by Roger de Fontenay. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1862-64). This edition differs from the first with a new seventh volume of essays and correspondence.

Vol. 1: Correspondance et mélanges (1862)
Vol. 2: Le Libre-Échange (1862)
Vol. 3: Cobden et la Ligue ou L'agitation anglaise pour la liberté des échanges (1864)
Vol. 4: Sophismes économiques. Petits pamphlets I (1863)
Vol. 5: Sophismes économiques. Petits pamphlets II (1863)
Vol. 6: Harmonies économiques (1864) 5th ed.
Vol. 7: Essais, ébauches, correspondance (1864).

Oeuvres choisies de Fr. Bastiat (1863)

Oeuvres choisies de Fr. Bastiat. Tome I: Sophismes économiques. Petits pamphlets. Tome Ie (Paris: Guillaumin, 1863).
Oeuvres choisies de Fr. Bastiat. Tome II: Sophismes économiques. Petits pamphlets. Tome II (Paris: Guillaumin, 1863).
Oeuvres choisies de Fr. Bastiat. Tome III: Harmonies économiques (Paris: Guillaumin, 1863). Called the 4e edition.

Books and Published Pamphlets:

Réflexions sur les pétitions de Bordeaux, le Havre et Lyon, concernant les douanes, par Frédéric Bastiat, membre du Conseil général du département des Landes. (A Mont-de-Marsan, chez Delaroy, imprimeur de la Préfecture et de l'Echévé, Avril 1834).

Cobden et la ligue, ou l'Agitation anglaise pour la liberté du commerce (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845).

Sophismes économiques (Paris: Guillaumin, 1846).

Le Petit Arsenal du libre-échange (impr. de E. Crugy, 1847).

Sophismes économiques. 2e série (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848).

Propriété et Loi. Justice et Fraternité, par M. F. Bastiat, Membre correspondant de l'Institut, Représentant du peuple à l'Assemblée nationale. Extrait du Journal des économistes, nos. du 15 mai et 15 juin, 1848 (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848).

Propriété et Loi. Justice et Fraternité (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848).

Rapport fait au nom du Comité des Finances, sur le décret relatif au crédit de 2 millions pour secours extraordinaires aux citoyens du département de la Seine qui se trouvent dans le besoin, par le citoyen F. Bastiat, Séance du 9 août 1848 (Impr. de l'Assemblée nationale, 1849).

Protectionisme et Communisme (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849).

Capital et Rente (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849).

Paix et Liberté, ou le Budget républicain (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849).

Incompatibilités parlementaires (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849).

L'État. Maudit argent! (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849).

Harmonies économiques (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850). 1st edition.

Intérêt et principal: Discussion entre M. Proudhon et M. Bastiat sur l'intérêt des capitaux (Paris: Garnier, 1850). Proudhon's version.

Gratuité du crédit : discussion entre M. Fr. Bastiat et M. Proudhon (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850). Bastiat's version with an addition 14th Letter not in Proudhon's version.

Spoliation et loi, par M. F. Bastiat. Membre correspondant de l'Institut. Représentant du peuple à l'Assemblée nationale (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850).

Baccalauréat et Socialisme (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850).

Propriété et spoliation , ed. Prosper Paillottett (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850).

Harmonies économiques (2 nd ed., Paris: Guillaumin, 1851). "EH2".

La Loi (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850).

Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas, ou l'Économie politique en une leçon. Par M. F. Bastiat, Représentant du peuple à l'Assemblée nationale, Membre correspondant de l'Institut (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850).

Harmonies économiques. 2me Édition augmentées des manuscrits laissés par l'auteur. Publiée par la Société des amis de Bastiat (Paris: Guillaumin, 1851). 2nd edition.

Lettres d'un habitant des Landes, Frédéric Bastiat. Edited by Mme Cheuvreux. Paris: A. Quantin, 1877.

Translations:

The Bastiat Collection. Introduction by Mark Thornton. Second Edition (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007, 2011). Chap. V. Captial and Interest, pp. 135-68. p. 138.

Economic Harmonies. Translated by W. Hayden Boyers. Edited by George B. de Huszar. Introduction by Dean Russell. Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996. First edition, 1964.

Harmonies of Political Economy, by Frédéric Bastiat. Translated from the Third Edition of the French, with a Notice of the Life and Writings of the Author. Second Edition. T rans. Patrick James Stirling (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1880).

Harmonies of Political Economy, trans. Patrick James Stirling. 2 vols. Santa Ana, Calif.: Register Pub., 1944–45.

Essays on political economy. English translation Revised, with Notes by David A. Wells (G.P. Putnam Sons, 1880). First ed. 1877. Contains "Capital and Interest," pp. 1-69; "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen," pp. 70-153; "Government" (The State), pp. 154-73; "What is Money?" (Damned Money), pp. 174-220; "The Law," pp. 221-91.

Economic Sophisms (First and Second Series) , trans from the French and Edited by Arthur Goddard (Irvington-on-Hudson, New York: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1968) (1st edition D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc. 1964. Copyright William Volker Fund) < /title/276 >.

Economic Sophisms , translated from the forth edition from the French by Patrick James Stirling (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1873).

"What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen" in Selected Essays on Political Economy , translated from the French by Seymour Cain. Edited by George B. de Huszar (Irvington-on-Hudson, New York: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1968) (1st edition D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc. 1964. Copyright William Volker Fund), pp. 1-50 < /title/956/35425 >.

Articles: (are there too many here to list them all?? or do I insert here the complete Chronological list of his collected writings?)

At the OLL: "Bastiat's Letters, Articles, and Books Listed in Chronological Order" </pages/bastiat-chrono-list>.

Bastiat, Letter to Carey, Bastiat's Letter can be found in CW1, Letter 209, pp. 297-302.

Bastiat, Réflexions sur les pétitions de Bordeaux, le Havre et Lyon, concernant les douanes, par Frédéric Bastiat, membre du Conseil général du département des Landes. (A Mont-de-Marsan, chez Delaroy, imprimeur de la Préfecture et de l'Echévé, Avril 1834). 16 pp. This can be found in CW2.1, pp. 1-9.

Bastiat, T.19 (1844.10.15) "De l'influence des tarifs français et anglais sur l'avenir des deux peuples" (On the Influence of French and English Tariffs on the Future of the Two People), Journal des Économistes, T. IX, Oct. 1844, pp. 244-71. [OC1, pp. 334-86.] in CW6 (forthcoming).

Bastiat, Incompatibilités parlementaires (Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest) (1849). OC5, pp. 518-61; CW2.19, pp. 366-400.

"To the Electors of the Département of the Landes" (Nov. 1830), CW1, pp. 341-67.

Spoliation et loi, par M. F. Bastiat. Membre correspondant de l'Institut. Représentant du peuple à l'Assemblée nationale (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850).

T.3 (1834.??) "On a New Secondary School to Be Founded in Bayonne" (D'un nouveau collège à fonder). Published in an unnamed Bayonne newspaper in 1834. OC7.2, pp. 4-10; CW1, p. 415-19.

T.5 (1834.04) "Reflections on the Petitions from Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Lyons Relating to the Customs Service" (Réflexions sur les pétitions de Bordeaux, Le Havre et Lyon, concernant les Douanes). [OC1, pp. 231-43] [CW2, pp. 1-9].

"Reflections on the Question of Dueling" (Feb. 1838)

"Draft Preface to Economic Harmonies" in CW1, p. 317.

"On the Basque Language" (April, 1838"The Tax Authorities and Wine" (January, 1841), CW2, pp. 10-23

T.12 (1841.01) "The Tax Authorities and Wine" (Le Fisc et la vigne). OC1, pp. 243-59; CW2, pp. 10-23.

T.13 (1843.01.22) "Memoir Presented to the Société d'agriculture, commerce, arts, et sciences du département des Landes on the Wine-Growing Question" (Mémoire présenté à la société d'agriculture, commerce, arts et sciences, du département des Landes sur la question vinicole). [OC1, pp. 261-83] [CW2, pp. 25-42]

T.19 (1844.10.15) "De l'influence des tarifs français et anglais sur l'avenir des deux peuples" (On the Influence of French and English Tariffs on the Future of the Two People), Journal des Économistes, T. IX, Oct. 1844, pp. 244-71. [OC1, pp. 334-86.] in CW6 (forthcoming).

T.28 (1845.06.15) "The Economic Situation of Great Britain: Financial Reforms and Agitation for Commercial Freedom" (Situation économique de la Grande-Bretagne. Réformes financières. Agitation pour la liberté commerciale), Journal des Économistes , June 1845, T. XI, no. 43, pp. 233-265.

T.47 [1846.02.15] "Thoughts on Sharecropping" (Considérations sur le métayage), Journal des Économistes , T.13, no. 51, Feb. 1846, pp. 225-239. [Not in OC] [CW4, pp. 000].

"To the Electors of the District of Saint-Sever" (1846), CW1, pp. 352-67.

T.66 (1846.05.19) "On the Railway between Bordeaux and Bayonne. A Letter addressed to a Commission of the Chamber of Deputies" (Du chemin de fer de Bordeaux à Bayonne. Lettre adressée à une commission de la Chambre des députés), Le Mémorial bordelais , 19 May 1846. [OC7.22, pp. 103-8] [CW1, p. 312-16].

T.131 (1847.05.300 "Two Losses against One Profit" (Deux pertes contre un profit. À M. Arago, de l'Académie des Sciences), Le Libre-Échange , 30 May 1847, no. 27, pp. 215-16. OC2, pp. 384-91; CW3 - ES3.7.

T.199 (1848.03.05) "Curée des Places" (The Scramble for Positions), La République française , 5 March 1848. OC7.54, p. 232; CW1, pp. 431-32.

T.204 "Disastrous Illusions" (JDE, March 1848) in CW3, pp. 000.

T.220 Property and Plunder (July 1848) in CW2, pp. 147-84

T.247 (1850.??) Baccalaureate and Socialism (Baccalaureate et socialisme). Written in early 1850 for a Parliamentary commission on free education; also published as a pamphlet, Baccalauréat et Socialisme (The Baccalaureate and Socialism) (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850). OC4, pp. 442-503; CW2.11, pp. 185-234.

T.257 Plunder and Law (May 1850) in CW2, pp. 266-76.

Peace and Liberty or the Republican Budget (February 1849), CW2, pp. 282-327

T.258 The Law (June 1850) in CW2, pp. 107-46.

T.259 What is Sen and What is Not Seen (July 1850) in CW3, pp. 401-52.

"Justice et fraternité," Journal des Économistes , 15 June 1848, T. 20, no. 82, pp. 310-27; also published as a pamphlet, Propriété et Loi. Justice et Fraternité (Property and Law. Justice and Fraternity) (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848). See, CW2, pp.60-81.

speech in the Chamber was on 12 Dec. 1849, on "The Tax on Wine and Spirits", CRANL, vol. 4, p. 159-65. OC5, pp. 468-93. CW2.16, pp. 328-47.

T. 266-68. A series of 3 essays on "Free Trade. State of the Question in England," Sentinelle des Pyrénées , May-June 1843 in CW6 (forthcoming).

T.15 (c. 1844) "Freedom of Trade" (Liberté du commerce). Unnamed newspaper in the south of France 1844. [OC7.4, pp. 14-20] [CW1, pp. 421-25]

"On the Future of the Wine Trade between France and England", Journal des Économistes , (Aug. 1845) (CW6 forthcoming)

"On the Questions submitted to the General Councils of Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce", Journal des Économistes , (Dec. 1845) (CW6 forthcoming)

"On the Impact of the Protectionist Regime on Agriculture", Journal des Économistes , (Dec. 1846) (CW6 forthcoming)

"Organisation and Liberty", Journal des Économistes , (Jan. 1847) (CW6 forthcoming)

T.44-46 "Plan for an Anti-Protectionist League" (in 3 parts), Mémorial bordelais , 8, 9, 10 February, 1846, in CW6 (forthcoming).

T.48 "The Free Trade Association in Bordeaux", Mémorial bordelais , 18 Feb. 1846, in CW6 (forthcoming)

"Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" (12 Dec. 1849), CW2, pp. 328-47.

"On the Bordeaux to Bayonne Railway Line" (19 May 1846), CW1, pp. 312-15.

"Proposition for the Creation of a School for Sons of Sharecroppers" CW1, pp. 334-40.

T.43 (1846.01.15) "Theft by Subsidy" (Le vol à la prime), Journal des Économistes , Jan. 1846, T. XIII, no. 50, pp. 115-120; also ES2.9 [OC4, pp. 189-98] CW3, ES2 9, pp. 170-79.

"Premier discours, à Bordeaux" (First Speech given in Bordeaux), 23 Février 1846. [OC2.42, p. 229-38] in CW6 (forthcoming)..

"Consequences of the reduction of the Salt Tax" ( Journal des Débats , 1 Jan. 1849), CW2, pp. 324-27.

"Draft Preface to Economic Harmonies" in CW1, pp. 000.

"England and Free Trade," Libre-Échange , 6 Feb. 1847 [OC2.32, p. 177] in CW6 (forthcoming).

1847.05.22 "Peuple et Bourgeoisie" (The People and the Bourgeoisie) Libre-Échange , 22 May 1847] [OC2.51, pp. 348-55] [CW3] [ES3.6].

Bastiat's DEP entries: "Abondance," DEP, vol. 1, pp. 2-4; "La Loi" (The Law), DEP, vol. 1, pp. 733-36 (signed by Charles Coquelin, the editor); and "L'État" (The State)," DEP, vol. 2, pp. 93-100.

ES:

ES1 9 "An Immense Discovery" (Oct. 1845), CW3, pp.54-57 ; ES1 10 "Reciprocity" (Oct. 1845), CW3, pp. 57-60; ES1 16 "Blocked Rivers pleading in favor of the Prohibitionists" (late 1845), CW3, pp. 80-81; and ES2 7 "A Chinese Tale" (late 1847), CW3, pp. 163-67.

ES1 17 "A Negative Railway" (c. 1845), CW1, pp. 81-83.

"Proposal for the Creation of a School for Sons of Sharecroppers" (1844) in CW1, pp. 334-40, an article "Thoughts on Share Cropping" in JDE (February, 1846) (in this volume below, pp. 000), and several comments in "On the Bordeaux to Bayonne Railway Line" (May 1846) in CW1, pp. 312-16.

"The Fear of a Word" ( Le Libre-Échange , 20 June 1847) (ES313, CW3, pp. 318-27)

Anglomania and Anglophobia" (1847) (in CW1, pp. 320-34)

T.102 (1847.01.17) "The Utopian" (L'utopiste), Le Libre-Échange , 17 Jan. 1847, no. 8, pp. 63-64; [OC4, pp. 203-12] CW3, pp. 187-98.

ES1 2 "Obstacle and Cause" April 1845),

ES1 4 "Equalizing the Conditions of Production" (JDE, July 1845), in CW3, pp. 25-39.

ES1 13 "Theory and Practice" (late 1845), CW3, pp. 69-75.

ES1 16 "Blocked Rivers" (c. 1845),

ES1 17 "A Negative Railway" (c. 1845);

ES1 18 "There are no Absolute Principles" CW3, pp. 83-85.

ES1 22 "Metaphors," in CW3, pp. 100-3.

ES2 5 "High Prices and Low Prices" ( Le Libre-Échange , 25 July, 1847), no. 35, pp. 273-74; and Bastiat's response to letters on the article in the following issue, 1 August 1847, no. 36, p. 282. See ES2 5 in CW3 , pp. -164-54.

ES2 3 "Two Axes" (c. 1847),

ES2 11 "The Utopian" ( Le Libre-Échange , 17 Jan. 1847), CW3, pp. 187-98.

ES2 13 "La protection ou les trois Échevins" (Protection, or the Three Municipal Magistrates) [late 1847] [ES2.13] [OC4.2.13, pp. 229-41] in CW3, pp. 214-26

ES2 15 "The Free Trader's Little Arsensal" (April 1847), in CW3, pp. 234-40.

ES2 16 "The Right Hand and the Left Hand" (Dec. 1846).

ES3 15 "One Man's gain is another Man's loss" in CW3, pp. 341-43

ES3 18"Le maire d'Énios" (The Mayor of Énios]) [ Le Libre-Échange , 6 February 1848] [OC2.63, pp. 418-29] in CW3, ES3 18 pp. 355-65.

ES3 21 "The Immediate Relief of the People" ( La République française , 12 March 1848, ES3 21, pp.377-79.

ES3 24 "Disastrous Illusions" ( JDE , 15 March 1848), ES3 24, CW3, pp. 384-99.

Bastiat, Rapport fait au nom du Comité des Finances, sur le décret relatif au crédit de 2 millions pour secours extraordinaires aux citoyens du département de la Seine qui se trouvent dans le besoin, par le citoyen F. Bastiat, Séance du 9 août 1848 (Impr. de l'Assemblée nationale, 1849).

Works by Other Authors cited in the Text, Notes, and Glossaries

St. Ambrose, Commentary on Tobias (c. 370). Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum , vol. XXXII S. Ambrosii opera (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1897).

Anon. Projet de réforme postale, par un directeur comptable des postes. 23 février 1846 (Impr. de Robin, (s. d.)).

Anon. Report of the Proceedings of the Second General Peace Congress, held in Paris, on the 22nd, 23rd and 24th of August, 1849. Compiled from Authentic Documents, under the Superintendence of the Peace Congress Committee. (London: Charles Gilpin, 5, Bishopsgate Street Without, 1849).

Anon. "Documents extraits de l'enquête sur les théâtres," JDE July 1850, T. XXVI, pp. 409-12.

Anon. Plus de conscription! (Signé: Allyre Bureau, l'un des rédacteurs de "la Démocratie pacifique") (Paris: Impr. de Lange Lévy, 1848).

Arago, Étienne. Mandrin, mélodrame en 3 actes (Paris, Porte-Saint-Martin, 1827).

Arago, Étienne. Les Aristocraties, Comédie en cinq actes et en vers (Velhagen & Klasing, 1848).

Arago, François. Sur les Fortifications de Paris (Paris: Bachelier, 1841).

Arago, François. Études sur les fortifications de Paris, considérées politiquement et militairement (Paris: Pagnerre, 1845).

Arago, François. Œvres complètes de François Arago, secrétaire perpétuel de l'Académie des sciences. Publiées d'après son ordre sous la direction de M. Jean Augustin Barral (Paris: Gide et J. Baudry, 1855-1862). 13 vols.

Argout, "Opérations des banques publiques en France pendant l'année 1849. Rapport annuel de M. d'Argout, gouverneur de la Banque" in Annuaire de l'économie politique et de la statistique pour 1851 , par MM. Joseph Garnier et Guillaumin (Paris: Guillaumin, 1851), pp. 62-83.

Aristotle, Aristotle's History of Animals: In Ten Books. Edition by Johann Gottlob Schneider. Translated by Richard Cresswell (London: Bell, 1887).

Bacon, Francis. Essays, Moral, Economical, and Political. By Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, and Viscount of St. Albans. A New Edition, withy the Latin quotations translated. To which are now added his apothegms, select sentences, Christian paradoxes, confession of faith, and essay on death. (Boston: William Hillard, 1833).

Bardin, Etienne Alexandre and Oudinot de Reggio (eds.). Dictionnaire de l'armée de terre: ou recherches historiques sur l'art et les usages militaires des anciens et des modernes (Paris: Perrotin, 1841). 8 vols.

Barre, Charles. Du crédit et des banques hypothécaires (Paris: Guillaumine, 1849).

Beaumont, Gustave de. L'Irlande sociale, politique et religieuse (Paris: C. Gosselin, 1839). 2 vols.

Belloc, Alexis. Les Postes françaises. Recherches historiques sur leur origine, leur développement, leur législation (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1886).

Bentham, Jeremy. Essay on Political Tactics: Containing Six of the Principal Rules Proper to be Observed by a Political Assembly, in the Process of Forming a Decision (London: T. Payne, 1791).

Bentham, Jeremy. Théorie des peines et des récompenses, Théorie des peines et des récompenses, Ouvrage extrait des manuscrits de M. Jérémie Bentham, jurisconsulte anglois. Par Et. Dumont (Paris: Bossange et Masson, 1818). 2nd ed. 2 vols.

Bentham, Jeremy. The Rationale of Reward (London: (London: John and H. L. Hunt, 1825).

Bentham, Jeremy. Oeuvres de Jeremy Bentham (Bruxelles: L. Hauman, 1829-1830). 3 vols.

Bentham, Jeremy. An Essay On Political Tactics, Or Inquiries Concerning The Discipline And Mode Of Proceeding Proper To Be Observed In Political Assemblies: Principally Applied To The Practice Of The British Parliament, And To The Constitution And Situation Of The National Assembly Of France . (1791) in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-1843). 11 vols. Vol. 2.

The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-1843). 11 vols.

Béranger, Pierre Jean de. Chansons de P.J. Béranger, précédées d'une notice sur l'auteur et d'un essai sur ses poésies par M. P. Tissot (Paris: Perrotin, 1829). 3 vols.

Béranger, Pierre Jean de. Béranger lyrique. Oeuvres complète de P.J. de Béranger. Nouvelle édition revue par l'auteur avec tous les airs notés. Cette édition est augmentée de dix chansons nouvelles et d'une lettre de Béranger (Bruxelles: Librairie Encyclopédique de Perichon, 1850).

Béranger, Pierre Jean de. Béranger's Songs of the Empire, the Peace, and the Restoration , trans. Robert B. Brough (London: Addey and Co., 1854).

Béranger, Pierre Jean de. Oeuvres complètes de P.J. de Béranger contenant les dix chanson nouvelles, avec un Portrait gravé sur bois d'après Charlet (Paris: Perrotin, 1854-55). 2 vols.

Blanc, Louis. Organisation du travail. Association universelle. Ouvriers. - Chefs d'ateliers. - Hommes de lettres . (Paris: Administration de librairie, 1841. First edition 1839).

Blanc, Louis. Organisation du travail. Paris: Prévot, 1840.

Blanc, Louis. Organisation du travail: Association universelle: Ouvriers, Chefs-d'ateliers, Homme de lettres (Administration de librairie, 1841).

Blanc, Louis. Organisation du travail. IVe édition. Considérablement augmentée, précédée d'une Introduction, et suivie d'un compte-rendu de la maison Leclaire. La première édition a parus en 1839. (Paris: Cauville frères, 1845)

Blanc, Louis. Organisation du travail (5ème édition), revue, corrigée et augmentée d'une polémique entre M. Michel Chevalier et l'auteur, ainsi que d'un appendice indiquant ce qui pourrait être tenté dès à présent (Paris: au bureau de la Société de l'industrie fraternelle, 1847).

Blanc, Louis. Historie de la Révolution française , (Paris: Langlois et Leclerc, 1847). 3 vols.

Blanc, Louis. Le Socialisme; droit au travail, réponse à M. Thiers. Paris: M. Levy, 1848.

Blanc, Louis. Le nouveau monde, revue historique et politique, par Louis Blanc . No. 6 - Décembre 1849. (Bruxelles: Ve Wouters, 1849).

Blanc, Louis. La Révolution de février au Luxembourg (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1849).

Blanc, Louis. Pages d'histoire de la révolution de février 1848 (Paris: Bureau du Nouveau Monde, 1850).

Blanc, Louis. Plus de girondins (Paris: Charles Joubert, 1851).

Blanqui, Adolphe-Jérôme. Histoire de l'économie politique en Europe: depuis les Anciens jusqu'à nos jours; suivie d'une Bibliographie raisonnée des principaux ouvrages d'économie politique , 2 vols. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845). 3rd ed. (1st ed. 1837.)

Block, Maurice. "Fergusson, Adam," (sic) in DEP, vol. 1, pp. 758-59.

Block, Maurice. Statistique de la France, comparée avec les autres états de l'Europe . 2 vols. (Paris: D'Amyot, 1860).

Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen von. Capital and Interest , vol. I: History and Critique of Interest Theories (South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, 1959).

Bonaparte, Lucien and Théodore Iung. Lucien Bonaparte et ses mémoires: 1775 - 1840 d'après les papiers déposés aux archives étrangères et d'autre documents inédits . 3 vols. (Paris: Charpentier, 1882-83). 3 vols.

Bonaparte, Napoléon. Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, ou, Journal où se trouve consigné, jour par jour, ce qu'a dit et fait Napoléon durant dix-huit mois, par le comte de Las Cases (Paris: L'Auteur, tous les libraires de France et de l'etranger, 1823). 8 vols.

Bonjean, Georges. Révision et conservation du Cadastre approprié aux besoins de la propriété foncière: péréquation de l'impôt ; Titres. - Bornages. - Hypothèques. - Crédit agricole etc ; enquete officieuse du Président Bonjean, continuée et rédigée par Georges Bonjean, Louis Bernard Bonjean (Paris: A. Durand et Pedone-Lauriel, 1874)

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Glossary of Persons↩

Aguado, Alexandro Maria (1784-1842)

Alexandro Maria Aguado, marquis de Las Marismas del Guadalquivir, viscount de Monte Ricco (1784-1842) was a Spanish banker who fought with Joseph Bonaparte in Spain, seeing service at the Battle of Baylen (1808) and then rising to the rank of colonel in the French Army and aide-de-campe of Marshall Soult. After 1815 he made a fortune in business in Cuba and Mexico and set up his own bank in Paris. His bank handled most of the state loans to King Ferdinand VII of Spain throughout the 1820s and he was made a Marquis for his work in 1829. Throughout this period he purchased several large properties and châteaux in the French countryside as well as in Paris, collected a large number of paintings, and was active in running the French opera.

Aquinas, St. Thomas (1225-1274)

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was born near Aquino, Sicily and was an Italian Dominican theologian whose scholarship propelled him to the first rank among the Scholastics of the Middle Ages. His major works are the Summa theologica and the Summa contra gentiles .

Arago, Étienne Vincent (1802-1892)

Étienne Vincent Arago (1802-1892) was the youngest brother of the famous Arago family. It is possible that Bastiat knew Étienne as they were both in Sorèze attending a progressive school at the same time (c. 1815). While studying chemistry at the École Polytechnique he came into contact with the work of Auguste Comte and formed radical and republican political views which he retained for the rest of his life. During the 1820s he was active in Carbonari circles and in the 1830 Revolution he took part in the fighting on the barricades as an ally of Lafayette's group, while Bastiat remained behind in Bayonne where he too played a small role in helping the new "constitutional monarch" Louis Philippe come to the throne. Arago was a prolific and successful playwright throughout the 1820 and 1840s writing very political plays such as Mandrin, mélodrame en 3 actes (1827), about Louis Mandrin (1725-55) the famous 18th century brigand and highwayman, and Les Aristocraties (1847), which was a strong republican attack on the privileges of the aristocracy. During the early days of the February Revolution he was with a group which seized control of the administrative building of the Post Office and declared himself to be the new Director General of the Post Office, later being confirmed in that position by the provisional government in which his brother François played an active role. Étienne was elected to the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 (as was Bastiat) but resigned his position as Director General of the Post Office when Louis Napoleon was elected president of the Republic in December. During the brief period he was in charge of the Post Office he introduced the new system of post stamps for letters, modeled on the English "penny post" system, a policy which Bastiat supported. For his role in leading protests against the regime in June 1849 he was convicted and sent into exile in Belgium.

Arago, François (1786-1853).

François Arago (1786-1853). François was the eldest of four successful brothers, Jean Arago (1788-1836) a General who saw service in Mexico, Jacques Arago (1790-1855) a writer and explorer, and Étienne Arago (1802-1892) who was a playwright and republican politician (who attended a Benedictine school in Sorèze at the same time Bastiat was there). François was a famous astronomer and physicist whose work was noticed by Laplace who got him the position of secretary and librarian at the Paris Observatory. At the young age of 23 he was appointed to the Academy of Sciences (1809) and in 1812 he became a professor of analytical geometry at the l'École polytechnique. François was also active in republican politics during the July Monarchy where he was an elected Deputy for its entire duration. He is mentioned several times in Bastiat's correspondence. In the sophism ES3 7 "Two Losses vs. One Profit" (30 May 1847) Bastiat appealed to François to assist him in developing the more sophisticated mathematics which he needed in order to calculate more precisely the losses incurred by tariff protection and subsidies, thus making his arguments more "invincible." We do not know if François ever replied to his letter. After the outbreak of the Revolution in February 1848 he became Minister of War, the Navy and Colonies and played an important role in the abolition of slavery in the French colonies. Refusing to swear an oath to Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, he resigned his position and was sent into exile. In addition to his theoretical scientific works, he wrote popular science books and edited the collected works of Condorcet which appeared in a multi-volume collection in 1847.

Argout, Appolinaire, Antoine Maurice, Comte d' (1782-1858)

Antoine Maurice Appolinaire, Comte d'Argout (1782-1858), was the Minister for the Navy and Colonies, then Commerce, and Public Works during the July Monarchy. In 1834 he was appointed Governor of the Bank of France, a position he held until 1857.

Bacon, Francis (1561-1626)

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, and author. Bacon was trained as a lawyer but made a name for himself as one of the clearest exponents of the scientific method at the dawn of the scientific revolution in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He argued that knowledge about the natural world could be best acquired through direct observation, experiment, and the testing of a hypothesis. His best-known works include The Advancement of Learning (1605), Novum Organum (1620), and New Atlantis (1626). In his utopian novel New Atlantis (1627) the state-sponsored scientific elite formed a college which is "the very eye of the kingdom."

Barrot, Hyacinthe Camille Odilon (1791-1873)

Hyacinthe Camille Odilon Barrot (1791-1873) was a lawyer who joined other liberals during the Restoration to oppose the political reaction of Louis XVIII, arguing in court for the freedom of speech of the King's opponents. He was an ally of Guizot and participated in the Three Glorious Days in July 1830 which brought Louis Philippe to the throne. During the July Monarchy he was elected Deputy representing l'Eure, l'Aisne, and Bas-Rhin between 181 and 1848. In 1834 he was one of the founding members of the anti-slavery group the French Society for the Abolition of Slavery. He was also one of the owners of the liberal journal Le Siècle . As an advocate of electoral reform he was active in the political banquets protests of 1847 which eventually led to the collapse of the July Monarchy in February 1848 but was shocked at its collapse and refused to be part of the Provisional Government. He was elected Deputy representing l'Aisne in April 1848 and voted with the conservative right. When Louis Napoléon was elected President of the Second Republic he called upon Odilon Barrot to form a government, of which he was President of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister) and Minister of Justice. He was one of the leading figures in "the Party of Order." He opposed Louis Napoléon's coup d'état of December 1851 and retired from politics to write on legal and constitutional matters.

Baudre , Jean-Baptiste de (1773-1850)

Jean-Baptiste de Baudre (1773-1850) was a senior engineer in the Department of Bridges and Roads who helped develop the ports of Calais and Bordeaux, the Garonne Canal, and the Adour and Garonne rivers. He was the chief engineer working on the Garonne lateral canal after 1828. After many interruptions, including the Revolution of 1830, the planned canal linking the Midi Canal (from the Mediterranean to Toulouse) and the Garonne Canal (from Toulouse to Bordeaux) was finally completed in 1856.

Bentinck, Lord George (1802-1848)

Lord George Bentinck (1802-1848), the 4th Duke of Portland, was elected a Member of Parliament in 1828 and he joined the conservative and protectionist faction. With Benjamin Disraeli he led the opposition in the House of Commons against Richard Cobden's and Sir Robert Peel's attempts to repeal the Corn Laws in 1846. Although he was unsuccessful in stopping repeal he and Disraeli were able to defeat Sir Robert Peel, splitting the conservatives into two groups, a free trade group led by Peel and a protectionist group which joined the new Conservative party. Bentinck later became the leader of the Conservative Party.

Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832)

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) trained as a lawyer and founded the early 19th century school of political thought known as "Benthamism" later called utilitarianism - based on the idea that governments should act so as to promote "the greatest good of the greatest number" of people. He spent much of his life attempting to draw up an ideal Constitutional Code, but he was also active in parliamentary reform, education, and prison reform. He influenced the thinking of James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill and the school of thought known as the Philosophic Radicals. It is interesting that Bastiat chose two passages from Bentham's writings as the opening for both the First and Second Series of the Economic Sophisms : Théorie des peines et des récompenses (1811). Bastiat may also have taken the name "sophism" from a work by Bentham, Traité des sophismes politiques (1816) [English version, Handbook of Political Fallacies (1824)]. His most important works were a Fragment on Government (1776), Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780, 1789), Defence of Usury (1787). See The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (1838-1843). 11 vols.

Béranger, Pierre-Jean de (1780-1857)

Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780-1857) was a poet and songwriter who rose to prominence during the Restoration period with his funny and clever criticisms of the monarchy and the church, which got him into trouble with the censors who imprisoned him for brief periods in the 1820s. Béranger came from a humble background and was apprenticed to a printer at the age of 14. Through the help and patronage of Napoleon's brother Lucien, Béranger secured a job in the offices of the Imperial University of France and began writing his songs for purely private use, many of which circulated in manuscript form thereby creating an appreciative audience. The satire of Napoleon "Le Roi d'Yvetot" [The King of Yvetot] (1813) was particularly popular. He shot to fame with his first published collection of songs and poems in 1815 ( Chansons morales et autres ) and two more followed in 1821 and 1825.

His material was much in demand in the singing societies or "goguettes" which sprang up during the Restoration and the July Monarchy as a way of circumventing the censorship laws and the bans on political parties. After the appearance of his second volume in 1821 he was tried and convicted to 3 months imprisonment in Sainte-Pélagie. Another bout of imprisonment (this time 9 months in La Force) followed in 1828 when his 4th volume was published. Many of the figures who came to power after the July Revolution of 1830 were friends or acquaintances of Béranger and it was assumed he would be granted a sinecure in recognition of his critiques of the old monarchy, but he refused all government appointments in a stinging poem which he wrote in late 1830 called "Le Refus" [The Refusal].

Guillaumin had one of his earliest publishing successes with a 3 volume edition of Béranger's poems in 1829 which sold very well after which Béranger and he became close friends. Béranger visited the offices of the Guillaumin frequently and that is where Bastiat probably met him. He was sympathetic to free trade, wrote a poem about the heroism of smugglers "Les Contrebandiers" (1829), and even joined Bastiat's Free Trade Association. Bastiat quoted his work frequently in the Economic Sophisms as Béranger's songs were well-known to the audience Bastiat was trying to reach.

At the age of 68 Béranger was overwhelmingly elected to the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 in which he sat for a brief period before resigning. He began writing as a firm supporter of Napoleon but later evolved into a more mainstream classical liberal in the 1840s.

The work of Béranger was well known to Bastiat who calls him "the people's poet" and admits that he sang his songs in his youth (Speech to Members of the Free Trade Association, 14 June, 1846) and even sang his songs to win the officers of the Bayonne garrison over to the side of the July Monarchy in August 1830 (Letter to Coudroy, 5 August, 1830). He tells his friend Félix Coudroy that he had persuaded Béranger to join the Free Trade Association (Letter to Coudroy, 22 March 1846) and regretted that Béranger was unable to attend his welcome dinner in Paris in May 1845 (Letter to Coudroy, May 1845).

Bernadotte, Jean-Baptiste (1763-1844)

Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (1763-1844) was one of Napoléon's Marshals. He was elected the hereditary prince of Sweden in 1810, and became king in 1818.

Bertin, Armand (1801-1854).

CW4:Armand Bertin (1801-1854) was the son of François Bertin who founded Le Journal des débats. He began working for his father's journal in 1822, took over as editor when he died in 1841, and remained with it until his death. The journal became one of the leading journals in France with authors like Hector Berlioz, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo writing for it. Politically it was rather conservative, opposing many liberal reforms during the July Monarchy . After 1848 it took a more moderate conservative position and economists like Michel Chevalier and Bastiat were able to have some essays published in it, most notably Bastiat's essay "The State" in September 1848, most likely because of their strong anti-socialist position.

Billault, Adolphe Augustin Marie (1805-1863)

Adolphe Augustin Marie Billault (1805-1863) was a lawyer and politician. He was a Municipal Councillor of the city of Rennes 1831-37, Deputy for la Loire-Inférieure 1837-48, and active in the political banquets movement in 1847-48. During the Second Republic he was elected as Deputy for la Loire-Inférieure in April 1848 but failed to be reelected in May 1849. He voted with the moderate republicans. He became active in politics again under Louis Naploéon when he was elected to the Corps Législative of which he was later appointed President, then Minister of the Interior. In his political and economic views he was anti-clerical and a follower of Saint-Simon.

Blanc, Louis (1811-82).

Louis Blanc (1811-1882) was a journalist and historian who was active in the socialist movement. Blanc founded the journal Revue du progès and published therein articles that later became the influential pamphlet L'Organisation du travail (1839). In 1841 he published a very popular critique of the July Monarchy, Histoire de dix ans, 1830-1840 which went through many editions during the 1840s. During the 1848 revolution he became a member of the provisional government, promoted the National Workshops, and debated Adolphe Thiers on the merits of the right to work in Le socialisme; droit au travail, réponse à M. Thiers (1848). In 1847 Blanc began work on a multivolume history of the French Revolution, Histoire de la révolution française , two volumes of which had appeared when the February revolution of 1848 broke out. A second edition, of fifteen volumes, appeared in 1878.

Blanqui, Jérôme Adolphe (1798-1854).

Blanqui was a liberal economist; brother of the revolutionary socialist Auguste Blanqui. He became director of the prestigious École supérieure de commerce de Paris , succeeded Jean-Baptiste Say to the chair of political economy at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, and was the editor of the Journal des Économistes between 1842 and 1843 and often wrote articles under the nom de plume of "Adolphus." He was elected deputy representing the Gironde from 1846 to 1848. Among his many works on political economy and sociology are the Encyclopédie du commerçant (1839-41), Précis élementaire d'économie politique (1842), and Les classes ouvrières en France (1848).

Bonhomme, Jacques [person]

"Jacques Bonhomme" (literally Jack Goodfellow) is the name used by the French to refer to "everyman," sometimes with the connotation that he is the archetype of the wise French peasant. Bastiat uses the character of Jacques Bonhomme frequently in his constructed dialogues in the Economic Sophisms as a foil to criticise protectionists and advocates of government regulation . In England at this time the phrase used to refer to the average Englishman was "John Bull"; in the late 19th and early 20th century English judges used to refer to "the man on the Clapham Omnibus" to refer to the average British citizen with common sense; a more colloquial contemporary American expression for the average man would be "Joe Six Pack". In the FEE translation it has been translated as "John Goodfellow" which is a close literal translation of the French. It should be noted that the name "Jacques Bonhomme" was given to the small magazine that Bastiat and Molinari published and handed out on the street corners of Paris in June and July 1848. They were forced to close it down following the bloody riots in Paris known as the "June Days." See the glossary entry on " Jacques Bonhomme (Journal)."

Frédéric Bastiat liked to use the figure of Jacques Bonhomme in his economic sophisms (mainly in the Second Series which were written during 1847) in order to present his economic ideas to a popular audience. Jacques Bonhomme was sometimes a carpenter ("like Jesus") 2316 or some other tradesman who had doubts about the justice and economic rationality of protectionism and government regulation. The source for Bastiat's "Jacques Bonhomme" is probably Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard" which was translated in French as "Bonhomme Richard". Franklin's work was popular in France and circulated in several editions. An edition of 1824 2317 had been edited by Augustin-Charles Renouard (1794-1878) who was a lawyer with an interest in elementary school education and later became secretary general of the minister of justice and an elected deputy. He also was vice-president of the Société d'économie politique and probably would have known Molinari and Bastiat quite well in the 1840s.

Bastiat's first use of the character "Jacques Bonhomme" was in an article, "Salt, the Mail, and the Customs Service," in JDE (May 1846), which also appears in ES2 12. 2318 Here Jacques Bonhomme has a conversation, in the form of a play or dialogue, with his English counterpart John Bull who tells Jacques Bonhomme how well liberal reforms like postal reform have gone in England and how they should be tried in France. Jacques becomes so convinced of this idea that he writes a cheeky letter to the Deputy who Chaired the Committee looking into postal reform offering to take over the French postal system, introduce the reforms, and still make a profit.

He next appeared in three pieces which were probably written in 1847 and appeared as part of Bastiat's series of Economic Sophisms. The first was ES2 3 "The Two Axes" 2319 in which Jacques, now a "carpenter like Jesus," writes a mocking petition to the Minister of Trade, M. Cunin-Gridaine, suggesting that he could make more work for French carpenters by forcing them to use blunt instead of sharp axes. the second was ES2 10 "The Tax Collector" 2320 which is a long conversation between Jacques Bonhomme, now a wine merchant, and M. Blockhead, the tax collector, on the nature of tax collection and representative government. And finally, ES2 13 "The Three Municipal Magistrates," 2321 which is one of Bastiat's most elaborate economic sophisms which involves a four act play about the impact restrictionist trade policies and taxes have on two generations of Parisians. In the final forth act, Jacques Bonhomme enters Paris to launch a protest movement against the city tolls and realises how fickle crowds can be.

The main use of this character occurs in March and June 1848 in Bastiat's revolutionary magazines, especially the one called Jacques Bonhomme , which appeared in June 1848. 2322 In this short lived journal, many of the articles are written from the perspective of a real person named Jacques Bonhomme who tells his readers what has been happening during the revolution and comments upon it. This is an interesting example of where Bastiat has become Jacques Bonhomme and speaks with his voice (literally as "I"), so closely has he become tied to the ideals of the revolution and economic reforms. Two important instances of this are in the very first issue where Jacques Bonhomme gives his readers an account of how he came to be on the streets of Paris in the middle of a revolution, 2323 and in the second issue of 11-15 June where Jacques/Bastiat gives his criticism of the excessive demands being placed on "The State" and offers a 50,000 franc reward for anybody who can provide a good definition of what the state really is. 2324

Bastiat next returned to Jacques Bonhomme two years later in July 1850 when he published his masterpiece What is Seen and What is Not Seen in which Jacques plays a leading role, especially in the opening chapter "The Broken Window." 2325 It is Jacques' window which gets broken by his unruly son and this gives Bastiat an opportunity to talk about opportunity cost and the folly of breaking windows.

See also, the Glossary entry on "Jacques Bonhomme (person)."

Brisson, Barnabé (1777-1828)

Barnabé Brisson (1777-1828) was a senior engineer with the Department of Bridges and Roads and a mathematician. After the defeat of Napoleon he worked in la Marne rebuilding the infrastructure which had been destroyed during the war. In 1820 he began teaching at the School of Bridges and Roads in Paris and began working on constructing the canal between Paris and Tours. In 1822 he was appointed secretary of the General Council of Bridges and Roads, and in 1824 was made Chief Inspector of the Department. His major work was Essai sur le système général de navigation intérieure de la France (1829).

Brutus, Marcus Junius (ca. 85-42 B.C.).

Roman senator who had been brought up in the Stoic philosophy by his uncle, Cato the Younger. Brutus participated in the assassination of Julius Caesar and because of this was regarded by many in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the model of the tyrannicide.

Buffet, Louis Joseph (1818-98).

Louis Joseph Buffet (1818-1898) was a lawyer and politician. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 and was Minister of Agriculture and Commerce in Odelin Barrot's first government in 1849. He was briefly imprisoned for his opposition to Louis Napoléon but returned to politics towards the end of the Second Empire and served as President of the National Assembly in the Third Republic 1873-75 and was made a Senator for life in 1876.

Buckingham, Richard Grenville, 2nd Duke of (1797-1861)

Richard Plantagenet Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos (1797-1861) was a wealthy landowner in Buckinghamshire and member of the conservative group in Parliament. He represented Buckinghamshire in Parliament between 1818 and 1839 before assuming a position in the House of Lords when his father died. The Duke was often the butt of the jokes of the Free Traders in the House because of his uncompromising opposition to free trade and unwillingness to compromise. He suffered a spectacular bankruptcy in 1847 which led to the contents of his family's very large country house being auctioned off.

Burritt, Elihu (1810-1879)

Elihu Burritt (1810-1879) was active in the abolitionist movement and the peace movement, becoming the president of the Society of the Friends of Peace in the United States.

Cabet, Etienne (1788-1856).

Étienne Cabet (1788-1856) was a lawyer and utopian socialist who coined the word "communism." Between 1831 and 1834 he was a deputy in the Chamber, until he was forced into exile to Britain, where he came into contact with Robert Owen. Cabet advocated a society in which the elected representatives controlled all property that was owned in common by the community. He promoted his views in a journal called Le Populaire and in a book about a fictitious communist community called Icarie, Voyage et aventures de lord William Carisdall en Icarie (1840). In 1848 Cabet left France in order to create such a community in Texas and then at Nauvoo, Illinois, but these efforts ended in failure. The naming of his utopian community after the figure from Greek mythology, Icarus, who failed in his attempt to flee the island of Crete by flying with wax wings too close to the sun, was perhaps unfortunate.

Caesar, Gaius Julius (100-44 BC)

Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) was a Roman general, politician, and historian. His victories in the Gallic Wars (58-50 BC) fed his political ambitions and he was ordered by the Roman Senate to resign his command and return to Rome. He refused and led his army into Italy, thus violating the ban on the military crossing the Rubicon river, which in turn led to civil war. His victory in that war led to him assuming political control of the Roman Republic and eventually to becoming dictator. A group of senators led by Brutus assassinated Caesar because they thought he was destroying the political institutions of the old Republic. Further civil war ensued and the Republic never recovered. Caesar's adopted son and heir Octavian won the next round of civil war and assumed political control, later ruling as Emperor Augustus. His political legacy was a form of government later called "Caesarism" in which a military leader with charisma and popular support creates a personality cult and rules through his control of political and military force. Napoleon Bonaparte modeled his rule on that of Julius Caesar and his form of "Caesarism" has become known as "Bonapartism."

Carey, Henry C. (1793-1879)

Henry C. Carey (1793-1879) was an American economist who argued that national economic development should be promoted by extensive government subsidies and high tariff protection. There were several topics on which he was close to the French economists, most notably his idea that economies are governed by the operation of natural laws which are observable by men, and that there is no inherent reason why the interests of economic actors are not "harmonious" in a free society. On the latter topic he clashed with Frédéric Bastiat whom he charged with plagiarizing his book The Harmony of Interests, Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial (1851). Bastiat's book Economic Harmonies appeared in print in a shortened form in mid-1850 and a more complete form in late 1850. Carey accused him of plagiarism and a bitter debate in the Journal des économistes ensued. Carey's other major works are Principles of political economy (1837-1840) and Principles of social science (1858-1860).

Castille, Hippolyte (1820-1886)

Hippolyte Castille (1820-1886) was born in Montreuil-sur-Mer (département de Pas-de-Calais) and was a prolific French author who wrote popular works on the History of the Second French Republic (4 vols. 1854-56) and a multi-volume series of Portraits politiques au dix-neuvième siècle (1857-1862) which included several small volumes on classical liberal figures such as Mme de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Béranger, Lafayette, Garibaldi, Cavour, Mazzini, as well as many other individuals. He founded in 1847 a short-lived journal devoted to the importance of intellectual property, Le travail intellectuel, journal des intérêts scientifiques, littéraires et artistiques , for which Molinari wrote a number of articles. Molinari is mentioned as a "collaborator"and other leading economists were listed as "supporters" (Frédéric Bastiat, Charles Dunoyer, Horace Say, Michel Chevalier, Joseph Garnier). The journal was monthly and lasted 7 months before closing in 1848. Castille's home on the rue Saint-Lazare (the old residence of Cardinal Fesch) was the meeting place for a small group of liberals (which included Bastiat, Molinari, Garnier, Fonteyraud, and Coquelin) which met regularly between 1844 and early 1848 to discuss political and economic matters. It was Castille's home which supplied the name for Molinari's book, Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare (1849). Castille was also one of the founders of Bastiat's revolutionary journal La République française in February 1848, along with Gustave de Molinari. In mid-1848 Castille gradually drifted apart from his economist friends and eventually worked on the Jacobin republican magazine La révolution démocratique et sociale edited by Charles Delescluze (1809-1871).

Cato the Younger (95-46 BC)

Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis (95-46 BC), better known as Cato the Younger (Cato Minor), was a politician in the late Roman Republic and a noted defender of "Roman Liberty". He was a supporter of the Stoic school of philosophy and became renowned for his opposition to political corruption and the growing power of Julius Caesar. He was much admired in the 18th century and his name was used as a nom de plume by opponents of the British Empire in the 1720s, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in their Cato's Letters (172-23).

Charras , Jean-Baptiste-Adolphe (1810-1865)

Jean-Baptiste-Adolphe Charras (1810-1865) was a solider and politician. As a young man he got into trouble for singing "La Marseillaise" and making a toast to General La Fayette. He later took part in the "Three Glorious Days in July 1830 which brought Louis Philippe to power. After he was sent to the Paris garrison in 1834 he became involved in liberal politics writing articles for Le National on military matters. After serving for several years in Algeria he returned after the February Revolution and was appointed an under-secretary in the Department of War in the Provisional Government. He was elected a Deputy representing Puy-de-Dôme and voted with the moderate republicans. He was reelected in May 1849. His total opposition to the increasingly authoritarian policies of Louis Napoleon led to his arrest after his coup d'état in 2 December 1851 and exile in Belgium.

Charlemagne, Edmond (1795-1872)

Edmond Charlemagne (1795-1872) was a judge and magistrate. He was elected to represent l'Indre during the July Monarchy where he voted with the Legitimist opposition (i.e pro-Bourbon). During the Second Republic he had switched sides and was elected Deputy of l'Indre in April 1848 voting with the moderate republicans, and then reelected in June 1849 where he voted with the centre right. He supported Louis Napoléon's coup d'état of 1851 and was appointed Councillor of State in the new regime.

Chastellux, François -Jean, marquis de (1734-1788).

Chastellux came from an old Burgundian family and became a general in the French Army, fighting in the Seven Years War (1756-63). He was a friend of Voltaire and other members of the French Enlightenment and turned his hand to writing plays while he was serving in the field. He was rewarded for efforts by being elected to the French Academy in 1775. In 1780 he was sent to assist the Americans in their War of Independence, seeing action in the Battle of Yorktown. He became friends with James Madison and Thomas Jefferson with whom he corresponded. Chastellux wrote De la Félicité publique (1772), and a memoire about his activities in America, Voyages de M. le Marquis de Chastellux dans l'Amérique septentrionale (1786).

Chateaubriand, François René, vicomte de (1768-1848).

François René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) was a novelist, philosopher, and supporter of Charles X. He was the Minister of Foreign Affairs from December 1822 to June 1824. He was a defender of the freedom of the press and Greek independence from Turkey. He refused to take the oath of allegiance to King Louis-Philippe after he came to power in 1830. He spent his retirement writing Mémoires d'outre-tombe (Memoirs from Beyond the Grave) (1849-50) which was published posthumously. He died the previous July (1848). Bastiat closed his last book, WSWNS with a quote from this book.

Chégaray, Michel-Charles (1802-1859)

Michel-Charles Chégaray (1802-1859) was a magistrate and conservative politician. His father was the mayor of Bayonne (the city in which Bastiat was born in 1801), he studied law in Paris, and then was appointed a magistrate in Bayonne in 1826 (Bastiat was appointed in 1831). His career in some ways was like a mirror image of Bastiat's, with Bastiat following a path trod by the liberals and Chégaray following that of the conservative monarchists. He was elected a Deputy representing the Basses-Pyrénées in 1837 and supported Guizot in the Chamber. He temporarily lost his seat in 1848 but regained it in 1849 to sit in the Legislative Assembly (where Bastiat was also a Deputy from the south west). He eventually sided with Louis Napoléon who appointed him a Councilor in the Cour de cassation (the highest court in France) in December 1851 where he remained until his death. In July 1844 Chégaray presented a Report to the Chamber on an inquiry into the cost of sending letters in July 1844 which was a topic which much interested Bastiat.

Cherbuliez, Antoine-Elisée (1797-1869)

Edit 3: Antoine-Elisée Cherbuliez (1797-1869) was a Swiss lawyer, judge, and professor of law and political economy at the Académie de Genève. He was elected to the Cantonal Legislature in 1831 and then to the Constituent Assembly in 1842. In 1848 he moved to Paris and became active in the Economists' circle, writing for the JDE and participating in the pamphlet war of 1848 on socialism. He returned to academic life in Switzerland five years later. His books include Riche ou pauvre (1840); De la démocratie en Suisse (1843); Simples Notions de l'ordre social à l'usage de tout le monde (1848); Le potage à la tortue: entretiens populaires sur les questions sociales (1849); Etudes sur les causes de la misère (1853); Précis de la science économique et de ses principales application s (1862).

Cheuvreux, Hortense (née Girard) (1808-93).

Hortense Cheuvreux (née Girard) was married to Jean Pierre-Casimir Cheuvreux (1797-1881), who was a wealthy textile merchant. Casimir was active in liberal circles in Paris, helping to fund their activities and running an important salon, headed by Hortense, from their Paris home. People like the scientist Jean-Jacques Ampère and the politician and historian Alexis de Tocqueville attended, as did Bastiat. Casimir's sister, Anne Cheuvreux, had married Horace Say, the son of the economist Jean-Baptiste Say, who was also a wealthy businessman who helped fund liberal activities. Like Hortense, Anne Say ran a liberal salon. Thus the two women and the Cheuvreux-Say families played an important role in liberal circles in Paris during the 1840s.

Bastiat became good friends with the Cheuvreux family, which included their daughter Louise (to whom Bastiat wrote some letters - L.173 (11 June, 1850) and L.191 (14 Sept. 1850)), and he spent his holidays with them in their country home outside Paris. They also helped Bastiat during the summer of 1849 when he was trying to complete the Economic Harmonies by arranging for him to have use of a hunting lodge (Butard) in some woods outside Paris where he could write in peace. It is clear that Bastiat's friendship with Hortense was a close one (how close we can only speculate). She was one of the few people to visit him in Rome in his last days and 27 years years after his death she published a book of his letters to her, Lettres d'un habitant des Landes (1877), which show us a much more personal side to Bastiat than we see in his other writings. In her introduction to the book (unsigned) she also provides us with some very touching descriptions of the appearance and personality of the man as the following quote reveals: 2326

There I saw Bastiat fresh from the Great Landes present himself at M. Say's home. His attire was so conspicuously different from those surrounding him that the eye, however distracted, could not help but stare at him for a moment. The cut of his garments, due to the scissors of a tailor from Mugron, was far away from ordinary designs. Bright colors, poorly assorted, were placed next to one another, without any attempt at harmony. Floss-silk gloves covering his hands, playing with long white cuffs; a sharp collar covering half his face; a little hat, long hair; all that would have looked ludicrous had not the mischievous appearance of the newcomer, his luminous glance, and the charm of his conversation made one quickly forget the rest.

Sitting in front of this rustic man, I discovered that Bastiat was not only one of the high priests of the temple, but also a passionate initiator. What fire, what verve, what conviction, what originality, what winning and witty common sense! Through this cascade of clear ideas, of these displays, new and to the point, the heart was shown, the true soul of man revealed itself. "Here is someone," I said to myself, "whom one will have to get to know better or say why not, the ladies, in spite of themselves, will perhaps take an interest in the impact of English and French tariffs after all.

After dinner we played music. This inhabitant of Les Landes arranged yet another surprise for us; he possessed to an extraordinary degree feelings for art and poetry.

Chevalier, Michel (1806-87).

Michel Chevalier (1806-87) was a liberal economist and alumnus of the École polytechnique and a Minister under Napoleon III. Initially a Saint-Simonist, he was imprisoned for two years (1832-33). After a trip to the United States, he published Lettres sur l'Amérique du Nord (1836), Histoire et description des voies de communications aux Etats-Unis et des travaux d'art qui en dependent (1840-41), and Cours d'économie politique (1845–55). He was appointed to the chair of political economy at the Collège de France in 1840 and became a senator in 1860. He was an admirer of Bastiat and Cobden and played a decisive role in the free trade treaty signed between France and England in 1860 (Chevalier was the signatory for France, while Cobden was the signatory for England). His dismissal from his teaching post during the 1848 Revolution was strongly resisted by the Political Economy Society which was able to eventually get him reinstated.

Clément, Ambroise (1805-86).

Ambroise Clément (1805-86) was an economist and secretary to the mayor of Saint-Étienne for many years. Clément was able to travel to Paris frequently to participate in political economy circles. In the mid 1840s he began writing on economic matters and so impressed Guillaumin that the latter asked him to assume the task of directing the publication of the important and influential Dictionniare de l'économie politique , in 1850. Clément was a member of the Société d'économie politique from 1848, a regular writer and reviewer for the Journal des économistes , and was made a corresponding member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1872. He wrote the following works: Recherches sur les causes de l'indigence (1846); Des nouvelles Idées de réforme industrielle et en particulier du projet d'organisation du travail de M. Louis Blanc (1846); La crise économique et sociale en France et en Europe (1886); as well as an early review of Bastiat's Economic Harmonies for the Journal des économistes (1850), in which he praised Bastiat's style but criticized his position on population and the theory of value. Two works which deserve special note are the article on "spoliation" (plunder), "De la spoliation légale," Journal des économistes , vol. 20, no. 83, 1er juillet 1848, which he wrote in the heat of the June Days uprising in Paris, and the two volume work on social theory which has numerous "Austrian" insights, Essai sur la science sociale. Économie politique - morale expérimentale - politique théorique (1867).

Cobden, Richard (1804-65).

Richard Cobden (1804-65) was the founder of the Anti-Corn Law League. Born of a poor farmer's family, he was trained by an uncle to become a clerk in his warehouse. At twenty-one, he became a travelling salesman, and was so successful that he was able to set up his own business by acquiring a factory making printed cloth. Thanks to his vision of the market and his sense of organization, his company became very prosperous. Nevertheless, at the age of thirty, he left the management of the company to his brother in order to travel. He wrote some remarkable articles in which he defended two great causes: pacifism, in the form of non intervention in foreign affairs, and free exchange. From 1839, he devoted himself exclusively to the Anti-Corn Law League and was elected as MP for Stockport in 1841. He began corresponding with Bastiat in 1844 and became a close friend and confidant as Bastiat's letters to him reveal. He and Bastiat gave important speeches at the Paris Friends of Peace Congress in August 1849 and it is quite likely that he and Bastiat met secretly in November 1849 on a possible disarmament treaty between France and England, which came to nothing. Toward the end of the 1850s, he was asked by the government to negotiate a free trade treaty with France. His French counterpart was Michel Chevalier, a minister of Napoleon III and a friend and admirer of Bastiat. The treaty was signed by Cobden and Chevalier in 1860.

Colmont, Saint-Julle de (1792-??)

Saint-Julle de Colmont (1792-??) had been Secretary of Finance under the July Monarchy. He was a member of the Political Economy Society and wrote articles for the JDE and the Annuaire de l'économie politique on tax, trade marks, and gold and silver currency.

Comte, Charles (1782–1837).

Charles Comte (1782-1837) was a lawyer, a critic of the repressive policies of Napoleon and then the restored monarchy, and the son-in-law of the economist Jean-Baptiste Say. He founded, with Charles Dunoyer, the journal Le Censeur in 1814 and Le Censeur européen in 1817 and was prosecuted many times for challenging the press censorship laws and criticizing the government. He came across the economic ideas of Say in 1817 and discussed them at length in Le Censeur européen . After the government passed new censorship laws in 1820, it closed closed down the magazine and convicted and sentenced Comte to two years in prison. He went into exile in Switzerland, living in Geneva for 15 months, before accepting a position in Lausanne teaching law. In 1822 Ferdinand VII of Spain (a Bourbon) appealed to the Holy Alliance to restore him to the throne after the liberal Cortez had pushed him aside. His fellow Bourbon Louis XVIII of France sent 95,000 troops into Spain in 1823 in order to assist Ferdinand. An occupying force of 45,000 soldiers remained in Spain until they were withdrawn in 1828. Comte believed that the Ultra conservatives in France would put pressure on other countries like Switzerland who gave shelter to liberal exiles and critics of the government. Therefore, he resigned his teaching position after two years in Lausanne and went to England in 1824 where he spent another two years and became acquainted with Jeremy Bentham and other English liberals, including James and John Stuart Mill. He was able to return to France in 1825 where he worked on Lafayette's journal La Revue Américaine . In 1827 he published the first part of his magnum opus, the four-volume Traité de législation , which very much influenced the thought of Bastiat, and the second part, Traité de la propriété which followed in 1834. Comte was appointed to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques when it was re-established by King Louis Philippe in 1832, and was its permanent secretary. After the 1830 revolution he was also elected a deputy representing La Sarthe.

Condillac, Étienne Bonnot, abbé de (1714-80).

The Abbé de Condillac (1714-80) was a priest, philosopher, economist, and member of the Académie française. Condillac was an advocate of the ideas of John Locke and a friend of the encyclopedist Denis Diderot. In his Traité des sensations (1754), Condillac claims that all attributes of the mind, such as judgment, reason, and even will, derive from sensations. His book Le Commerce et le gouvernement, considérés relativement l'un a l'autre (1776) appeared in the same year as Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations .

Considerant, Victor Prosper (1808-93)

Victor Prosper Considerant (1808-93) was a follower of the socialist Charles Fourier and edited the most successful Fourierist magazine La Démocratie pacifiste (1843-1851). He was elected Deputy to represent Loiret in April 1848 and Paris in May 1849. The Fourierists advocated a utopian, communistic system for the reorganization of society. The population was to be grouped in "phalansteries"of about 1,800 persons, who would live together as one family and hold property and work in common. Considerant on a couple of occasions tried to set up state funded experimental communities based upon Fourierist principles but was unsuccessful. He was also an advocate of the "right to work" (the right to a job), an idea which Bastiat opposed.

Coquelin, Charles (1802-1852)

Charles Coquelin (1802-1852) was one of the leading figures in the Political Economy movement in Paris before his untimely death. He was selected by the publisher Guillaumin to edit the prestigious and voluminous Dictionnaire de l'économie politique (1852) because of his erudition and near photographic memory. He also wrote dozens of articles for the Dictionnaire . Coquelin was born in Dunkirk and went to Paris in order to study law but he spent considerable time reading the classic works of political economy, developing a keen interest in business cycles after the depression of 1825-26. In 1827 he began a journal, Les Annales du Commerce (1827-28) in which he wrote on banking matters. In the early 1830s he turned to banking policy in the United States, especially in New England where there were liberal laws governing the creation of banks. Financial concerns in 1839 forced him to seek employment in the textile industry on which he wrote a number of works. In the early 1840s he wrote a series of articles for La Revue des Deux-Monde s on banking in which he toyed with the idea of the competitive issue of currencies by banks competing for business in the market. These ideas were further developed in his major book on the subject, Du Crédit et des Banques which appeared in 1848. Coquelin was also very active in the free trade movement, becoming secretary of the Association and writing articles for Bastiat's journal Le libre-échange and later taking over the editor's role when Bastiat had to resign because of ill health. He also wrote dozens of articles and book reviews for the Journal des économistes . During the 1848 Revolution Coquelin was active in forming a debating club, the Club de la Liberté du Travail (the Club for the Freedom of Labor) which took on the socialists before it was violently broken up by opponents. He, along with Bastiat, Fonteyraud, Garnier, and Molinari, started a small revolutionary magazine written to appeal to ordinary people, Jacques Bonhomme , which lasted only a few weeks in June before it too was forced to close. Coquelin wrote on transport, the linen industry, the law governing corporations, money, credit, and banking (especially free banking of which he was probably the first serious advocate).

Coquerel, Athanase-Charles (père) (1795-1868) and fils (1820-1875)

There were two "Athanase Coquerels," a father and a son, both of whom were liberal Protestant preachers. Athanase-Charles Coquerel (Athanase Coquerel père) (1795-1868) was elected Deputy representing la Seine in April 1848 where he voted with the moderate republicans, and reelected in May 1849 but voted with the Party of Order especially in support of France's military intervention in Rome in April 1849. So it is unlikely he would have attended the Peace Congress in August. His son Athanase Josué Coquerel (Athanase Coquerel fils) (1820-1875), although only 29, may be the one who spoke at the Paris Friends of Peace Conference in August 1849.

Croesus (595-547 BC).

Croesus was King of Lydia until he was defeated and captured by the Persians. His name was synonymous with great wealth. The river Pactolus ran through the Lydian city of Sardis and gold was mined from the river silt thus providing the ore to make the gold coins for which Croesus was famous. He made a name for himself in the ancient world with generous gifts to Greek temples such as the rebuilding of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

For the political economists King Croesus was a textbook example of how a king can only become extremely rich by living off the wealth produced by an industrious people. J.B. Say has a long footnote devoted to Croesus in the Traité . He notes that Lydia was a prosperous country before Croesus came to power, that he used this already existing wealth to finance his conquests of neighbouring countries, and then lived a debauched life of luxury when his political and military power was at its peak. Croesus lost it all when he was defeated in battle and held captive by Cyrus, King of the Persians. Say, like Bastiat, concluded that:

If Croeus had not devoted himself to ostentatious living and to ambitious conquests, he probably would have kept his great power and would not have ended his days in misfortune. The art of linking cause and effect and the study of political economy are no less important for the personal well-being of kings than for that of their people. It is the ignorance of political economy which has led Bonaparte to Saint-Hélène. He did not understand that the inevitable result of his system was to exhaust his resources and to alienate the affections of the majority of the French people. 2327

Coudroy, Félix (1801-74)

Félix Coudroy was the son of a doctor from Mugron and was a boyhood friend and eventually a neighbour of Bastiat's in Mugron. He studied law in Toulouse and Paris but a long illness prevented him from practicing. Coudroy and Bastiat were both members of a local discussion group in Mugron, "The Academy," where they pursued their intellectual interests for over 20 years. He published a number of articles in local newspapers such as La Chalosse and Le Mémorial bordelais, as well as an article on the Anti-Corn Law League and Bastiat's book Cobden and the League in the Journal des économistes in November 1845.

Culmann, Jacques (1787-1849)

Jacques Culmann (1787-1849) was a retired colonel in the French artillery. He was a Deputy representing Bas-Rhin (1848-1849).

Cuvier, George (1769-1832)

George Cuvier (1769-1832) was a French naturalist who specialised in the areas of comparative anatomy and paleontology. His study of fossils led him to oppose pre-Darwinian theories of evolution (e.g. Lamarck's). In the field of geology he was an exponent of the theory of catastrophism in which period cataclysmic events led to the radical transformation of the earth's landscape and the mass extinction of animal species. Georges Cuvier, Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe, et sur les changements qu'elles ont produits dans le règne animal (1821).

Daire, Eugene (1798-1847).

Eugène Daire (1798-1847) was of all things a tax collector who revived interest in the heritage of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century free-market economics. He came to Paris in 1839, met Guillaumin, discovered the works of Jean-Baptiste Say, and began editing the fifteen-volume work, Collection des principaux économistes (1840-48). It included works on eighteenth-century finance, the physiocrats, Turgot, Adam Smith, Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say, and Ricardo. He was a founding member of the Political Economy Society. Molinari edited the last two volumes in the Collection on miscellaneous economic writings from the 18th century.

Darblay brothers, Auguste-Rodolphe Darblay (1784-1873) and Aymé-Stanislas Darblay (1794-1878)

The Darblay brothers created a very successful family business based upon flour milling and paper making. The younger brother Stanislas was a Deputy between 1852 and 1870, a leading share holding and director of the Bank of France, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce of Paris. His older brother Rudolphe was a Deputy between 1840 and 1849 and thus served under the July Monarchy and then the Second Republic where he voted with the right where he would have been an opponent of Bastiat's. He was interested in improving agriculture and introduced the cultivation of oil-producing plants into the Brie region and set up one of the first factories for the extraction of seed oil. He also played an active role in the Agricultural Society.

David, Irénée François (1791-1862)

Irénée François David (1791-1862) was a lawyer in Auch, Gascony. During the Restoration he was mayor of Auch and opposed the July Monarchy. He was elected in 1848 and 1849 to represent the Department of Gers, allying himself with the moderate Republicans. He was a member of the Finance Committee of the National Assembly of which Bastiat was Vice-President.

Degousée , François Rose Joseph (1795-1862)

François Rose Joseph Degousée (1795-1862) was a military officer, civil engineer, and politician. He was active in the liberal Carbonari group which opposed the policies of the restored Bourbon monarchy during the 1820s, served with General Lafayette during the "Three Glorious Days" in 1830 when Charles X was overthrown by Louis Philippe, and helped found the Central Democratic Committee which organised political banquets to oppose Louis Philippe's regime in 1847. Degousée was elected to the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 and voted with the moderate republican group, and was a member of the Public Works Committee of the Chamber. He was not reelected in May 1849 and retired from politics.

Demesmay, Philippe Auguste (1805-1853)

Philippe Auguste Demesmay (1805-1853) was a Deputy who represented the département of Doubs, in the Franche-Comté region in eastern France between 1842 and 1853. He took up the cause of fighting the tax on salt and became known as the "Deputy for Salt". He published several pamphlets on the uses of salt and the effects of the salt tax and spoke in favour of its reduction in the Chamber. See, Du Sel dans ses emplois agricoles (1848) and Guide du cultivateur dans l'emploi du sel pour les divers usages agricoles; précédé d'un Historique de l'impôt (1850).

Descartes, René (1596-1650)

René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French philosopher and mathematician who lived much of his life in the Dutch republic. His best known works are Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and Discourse on Method (1637) which laid the foundation for modern rationalism.

Destutt de Tracy, Antoine (1754-1836).

Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) was one of the leading intellectuals of the 1790s and early 1800s and a member of the ideologues (a philosophical movement not unlike the objectivists, who professed that the origin of ideas was material–not spiritual). In his writings on Montesquieu, Tracy defended the institutions of the American Republic, and in his writings on political economy he defended laissez-faire. During the French Revolution he joined the third estate and renounced his aristocratic title. During the Terror he was arrested and nearly executed. Tracy continued agitating for liberal reforms as a senator during Napoleon's regime. One of his most influential works was the four-volume Éléments d'idéologie (first published in 1801-15) (Tracy coined the term "ideology"). He also wrote Commentaire sur l'ésprit des lois (1819), which Thomas Jefferson translated and brought to the United States. In 1822 he published his Traité d'économie politique (1823), much admired by Jefferson and Bastiat.

Destutt de Tracy , Victor (1781-1864)

Victor Destutt de Tracy (1781-1864) was the son of the Ideologue and economist Antoine Destutt de Tracy, an army officer, and then politician. He was a supporter of General Lafayette during the Restoration and elected a Deputy representing Moulins from 1826-1848. During the July Monarchy he was active in liberal causes such as the abolition of the death penalty and the abolition of slaver, being one of the founders and then President of the French Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1834. During the Second Republic he voted with the conservative right and was appointed Minister of the Navy and Colonies in Odilon Barrot's government. He was elected again in May 1849 but resigned from politics after Louis Napoléon's coup d'état of December 1851.

Deucalion

Deucalion was the son of Prometheus both of whom, along with Deucalion's wife Pyrrha, were able to survive a flood sent by Zeus to destroy mankind by building a chest which was able to float on the water and thus save them.

Diogenes (413-327 BC)

Diogenes (413-327 BC) was a Greek philosopher who renounced wealth and lived by begging from others and sleeping in a barrel in the market place. His purpose was to live simply and virtuously by giving up the conventional desires for power, wealth, prestige, and fame. His philosophy went under the name of Cynicism and had an important influence on the development of Stoicism.

Dombasle, Joseph Alexandre Mathieu de. (1777-1843)

Joseph Alexandre Mathieu deDombasle (1777-1843) was a pioneer agronomist who helped establish the French sugar-beet industry. He began a model farm in 1822, a factory to produce agricultural instruments (1823), and a school of agriculture (1824) . He wrote a number of works on taxation and the need for protectionism: Des impôts dans leurs rapports avec la production agricole (1829); De l'impôt sur le sucre indigène: Nouvelles considerations (1837); and "Études sur le commerce international dans ses rapports avec la richesse des peuples," in Oeuvres diverses. Économie politique. Instruction publique, Haras et remonte (1843). Inspired by British agriculture, he introduced the practice of triennial crop rotation (cereals, forage, vegetables), which Bastiat tried in vain to introduce in his own sharecropping farms.

Droz, Joseph (1773-1850).

Joseph Droz (1773-1850) was a moral philosopher, economist, literary critic, and father-in-law of Michel Chevalier. Some of his notable publications include Lois relatives au progrès de l'industrie (1801); Économie politique, ou, Principes de la science des richesses (1829); and Applications de la morale à la politique (1825). He was appointed to the Académie française in 1813 and to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1833.

Duchêne, Georges (1824-1876)

Not a lot is known about Georges Duchêne (1824-1876) other than that he was a friend of Proudhon, wrote a book with him on speculation, edited the posthumous collected works of Proudhon, and was later a member of the Paris Commune in 1870. See, Actualités. Livrets et prud'hommes (1847); with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Manuel du spéculateur à la bourse (1857).

Dunoyer, Barthélémy-Pierre-Joseph-Charles (1786-1862)

Dunoyer was a journalist, an economist, a politician, the author of numerous works on politics, political economy, and history, a founding member and President of the Société d'économie politique (1842) and its President between 1845 and 1862, and a key figure in the French classical liberal movement of the first half of the nineteenth century, along with Jean-Baptiste Say, Benjamin Constant, Charles Comte, Augustin Thierry, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Dunoyer studied law in Paris where he met Charles Comte (around 1807) with whom he was to edit the liberal periodical Le Censeur (1814-15) and its successor Le Censeur européen (1817-19). He became politically active during the last years of Napoleon's Empire and the early years of the Bourbon Restoration when he strenuously opposed authoritarian rule (whether Napoleonic or monarchical), especially censorship of the press, militarism, the slave trade, and the extensive restrictions placed on trade and industry. Dunoyer (and Comte) combined the political liberalism of Constant (constitutional limits on the power of the state, representative government); the economic liberalism of Say (laissez-faire, free trade); and the sociological approach to history of Thierry, Constant, and Say (class analysis and a theory of historical evolution of society through stages culminating in the laissez-faire market society of "industry") into a new and rich form of classical liberal thought which had a profound impact in France, especially on people like Bastiat.

He is best known for a series of works on industry and labour published between 1825 and 1845, L'Industrie et la morale considérées dans leurs rapports avec la liberté (1825), Nouveau traité d'économie sociale (1830), and his three-volume magnum opus De la liberté du travail (1845). After the revolution of 1830 Dunoyer was appointed a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1832, worked as a government official (he was prefect of L'Allier and La Somme), and eventually became a member of the Council of State in 1837. He resigned his government posts in protest against the coup d'état of Louis-Napoléon in 1851. He died while writing a critique of the authoritarian Second Empire; the work was completed and published by his son Anatole in 1864.

Dupin, Charles (1784-1873)

Charles Dupin (1784-1873) was a naval engineer who attended the École Polytechnique and later became Minister of the Navy. He taught mathematics at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers and also ran courses for ordinary working people. He is one of the founders of mathematical economics and of the statistical office of France. In 1828 he was elected deputy for Tarn, was made a Peer in 1830, and served in the Constituent and then the National Assemblies during the Second Republic. Charles Dupin, Le petit producteur français (1827).

Dupuit, Jules (1804-1866)

Jules Dupuit (1804-1866). Dupuit was an engineer and a political economist who wrote on the economics of public works. He trained at the École polytéchnique (1822) and rose to become the chief engineer of the Corps des ponts et chaussées (the Bridges and Roads Department) where he worked on the design and building of roads and the sewers of Paris. He wrote a number of books on the cost of maintaining roads, the role of tolls in financing roads, the railway monopoly, and the measurement of public utility. Dupuit also wrote several articles in the DEP , vol. 2 on "Péages" (Tolls), pp. 339-44; "Routes et chemins" (Highways and Roads), pp. 555-60; "Voies de communication" (Communication Routes), pp. 846-54. See also, Jules Dupuit, De l'influence des péages sur l'utilité des voies de communication (1849). In the article on "Péages" he comes close to developing the idea of the "Laffer Curve" where he argues that lowering the cost of the toll on a public highway would lead to an eventual increase in the overall revenue raised as a result of the increased traffic which resulted.

Durrieu, Simon (1775-1862).

Antoine Simon Durrieu (1775-1862) was a Landais native who rose to the rank of Major General during the campaign in Russia in 1812. He joined the local regiment in Bayonne in 1793 and served with distinction in most of the major battles of the Napoleonic Wars. He continued to serve in the military during the Restoration, was ennobled in 1830, awarded the Legion of Honour in 1834, made a Peer in 1845, and was elected to represent the Department of Les Landes between 1834-1845 and again 1851-52.

Dussard, Hippolyte (1791-1879).

Hippolyte Dussard (1798-1879) was a journalist, a businessman involved in the Paris-Rouen railway, and an economist. He was the editor of Le Journal des économistes from 1843 to 1845 , a contributor to the Revue encyclopédique, and a co-editor with Eugène Daire of the Works of Turgot (1844) for the Collection des Principaux Économistes published by Guillaumin. During the Second Republic he was appointed the prefect of la Seine-Inférieure and was elected to the Council of State.

Enfantin, Barthélemy Prosper (1796-1864).

Wine merchant, banker, and manager of the Paris-Lyon railroad. In the early 1840s he was appointed to the Scientific Commission of Algeria, which looked into matters concerning the French colonization of that country. His earliest political activity was to join the nationalist and liberal secret society, the Carbonari (the "charcoal burners"), which included the LaFayette and Lord Byron among its members. Enfantin came into contact with the ideas of Saint-Simon and, with Olinde Rodrigues et Bazard, founded the utopian socialist school of the Saint-Simonians, which advocated a form of socialism in which industrial society would be managed by an elite of scientists and engineers. By the time of the July revolution their "doctrine" had become a veritable "religion," with Enfantin as one of its "high priests." (See also the entry for Saint-Simon.)

Epimenides of Knossos

Epimenides of Knossos (Crete) was a 7th or 6th century BC Greek philosopher and poet who fell asleep in a cave while tending his father's sheep. He awoke 57 years later with the power of prophecy.

Ewart, William (1798–1869)

Falloux, Alfred-Frédéric (1811-1886)

CW4: Alfred-Frédéric Falloux (1811-1886) was a liberal Catholic and was Minister of Education from 20 December 1848. He was elected Deputy of Maine-et-Loire in 1846. He was arrested after Louis Napoléon's coup d'état of 2 December 1851 and retired from politics.

Faurie, François (1785-1854).

François Faurie (1785-1854) was a merchant from Bayonne who was elected Deputy representing Basses-Pyrénées from 1831 to 1837.

Faucher, Léon (1803-1854)

Léon Faucher (1803-54) was a journalist, writer, and deputy for the Marne (1847-1851). He became an journalist during the July Monarchy writing for Le Constitutionnel , and Le Courrier français, for which Molinari and Bastiat wrote, and was one of the editors of the Revue des deux mondes and the Journal des économistes . Faucher was appointed to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1849 and was active in L'Association pour la liberté des échanges. During the Second Republic he was Minister of Public Works (1848) and Minister of the Interior (1848-49). Under President Louis Napoléon he was de facto head of the government (April-October 1851) but resigned rather than serve under him after his coup d'état of 2 December 1851. He wrote on prison reform, gold and silver currency, socialism, and taxation. One of his better-known works was Études sur l'Angleterre (1856).

Fénelon (François de Salignac de la Motte-Fénelon) (1651-1715).

Fénelon (1651-1715) was the Archbishop of Cambrai and tutor to the young duke of Burgundy, the grandson of Louis XIV. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which had granted toleration for Protestants in France), Fénelon was one of several high-ranking clergy sent to convert recalcitrant Protestants to Catholicism. He wrote a collection called Dialogue des morts et fables (1700) , and Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), which was a thinly veiled satire of the reign of Louis XIV and a critique of the notion of the divine right of kings.

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762-1814)

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) was a German idealist philosopher who was much influenced by Immanuel Kant. He wrote on atheism (for which he was dismissed from one teaching position), the impact of the French Revolution, natural law, the autarkic nation state, and German nationalism.

Flandin, Louis (1804-1877)

Louis Flandin (1804-1877) was made Advocate general to the Court of Appeals of Paris by the Provisional Government following the February Revolution. He was elected Deputy representing Seine-et-Oise from 1848 to 1851 and served on the Agriculture Committee. He vote with the conservative right and supported general Cavaignac for President of the Republic in the December 1848 election. He was a Councillor of State between 1852 and 1874. He published a report to the Assembly on the establishment of state supported land credit: Rapport fait, au nom du Comité de l'agriculture, sur les propositions des citoyens Turck et Prudhomme, relatives à l'établissement du crédit foncier, par le citoyen Flandin (1849).

Fontenay, Roger-Anne-Paul-Gabriel de (1809–91)

Fontenay was a member of the Société d'économie politique and an ally of Bastiat in their debates in the Société on the nature of rent. Fontenay worked with Prosper Paillottet in publishing the expanded second edition of Bastiat's Economic Harmonies in 1851 and in editing the Œeuvres complètes of Bastiat, and was a regular contributor to Le Journal des économistes right up to his death. In a work published soon after Bastiat's death in 1850, Du revenu foncier (1854), Fontenay describes himself and Bastiat as forming a distinct "French school of political economy," tracing its roots back to Jean-Baptiste Say and including Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Charles Comte, and especially Charles Dunoyer, in contrast with the "English school" of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. The main difference between the two schools was on the issue of rent from land and the inevitability of the Malthusian population trap. Concerning the former, Bastiat and Fontenay denied that there was any special "gift of nature" that made up the rents from land, instead arguing that all returns on investments (whether capital, interest, or rent) were the result of services provided by producers to consumers. Concerning the latter, they believed that the malthusians had seriously underestimated the ability of the free market to produce food and for people to rationally plan their lives. In Bastiat's chapter XVI "On Population" in the expanded second edition of Economic Harmonies Fontenay including a lengthy note in which he attempted to "complete the exposition of (Bastiat's) doctrine." 2328 In the second edition of Bastiat's Oeuvres complètes in 1854 Fontenay wrote a lengthy essay on the life and work of Bastiat which appeared as the introduction. 2329

Fonteyraud, Henri Alcide (1822–49)

Fonteyraud was born in Mauritius and became professor of history, geography, and political economy at the École supérieure de commerce de Paris. He was a member of the Société d'économie politique and one of the founders of the Association pour la liberté des échanges. Because of his knowledge of English he went to England in 1845 to study at first hand the progress of the Anti–Corn Law League. During the revolution of 1848, he campaigned against socialist ideas with his activity in the Club de la liberté du travail and, along with Bastiat, Coquelin, and Molinari, by writing and handing out in the streets of Paris copies of the broadside pamphlet Jacques Bonhomme. Sadly, he died very young during the cholera epidemic of August 1849. He wrote articles in La Revue britannique and Le Journal des économistes, edited and annotated the works of Ricardo in the multivolume Collection des principaux économistes, and wrote an "Introduction to Political Economy" for a popular encyclopedia in early 1849 . His collected works were published posthumously as Mélanges d'économie politique, edited by J. Garnier (1853).

Fould, Achille (1800-1867).

Achille Fould (1800–1867) was a banker and a deputy who represented the département of Les Hautes-Pyrénées in 1842 and La Seine in 1849. He was close to Louis-Napoléon, lending him money before he became emperor, and then served as Minister of Finance, first during the Second Republic and then under the Second Empire (1849–67). Fould was an important part of the imperial household, serving as an adviser to the emperor, especially on economic matters. He was an ardent free trader but was close to the Saint–Simonians on matters of banking.

Fourier, François-Marie Charles (1772-1837)

Fourier was a socialist and founder of the phalansterian school ("Fourierism"). Fourierism advocated a utopian, communistic system for the reorganization of society. The population was to be grouped in "phalansteries"of about 1,800 persons, who would live together as one family and hold property and work in common. Fourier's main works include Le Nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire (1829) and La Fausse industrie morcelée répugnante et mensongère et l'antidote, l'industrie naturelle, combinée, attrayante, véridique donnant quadruple produit (1835-36). Many of Fourier's ideas appeared in his journal, Phalanstère, ou la réforme industrielle , which ran from 1832 to 1834.

Fournier, Louis-Jacques-Marie (1786-1862)

Louis-Jacques-Marie Fournier (1786-1862) was a businessman with interests in the Antilles and Marseilles, a member of the Chamber of Commerce, and in May 1849 was elected Deputy representing Bouches-du-Rhône. He voted with the conservative right.

Fox, William Johnson (1786-1864).

William Johnson Fox (1786-1864) was a Member of Parliament, a journalist and renowned orator, and one of the founders of the Westminster Review . He became one of the most popular speakers of the Anti-Corn Law League and delivered courses to the workers on Sunday evenings. He served in Parliament from 1847 to 1863. The friend and editor of Bastiat's Collected Works , Prosper Paillottet translated one of his works on religion into French: Des Idées religieuses (1877).

Galabert, Louis (1773-1841)

Louis Galabert (1773-1841) was a colonel in the Army and then a Deputy who represented the Département of Gers between 1831-34 (Gers adjoined Les Landes). From the mid-1820s onwards he was best known for his advocacy of the "Pyrénées canal" which would connect Toulouse with the Atlantic coast via the Adour river. His efforts to raise private funding for the project collapsed when a similar scheme was adopted by the French government to build the Garonne Canal in 1838. Louis Galabert, Canal des Pyrénées, joignant l'Océan à la Méditerranée (1831).

Garnier, Joseph (1813-81).

Joseph Garnier (1813-81) was a professor, journalist, politician, and activist for free trade and peace. He came to Paris in 1830 and came under the influence of Adolphe Blanqui, who introduced him to economics and eventually became his father-in-law. Garnier was a pupil, professor, and then director of the École supérieure de commerce de Paris, before being appointed the first professor of political economy at the École des ponts et chaussées in 1846. Garnier played a central role in the burgeoning free-market school of thought in the 1840s in Paris and was one of the leading exponents of Malthusian population theory. He was one of the founders of L'Association pour la liberté des échanges and the chief editor of its journal, Libre échange ; he was active in the Congrès de la paix; he was one of the founders along with Guillaumin of the Journal des économistes , of which he became chief editor in 1846; he was one of the founders of the Société d'économie politique in 1842 and was its perpetual secretary; and he was one of the founders (with Bastiat) of the 1848 liberal broadsheet Jacques Bonhomme . Garnier was acknowledged for his considerable achievements by being nominated to join the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1873 and to become a senator in 1876. He was author of numerous books and articles, among which include Introduction à l'étude de l'Économie politique (1843); Traité d'économie politique (1845), Richard Cobden, les ligueurs et la ligue (1846); and Congrès des amis de la paix universelle réunis à Paris en 1849 (1850). He edited Malthus's Essai sur le principe de population (1845); Du principe de population (1857).

Gasparin, Adrien Étienne Pierre de. (1783-1862)

Adrien Étienne Pierre de Gasparin (1783-1862) was a soldier, an agronomist, and a politician. He was active in presenting papers to Agricultural Societies all over France. During the July Monarchy he was elected Deputy representing La Vaucluse in 1830, was made a Peer of France in 1834 and was Minister of the Interior 1836-37 and 1839. He retired from politics after the Revolution of 1848. He wrote a number of works educating farmers about good agricultural practices: Des Petites propriétés considérées dans leurs rapports avec le sort des ouvriers (1820); Guide des Propriétaires de biens ruraux affermés (1828); Mémoire sur le métayage , (1832); Guide des Propriétaires de biens soumis au métayage (1847).

Girardin, Saint-Marc (1801-73).

Saint-Marc Girardin (1801-1873) was a literary critic, professor of History at the Sorbonne (succeeding François Guizot), and a Deputy during the July Monarchy supporting the government. He served as a Councillor of State and was supposed to become Minister of Education in 1848 before the Revolution intervened. He was a critic for the Journal des Débats , the Revue des Deux-Mondes , and was elected to the French Academy in 1844.

Girardin, Émile de (1806-1881)

Émile de Girardin (1806-1881) was the first successful press baron of the mid-19th century in France. He began in 1836 with the popular mass circulation La Presse which had sales of over 20,000 by 1845. One reason for his success was the introduction of serial novels which proved very popular with readers. Girardin gradually turned against the July Monarchy on the grounds it was corrupt. In the 1848 Revolution he played a significant role in advising Louis Philippe to abdicate in February and then opposing General Cavaignac's repressive actions during the June Days riots. For the latter Girardin was imprisoned and his journal shut down. During the election campaign for the presidency he supported Louis Napoleon but ran afoul of him soon afterwards, selling his shares in La Presse in 1856. In his book, Le socialisme et l'impôt (1849) he argued that the state should be regarded as one big insurance company which insured the security and the property of the taxpayers and charged them a "premium" based on their wealth.

Gracchi Brothers. Tiberius Gracchus (162-133 B.C.) and Gaius Gracchus (154-121 B.C.).

The brothers Tiberius Gracchus (162-133 B.C.) and Gaius Gracchus (154-121 B.C.) were Roman patricians who both held the office of tribune at different times. They attempted to introduce significant land reform in ancient Rome. In response to an economic crisis they proposed to limit the size of the land holdings of aristocratic owners and distribute parcels of land to the poor. They failed to achieve this and were assassinated. They have been seen by socialists as precursors of the modern socialist movement. Babeuf even adopted the pseudonym "Gracchus" in hommage to them.

Guillaumin, Gilbert-Urbain (1801-1864)

Guillaumin was a mid-19th century French classical liberal publisher who founded a publishing dynasty which lasted from 1835 to around 1910 and became the focal point for the classical liberal movement in France. Guillaumin was orphaned at the age of five and was brought up by his uncle. He came to Paris in 1819 and worked in a bookstore before eventually founding his own publishing firm in 1835. He became active in liberal politics during the 1830 revolution and made contact with the economists Adolphe Blanqui and Joseph Garnier. He became a publisher in 1835 in order to popularize and promote classical liberal economic ideas, and the firm of Guillaumin eventually became the major publishing house for liberal ideas in the mid nineteenth century. Guillaumin helped found the Journal des économistes in 1841 with Horace Say (Jean-Baptiste's son) and Joseph Garnier. The following year he helped found the Société d'économie politique which became the main organization which brought like-minded classical liberals together for discussion and debate.

His firm published scores of books on economic issues, making its catalog a virtual who's who of the liberal movement in France. Their 1866 catalog listed 166 separate book titles, not counting journals and other periodicals. For example, he published the works of Jean-Baptiste Say, Charles Dunoyer, Frédéric Bastiat, Gustave de Molinari and many others, including translations of works by Hugo Grotius, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Charles Darwin. By the mid-1840s Guillaumin's home and business had become the focal point of the classical liberal lobby in Paris which debated and published material opposed to a number of causes which they believed threatened liberty in France: statism, protectionism, socialism, militarism, and colonialism. After his death in 1864 the firm's activities were continued by his oldest daughter Félicité, and after her death it was handed over to his youngest daughter Pauline. The firm of Guillaumin continued in one form or another from 1835 to 1910 when it was merged with the publisher Félix Alcan. The business was located in the Rue Richelieu, no. 14, in a very central part of Paris not far from the River Seine, the Tuileries Gardens, the Louvre Museum, the Palais Royal, the Comédie Française theatre, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Guillaumin also published the following key journals, collections, and encyclopedias: Journal des économistes (1842–1940), L'Annuaire de l'économie politique (1844–99) , the multivolume Collection des principaux économistes (1840–48) , Bibliothèques des sciences morales et politiques (1857–), Dictionnaire d'économie politique (1852) (coedited with Charles Coquelin), and Dictionnaire universel théorique et practique du commerce et de la navigation (1859-61).

Guillaumin was a member of the group which Gérard Minart has called the "Four Musketeers" of French political economy. This term was coined by Gérard Minart in his biography of Molinari 2330 to describe the four young men from the provinces who went to Paris between 1819 and 1845 (Gilbert-Urbain Guillaumin in 1819 aged 18, Charles Coquelin also in 1819 aged 17, Gustave de Molinari in 1840 aged 21, and Frédéric Bastiat in 1845 aged 44) and transformed the French school of political economy with their organizational skills and their new ideas.

Guizot, François Pierre Guillaume (1787-1874).

François Pierre Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874) was a successful academic and politician whose career spanned many decades. He was born to a Protestant family in Nîmes. His father was guillotined during the Terror. As a law student in Paris, the young Guizot was a vocal opponent of the Napoleonic empire. After the restoration of the monarchy Guizot was part of the "doctrinaires," a group of conservative and moderate liberals. He was professor of history at the Sorbonne from 1812 to 1830, publishing Essai sur l'histoire de France (1824), Histoire de la revolution d'Angleterre (1826-27), Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe (1828), and Histoire de la civilisation en France (1829-32). In 1829 he was elected deputy and became very active in French politics after the 1830 revolution, supporting constitutional monarchy and a limited franchise. He served as minister of the interior, minister of education (1832-37), ambassador to England in 1840, and then foreign minister and prime minister, becoming in practice the leader of the government from 1840 to 1848. He promoted peace abroad and liberal conservatism at home, but his regime, weakened by corruption and economic difficulties, collapsed with the monarchy in 1848. He retired to Normandy to spend the rest of his days writing history and his memoirs such as Histoire parlementaire de France (1863-64) and Histoire des origines du gouvernement représentif en Europe (1851).

Harcourt, François-Eugène, duc d' (1786-1865).

François-Eugène-Gabriel, duc d'Harcourt (1786-1865) served briefly in the military in the early years of the Restoration before resigning in order to support the Greek struggle for independence from Turkey. He was elected to represent Seine-et-Marne in 1827 and supported the liberal opposition to Charles X. Under the July Monarchy he was appointed ambassador to Madrid, was active in the reform of secondary education, and was a supporter of free trade. Because of his speeches on behalf of free trade in the Chamber and because of his social and political contacts he was appointed president of the Free Trade Association when it was founded in 1846. During the Second Republic he was appointed ambassador to Rome by Lamartine.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a German idealist philosopher whose work on dialectics had a big impact on the thinking of Karl Marx. He believed that the State was the culmination of social and political evolution.

Hill, Rowland (1795-1879)

Rowland Hill (1795-1879) pioneered reform of the British postal system in 1839 and 1842 with the introduction of a cheap, pre-paid system of postage - the "penny post." Hill was active in the South Australian colonization project serving as secretary of the South Australian Colonization Commission between 1833 and 1839, working with the economist Robert Torrens who was its chairman. In 1837 he published an influential pamphlet on postal reform, Post Office Reform; its Importance and Practicability (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1837) which led to the passage of the "Uniform Four Penny Post" reform act in 1839 and then a further reform which cut the cost of a prepaid stamp to one penny in 1842. Another strong advocate of postal reform was Richard Cobden who believed that the existing system was another example of protection given by the government to the elite which imposed an excessive cost on business. Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League were able to take advantage of the cheap mail rates by distributing large numbers of their pamphlets and other propaganda before they were successful in 1846 in having the Corn laws repealed by the British Parliament. Later Hill became a member of the Political Economy Club and a member of an exclusive discussion group which called itself "Friend in Council" and which included Edwin Chadwick and John Stuart Mill among its members.

Hilliers, Achille, comte Baraguey d' (1795-1878)

Achille, comte Baraguey d'Hilliers (1795-1878) was a distinguished soldier, having served in the conquest of Algeria in 1830. In 1834 he was appointed deputy governor of the Saint-Cyr military academy and full governor in 1836. After serving again in Africa he was promoted to full general and then Inspector General of the Infantry in 1847. During the Second Republic he was elected Deputy representing the Department of Doubs in eastern France. He voted with the conservative right.

Hottinguer, Jean-Conrad (1764-1841)

The Swiss-born Jean-Conrad Hottinguer (1764-1841) founded a family banking dynasty which specialised in funding government debt under the ancien régime. He founded the Banque Hottinguer in Paris in 1786 and was one of the founders of the privately owned Banque de France in 1800. His son Jean-Henri Hottinguer (1803-66) took over the family bank in 1833, and invested cleverly in a number of innovative industries such as savings banks for people on average incomes (Caisse d'Epargne et de Prévoyance de Paris), and utilities such as electricity and water supply (la Compagnie générale des eaux in 1853).

Hovyn de Tranchère , Jules-Auguste (1816-1898)

Jules-Auguste Hovyn de Tranchère (1816-1898) was a politician and businessman from Bordeaux. He was elected in April 1848 to the Constituent Assembly, voted with the conservatives, and was Secretary of the Agriculture Committee. He opposed Louis Napoléon's coup d'état of November 1851 and later resigned from the Chamber. He was mayor of Guîtres in the Gironde 1848-1852 and a Member of the General Council 1848-51.

Humann, Georges (1780-1842).

Georges Humann was born in Strasbourg, became a businessman with interests in insurance, sugar refining, steam navigation on the Rhine, coal mining, and other ventures. He was an elected Deputy representing the Lower Rhine during the July Monarchy, supporting the moderate liberal faction., and was appointed Minister of Finance several times between 1832-36 and again between 1840-42. He opposed the increase in expenditure caused by Thiers' public works program to build a military wall around Paris beginning in 1841 (the "fortifications of Paris.") In order to balance the budget he attempted to "rationalise" in a rather heavy-handed way the collection of direct taxes (especially the tax on doors and windows) and to impose new taxes on wine and alcohol which affected the wine growing region where Bastiat lived. These measures resulted in a number of popular revolts over the summer of 1841 in places like Toulouse and Bordeaux.

Hus, Jan (1370-1415).

The Moravian Church, or Moravian Brotherhood, is a protestant group founded by Jan Hus in the late 14th century. He was tried by the Council of Constance, declared to be a heretic, and was burnt at the stake. In 1457 some of his followers founded the Bohemian Brethren. During the 18th century the Moravians established settlements where communal living and simplicity of lifestyle based upon limited personal property was practiced. They were also one of the first protestant groups to engage in extensive missionary activities throughout the world.

Huskisson, William (1770-1830)

William Huskisson (1770-1830) was a British Member of Parliament who served from 1796 to 1830. He rose to the post of secretary to the treasury 1804-09 and later president of the Board of Trade (1823-27). Huskisson introduced a number of liberal reforms, including the reformation of the Navigation Act, a reduction in duties on manufactured goods, and the repeal some quarantine duties. As president of the Board of Trade he played an important role in persuading British merchants to support a policy of free trade.

Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826).

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was the author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), the American ambassador to France, then Vice President, and then President of the United States (1801-1809). He traveled extensively in France and was familiar with many of the French economists of the time, whose work he had translated and published in America (such as Destutt de Tracy).

Jobard, Marcellin (1792-1861)

Marcellin Jobard (1792-1861) was a Belgian lithographer, photographer, and inventor. From 1841 to 1861 he was the director of the Royal Belgian Museum of Industry in Brussels. He was a prolific inventor (with 75 patents) and took up the cause of defending the absolute property rights of inventors. He wrote dozens of pamphlets expressing his views in a very idiosyncratic manner. Molinari was sympathetic to his position in favour of absolute property rights in literary and artistic material but objected to his critique of economic liberty in the broader sense. Jobard wrote Nouvelle économie sociale, ou monautopole industriel, artistique, commercial et littéraire (1844) and Organon de la propriété intellectuelle (1851). Joseph Garnier described his ideas as a mixture of "a bit of plausibility, a bit of nonsense, a bit of science, and a bit of ignorance." There is a lengthy, critical, though respectful discussion of Jobard's ideas by Charles Coquelin, "Brevets d'invention' (Patents) in JDE , vol. 1, pp. 209-23.

Juvigny, Jean-Baptiste (1772-1836)

Jean-Baptiste Juvigny (1772-1836) wrote many books on life insurance, money, banking, public finance, and accounting during the 1820s and 1830s. See, Application de l'arithmétique au commerce et à la banque (1824); Moyen de suppléer par l'aritmétique à l'emploi de l'algèbre dans les questions d'intérêts composés, d'annuités, d'amortissemens (1825); De la Nécessité de maintenir l'amortissement (1832).

Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German philosopher who taught for many years at the University of Koenigsberg. He made pivotal contributions to the study of ethics and epistemology and was a leading figure in the German Enlightenment.

Kerdrel, Vincent Paul Marie Casimir Audren de (1815-1899)

Vincent Paul Marie Casimir Audren de Kerdrel (1815-1899) was a descendant of an ancient Norman noble family. He was a politician who was elected Deputy representing Ille-et-Vilaine (1848-51) but withdrew from politics after the Louis Napoléon's coup d'état.He later returned to politics in the Third Republic where he served as a Deputy and then Senator for life.

Lakanal, Joseph (1762-1845)

Joseph Lakanal (1762-1845) was a professor of rhetoric and philosophy at the college of the Fathers of Christian Doctrine before he became involved in the French Revolution. He was elected Deputy representing l'Ariège in the National Convention (1792-95) and then represented Finistère in the Council Of Five Hundred (1795-97). In the Convention he sat on the Committee for Public Education, voted with the socialist "Mountain" faction, and voted in favour of a law granting authors intellectual property rights to their works. For the Council of Five Hundred he helped form the prestigious intellectual body known as the Institute of France. During Napoléon's Empire he taught ancient languages at the Central High School on the rue Saint-Antoine, was an economic advisor to Napoleon, and edited a collection of works by Rousseau. During the Restoration he moved to Louisiana where he became President of the University of New Orleans and then a planter in Alabama. Upon his return to France following the coming to power of Louis Philippe in 1830 he was appointed to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences.

Lamarque, General Jean-Maximien (1770-1832).

General Jean-Maximien Lamarque (1770-1832). Lamarque was a general under Napoleon and was exiled in 1815 for three years. After his return he wrote a book defending the idea that France could still have a standing army if it were run on more economical lines. In the Landes, he showed a great interest in improving agriculture and the means of communication and transport. He was elected deputy of the Landes in 1828 and 1830 and was an influential speaker in the Chamber, and was President of Conseil Général of Les landes in 1831. He showed some literary talent by translating the 10,000-odd verses of James Macpherson's "Ossian poems" into French. He died of cholera in Paris in 1832 and was given a national funeral in June, during which an uprising by Republicans was brutally put down by the commander of the National Guard, Georges Mouton, comte de Lobau. This event is described by Victor Hugo in the climax to his novel Les Misérables (1862). His writings include, Nécessité d'une armée permanente (1820); De l'Esprit militaire en France (1826); Souvenirs, mémoires et lettres du général Maximien Lamarque (1835); and Ossian, Poëmes et fragments traduits par le Cte Maximien Lamarque (1859).

Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis de (1790–1869) (to do)

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) was a poet and statesman and as an immensely popular romantic poet, he used his talent to promote liberal ideas. Lamartine was elected Deputy representing Nord (1833-37), Saône et Loire (1837-Feb. 1848), Bouches-du-Rhône (April 1848-May 1849), and Saône et Loire (July 1849- Dec. 1851). During the campaign for free trade organised by the French Free Trade Association between 1846 and 1847 Lamartine often spoke at their large public meetings and was a big draw card. He was a member of the Provisional Government in February 1848 (offering Bastiat a position in the government, which he declined) and Minister of Foreign Affairs in June 1848. After he lost the presidential elections of December 1848 against Louis-Napoléon, he gradually retired from political life and went back to writing.

Lamennais, Félicité, abbé de (1782-1854).

Félicité de Lamennais (1782-1854) was a Catholic p riest, deputy, and journalist. He is best known for his four-volume Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion (Essay on Indifference in Religious Matters) (1821-23). Lamennais was a strong critic of the Gallican Church and an ardent defender of the pope. By 1832, he resented the lack of encouragement from the Vatican in the face of violent attacks from Gallicanism and progressively distanced himself from Rome. He became active in journalism and, like Bastiat, was elected to the Legislative Assembly of 1848.

Laplace, Pierre Simon, marquis de (1749–1827).

Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (1749-1827) was an astronomer and mathematician who was appointed Minister of the Interior under Napoleon in 1799 and a Peer in the Restoration. He contributed to the restructuring of the French high school system under Napoléon by ensuring that mathematics was a crucial part of the curriculum. His major work was the multi-volume Mécanique céleste (Celestial Mechanics) (1799-1805). He used his new mathematical models to explain the perturbations in the orbits of Saturn, Jupiter, and the moon and discovered that they were oscillations which repeated themselves over time within precise limits.

Law, John (1671-1729)

John Law (1671-1729) was a Scottish financier who worked for Louis XV to set up the first central bank funded by fiat paper money, believing that paper money was preferable to gold. In 1705 he published Money and Trade Considered With a Proposal For Supplying the Nation With Money in which he justified the creation of paper money to increase the circulation of money. Influenced by this system, the French state in 1715 established a bank which exchanged gold and silver for paper money. He also consolidated all the government chartered companies in French-controlled Louisiana into one monopoly company called the Mississippi Company which issued shares. An over issue of these shares caused a speculative bubble which burst catastrophically in 1720.

Lebeuf, Louis-Martin (1792-1854).

Lebeuf was a successful banker, a member of the Chamber of Commerce of Paris, and the Vice-President of the Association for the Defence of National Labour, and a key figure in opposing the ideas of free trade in France. He was first elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1837 and served on several senior committees which dealt with financial and industrial matters. He was elected to the Legislative Assembly in May 1849 where he voted with the conservatives. He also supported the coup d'état of Louis Napoléon in December 1851 and played an important role in the Second Empire until 1854.

Leclerc, Louis (1799-1854)

Louis Leclerc (1799-1854) was a founding member of the Free Trade Association, a member of the Société d'Économie Politique, an editor of the Journal des Économistes and the Journal d'agriculture , the director of a independent private school called "l'école néopédique" between 1836 and 1848, secretary of the Chamber of Commerce of Paris, and a member of the jury at the London Trade Exhibition in 1851. Leclerc had a special interest in agricultural economics (wine and silk production) on which he wrote many articles for the Journal des Économistes . His article in 1848 on Victor Cousin's idea of "the self" and property rights had a big impact on Molinari.

Lefranc, Bernard Edme Victor Etienne (1809-83).

Bernard Edme Victor Etienne Lefranc (1809-1883) was a fellow Landais citizen like Bastiat and was elected Deputy in the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 (topping the list of 7 candidates, Bastiat came second) and to the Legislative Assembly in May 1849. He studied law and became a judge at Mont-de-Marsan near where Bastiat lived in Les Landes, so they would have known each other. Lefranc was one of the leading figures in the liberal movement in Les Landes which opposed King Louis Philippe during the July Monarchy. His opposition to Louis Napoléon forced him to withdraw from politics and take up his legal practice again. During the Third Republic he returned to politics, becoming Minister of the Agriculture and Commerce (1871-72), Minister of the Interior (1872), and then Senator for life (1881-83).

Leroux, Pierre (1798-1871).

Pierre Leroux (1798-1871) was a prominent member of the Saint-Simonian group of socialists and founder of Le Globe , a review of the Saint-Simonists. He was a journalist during the 1840s and was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848 and to the Legislative Assembly in 1849. Leroux based his social theory on groups of three (triads), borrowing from the Pythagorean philosophy of numbers. In "Doctrine de l'humanité" he has an elaborate social structure based upon various "trinities" such as "property, family, city", "liberty, fraternity, equality", and "citizens, associates, and functionaries." See, Pierre Leroux, De l'égalité (Boussac, Imprimerie de Pierre Leroux, 1848) p. 15 ff.. His most developed exposition of his ideas can be found in De l'Humanité (1840) and also in De la ploutocratie, ou, Du gouvernement des riches (1848).

Livy (Titus Livius) (59 BC - 17 AD)

Titus Livius (Livy) (59 BC - 17 AD) is best known for his massive (but largely lost) History of Rome from its founding up to the reign of Augustus. Although written during Augustus's reign Livy takes a pro-republican viewpoint. He had family and political connections with the powerful Julio-Claudian family.

Louis IX (1214-1270)

King Louis IX (1214-1270) was cannonised by the Catholic Church in 1297 and was therefore also known as "Saint Louis." During his reign Louis expanded the size of France by seizing Normandy, Maine, Provence, Languedoc. He also participated in the Seventh and Eighth Crusades, eventually catching dysentery on the last one and dying. As a staunch Catholic, Louis attempted to ban blasphemy, prostitution, gambling, and most interesting for our purposes here, the charging of interest on loans.

Lopez-Dubec, Salomon (1808-1860)

Salomon Lopez-Dubec (1808-1860) was a lawyer and businessman from Bordeaux. He was a judge on the Commerce Tribunal 1841-47, deputy mayor of Bordeaux, and a Deputy representing the Gironde 1849-1851.

Lurcy, Gabriel Pierre Lafond de. (1802-1876)

Gabriel Pierre Lafond de Lurcy (1802-1876) was a French navigator and explorer who spent much time in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific during the 1820s and 1830s, on occasion working with Simon Bolivar and José de San Martín in their struggle for independence from Spain. After returning to Paris he set up companies to encourage trade with South America and the Pacific. He was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1845.

Madison, James (1751-1836)

James Madison (1751-1836) was a member of the Virginia legislature in 1776-80 and 1784-86, of the Continental Congress in 1780-83, and of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, where he earned the title "father of the U. S. Constitution." He was a member of the U. S. House of Representatives from 1789 to 1797, where he was a sponsor of the Bill of Rights and an opponent of Hamilton's financial measures. He was the author of the Virginia Resolutions of 1798 in opposition to the U. S. alien and sedition laws. He was U. S. secretary of state in 1801-09, President of the U. S. in 1809-17, and rector of the University of Virginia, 1826-36.

Malebranche, Nicolas de (1638-1715)

Nicolas de Malebranche (1638-1715) was a rationalist philosopher and theologian who attempted to reconcile the views of Saint Augustine and Descartes. He is especially known for his ideas concerning the active role of God in all human affairs and the capacity of man to "see" God. See, De la recherche de la vérité (1674-1675).

Mallet, Charles (1815-1902)

Charles Mallet (1815-1902) was a member of a successful Parisian banking family which consisted of his father Jules Mallet and his brother with whom he formed the Banque Mallet frères. He later joined forces with another banking family, the Pereire brothers (Jacob Pereire (1800-1875) and Isaac Pereire (1806-1880), to form Crédit mobilier in 1852.

Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766-1858).

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1858) is best known for his writings on population, in which he asserted that population growth (increasing at a geometric rate) would outstrip the growth in food production (growing at a slower arithmetic rate). Malthus studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, before becoming a professor of political economy at the East India Company College (Haileybury). His ideas were very influential among nineteenth-century political economists. His principal works were An Essay on the Principle of Population (1st ed., 1798; 2nd revised and enlarged ed. 1803; 6th ed., 1826); Principles of Political Economy (1820); Definitions in Political Economy (1827). Bastiat became an important critic of Malthusian orthodoxy rejecting his pessimism about the capacity of the free market and free trade to expand the production of food.

Manuel, Jacques André (1791-1857)

Jacques André Manuel (1791-1857) was an army officer under Napoleon and then a banker during the Restoration of the monarchy. He was elected a Deputy representing la Nièvre (1839-1848) and opposed the July Monarchy. During the Second Republic he was a deputy representing la Nièvre (1848-1851) and voted with the conservative right and was a supporter of Louis Napoléon. Under the Second Empire he was a Senator 1852-1857.

Marrast, Armand (1801-1852)

Armand Marrast (1801-1852) was the President of the National Assembly between 19 July 1848 and 26 May 1849. He was a moderate republican and Secretary of the Commission which drew up the new Constitution which was approved in November 1848. He served as president until the Constituent Assembly was replaced by the Legislative Assembly in June 1849. Under the July Monarchy he was a journalist for the National and an active opponent of the regime. He was one of the organisers of the banned political banquet of 22 February 1848 which was the trigger for the overthrow of the July Monarchy. In March 1848 Marrast became mayor of Paris.

Mauguin, François (1785-1852)

Mauguin was a successful lawyer during the Restoration who made a name for himself handling political trials. He was elected a Deputy in 1827 and joined the liberal opposition to Polignac and then supported the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy in July 1830. During the July Monarchy he took an interest in colonial affairs and opposed the abolition of slavery. When elected to the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 he continued his interest in colonial matters and voted with the conservative on matters such as opposing the abolition of the death penalty and supporting the military expedition to Rome. He would have voted with Bastiat in favour of abolishing the tax on alcohol and against the "right to a job" clause in the new constitution.

Midas (8th century BC)

King Midas was ruler of the Greek kingdom of region Phrygia (in modern day Turkey) sometime in the 8th century BC. According to legend he had the power to turn into gold anything he touched. Aristotle wrote that this Golden Touch backfired and Midas died of starvation because all the food he picked up to put in his mouth turned into inedible gold. Another legend says that he eventually got bored and disillusioned with this power and retired to the country where he fell in love with Pan's flute music. In a competition between Pan and Apollo to see who played the best music King Midas chose Pan's flute over Apollo's lyre. Apollo was so incensed at the tin ears of Midas he turned them into the ears of a donkey.

Mignet, François-Auguste-Alexis (1796-1884).

Mignet was a liberal lawyer, journalist, and historian who was an editor of the Courrier français and the National (edited by Mignet, Thiers, Carrel, and Passy). The Courrier français began publishing Bastiat's articles April 1846, including several which would later become part of his Economic Sophisms . In 1830 he joined other journalists in protesting the restrictive press laws. After the Revolution of 1830 he secured a job as the director of the Archives of the Foreign Ministry, from which post he was able to publish many historical works. He lost his job as a result of the 1848 revolution and took early retirement to continue writing works of history. He became a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1832 when it was refounded by King Louis Philippe, becoming its permanent secretary in 1837. His main works were Histoire de la Révolution française (1824), Histoire de Marie Stuart (1852), and Notices et Mémoires historiques (1843), which contains many eulogies of important political economists and historians.

Mill, James (1773-1836)

James Mill (1773-1836) was an early 19th century Philosophic Radical, journalist, and editor from Scotland. He was very influenced by Jeremy Bentham's ideas about utilitarianism which he applied to the study of British India, political economy, and electoral reform. Mill wrote on the British corn laws, free trade, comparative advantage, the history of India, and electoral reform. His son, John Stuart, after a rigorous home education, became one of the leading English classical liberals in the 19th century.

Mimerel de Roubaix, Pierre (1786-1872).

Auguste Pierre Mimerel de Roubaix (1786-1872) was a textile manufacturer and politician from Roubaix who was a vigorous advocate of protectionism. Mimerel was the president of the Conseil général des manufacturiers which advised the government on economic policy. In 1824 he headed a textile group in Lille known as the "Comité des fileurs de Lille"; in 1842 he founded a pro-tariff "Comité de l'industrie" (Committee of Industry) in his home town Roubaix to lobby the government for protection and subsidies against a proposed Franco-Belgian trade treaty which was under discussion; and in October 1846 he was instrumental in organizing the regional committees to form a national body based in Paris known as the "Association pour la défense du travail national" (Association for the Defense of National Employment) in order to better counter the growing interest in Bastiat's Free Trade Association which had also been established in that year. Mimerel and Antoine Odier (1766-1853) sat on the Association's Central Committee, serving as vice-president and president respectively, which was commonly referred to as the "Mimerel Committee" or the "Odier Committee." The Mimerel Committee was a focus for Bastiat's criticisms of protectionism and it was the Mimerel Committee that called for the firing of free-market professors of political economy and for the abolition of their chairs. The committee later moderated its demands and called for the equal teaching of protectionist and free-trade views. Mimerel was elected deputy in 1849; appointed by Napoléon III to the Advisory Council and to the General Council of Agriculture, Industry, and Trade; and named senator in 1852.

Mirabeau, Gabriel Honoré Riqueti, comte de (1749-91).

Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau (1715-1789) was a soldier as well as a diplomat, journalist, and author who spent time in prison or in exile. His economic thinking was influenced by the Physiocrats. During the French Revolution he became a noted orator and was elected to the estates-general in 1789 representing Aix and Marseilles. In his political views he was an advocate of constitutional monarchy along the lines of Great Britain. He is noted for his Essai sur le despotisme (1776) and several works on banking and foreign exchange.

"Molière," Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622- 1673)

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (or Molière) (1622- 1673) was a playwright in the late 17th century during the classical period of French drama. Bastiat quotes Molière many times in the Sophisms as he finds his comedy of manners very useful in pointing out political and economic confusions. One of the cleverest examples of this is Bastiat's parody of Molière's parody of doctors in Le malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid, or the Hypocondriac) (1673) which appears in ES2 IX. "Theft by Subsidy". Molière wrote the following plays which have been quoted by Bastiat: L'École des maris (The School for Husbands) (1661); Tartuffe, or the Imposter (1664); The Misanthrope (1666); L'Avare (The Miser) (1668); Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman) (1670); Les Femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies) (1672); Le malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid, or the Hypocondriac) (1673).

Molinari, Gustave de (1819-1912)

Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912) was born in Belgium but spent most of his working life in Paris, becoming the leading representative of the laissez-faire school of classical liberalism in France in the second half of the nineteenth century. His liberalism was based upon the theory of natural rights (especially the right to property and individual liberty), and he advocated complete laissez-faire in economic policy and the ultra-minimal state in politics. During the 1840s he joined the Société d'économie politique and was active in the Association pour la liberté des échanges. During the 1848 revolution he vigorously opposed the rise of socialism and published shortly thereafter two rigorous defenses of individual liberty in which he pushed to its ultimate limits his opposition to all state intervention in the economy, including the state's monopoly of security. During the 1850s he contributed a number of significant articles on free trade, peace, colonization, and slavery to the Dictionnaire de l'économie politique (1852-53) before going into exile in his native Belgium to escape the authoritarian regime of Napoleon III. He became a professor of political economy at the Musée royale de l'industrie belge and published a significant treatise on political economy ( Cours d'économie politique , 1855) and a number of articles opposing state education. In the 1860s Molinari returned to Paris to work on the Journal des débats , becoming editor from 1871 to 1876. Toward the end of his long life Molinari was appointed editor of the leading journal of political economy in France, the Journal des économistes (1881-1909). Some of Molinari's more important works include Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare (1849), L'Évolution économique du dix-neuvième siècle: Théorie du progrès (1880), and L'Évolution politique et la révolution (1884).

Monclar, Eugène de (1800-1882)

Eugène de Monclar (1800-1882) was Bastiat's first cousin and a priest. Like Bastiat, he worked in the family commercial firm, which he left to study law. Shortly after becoming a lawyer, he studied for the priesthood. Once ordained, he became a member of the Company of Priests of Saint-Suplice, devoted to the education of ecclesiastics, and taught in different cities. He traveled to Italy and while in Naples learned that his cousin Bastiat was in Rome and was able to be with him in his final hours.

Mondor and Tabarin (Antoine and Philippe Girard)

The brothers Antoine and Philippe Girard were actors, jugglers, and sellers of patent medicines in Paris in the early 17th century. Antoine Girard played the part of "Tabarin" and Philippe Girard played the part of his master "Mondor." They wore brightly coloured costumes and entertained passers-by with witty, philosophical, seductive, and sometimes scatalogical songs and dialogue in order to persuade them to buy their merchandise. Their routine was much admired and copied and become known as "les tabarinades" (or "coq-à-l'âne" [cock and bull stories]). A collection of their stories were published in 2 volumes in 1858: Oeuvres complètes de Tabarin.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533–92).

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–92) was o ne of the best-known and most-admired writers of the Renaissance. His Essays (first published in 1580) were a thoughtful meditation on human nature in the form of personal anecdotes infused with deep philosophical reflections. Montaigne was brought up with Latin as his first language and went on to study law, serving in the Bordeaux parliament from 1557 to 1570 and then as mayor of Bordeaux from 1581 to 1585. He was a close friend of Étienne de la Boétie, who wrote Discours de la servitude volontaire (1576), in which he explores why the majority too often willingly capitulates to the demands of a tiny ruling minority. In the religious controversies of his day Montaigne was a moderate Catholic. Bastiat was particularly attracted to refuting one of Montaigne's essays on "Le profit de l'un est dommage de l'autre" (One Man's gain is another Man's loss) which Bastiat regarded as the classic example of an economic sophism which spawned so many other sophisms.

Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de (1689-1755).

Montesquieu was o ne of the most influential legal theorists and political philosophers of the eighteenth century. He trained as a lawyer and practiced in Bordeaux before going to Paris, where he attended an important enlightened salon. His ideas about the separation of powers and checks on the power of the executive had a profound impact on the architects of the American constitution. His most influential works are L'Esprit des lois (1748), Les Lettres persanes (1721), and Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1732).

Morin, Étienne-François-Théodore (1814-1890).

Étienne François Théodore Morin (1814-1890) was a t extile manufacturer and the elected representative for the département of La Drôme in the Constituent Assembly in 1848 and then in the Legislative Assembly in 1849. He published many works on jurisprudence and political economy, being best known for his Essai sur l'organisation du travail et l'avenir des classes laborieuses (1845). Morin was a member of the Political Economy Society and a staunch defender of freedom of association for both manufacturers as well as for the workers in order to promote their interests, provided that no one used any coercion or violence.

Nadaud, Martin (1815-1898)

Martin Nadaud (1815-1898) was a mason by trade, a socialist politician, and an author. During the February Revolution he was active in a socialist political club where he demonstrated considerable public speaking skills. He was a delegate to the Luxembourg Commission run by Louis Blanc where the National Workshops operated. He was not elected to the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 but was successful in May 1849 when he was elected a Deputy representing la Creuse. He voted with the extreme socialists known as the "Mountain." Because of his opposition to Louis Napoléon he was exiled in January 1852, eventually ending up in England when he taught French and mixed in socialist circles. When the Third Republic was formed he returned to France and served as a Deputy 187-1889 voting with the socialist republican group.

Necker, Jacques (1732-1804)

Necker was a Swiss-born banker and politician who served as the minister of finance under Louis XVI just before the French Revolution broke out. His private financial activities were intertwined with the French state when he served as a director of the monopolistic French East India Company and made loans to the French state. In 1775 he wrote a critique of Turgot's free-trade policies in L'Essai sur la législation et le commerce des grain . In 1776 he was appointed director general of French finances until his dismissal in 1781. He served again in this position from 1788 to 1790. As minister of finance he tried to reform the French taxation system by broadening its base and removing some of its worst inequalities. Needless to say, in this he largely failed. His daughter, Germaine Necker (de Staël), became a famous novelist and historian of the French Revolution.

Nemours, Duke de

The Duke de Nemours was a title given by King Louis XIV to his brother, Philippe de France (1640-1701), duc d'Orléans, who passed it down to his son, and so on. The most recent holder of the title in Bastiat's time was Louis Philippe d'Orléans who gave it up when he assumed the French throne in 1830, passing it on to his youngest son Louis who retained the title until his death in 1896.

Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1726)

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1726) was an English physicist and mathematician who made important contributions to gravitation, classical mechanics, optics, and calculus.

Noailles, Paul, duc de (1802-1884).

Noailles was a member of an old aristocratic family and succeeded his great uncle in the Chamber of Peers (1824-1848) where he demonstrated considerable oratorical skills. He was an historian who wrote several books on the French peerage and was a friend and confidant of Chateaubriand, whom he succeeded to the French Academy in 1849 under controversial circumstances (beating the novelist Honoré de Balzac). His business interests included senior positions in two railway companies, the Compagnie des chemins de fer des Ardennes and the Compagnie des chemins de fer de l'Ouest.

Odier, Antoine (1766-1853).

Antoine Odier (1766-1853) was a Swiss-born banker and textile manufacturer who came to Paris to play a part in the French Revolution, siding with the liberal Girondin group. He was a deputy (1827-37) and eventually a peer of France (1837). Odier was also president of the Chamber of Commerce of Paris and a leading member of the protectionist "Association pour la défense du travail national" (Association for the Defense of National Employment). He was a member of its "Central comité" (Central Committee) so the organization was sometimes referred to as "the Odier Committee" for short [also known as the Mimerel Committee].

Owen, Robert (1771-1858).

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a successful English manufacturer, philanthropist, and socialist theoretician. He made his fortune with a cotton mill in New Lanark in Manchester. The reforms he introduced in his factory became the model for creating "villages of cooperation," which culminated in the establishment of a model community, New Harmony, in Indiana, in 1824. Owen spent his own money in order to improve the fate of his workers and based his model community on the ideas of mutual cooperation, community of property, consumer cooperatives, and trade unions. His best-known works are A New View of Society (1813) and Report to the County of Lanark of a Plan for Relieving Public Distress (1821).

Pagès, Louis-Antoine (Garnier-Pagès) (1803-1878)

Louis-Antoine Pagès (Garnier-Pagès) (1803-1878) was a stock broker, republican politician, Mayor of Paris (February-March, 1848), and then Minister of Finance in the Provisional Government (March-May, 1848). His older brother Étienne Garnier-Pagès was a prominent lawyer during the July Monarchy who was elected Deputy representing Isère and voted with the republican opposition to King Louis Philippe until his death in 1842. Louis-Antoine continued his brother's work getting elected Deputy representing l'Eure in 1842 and voted with the republican left in the Chamber. In 1847 he was active in the political banquets movement which led to the overthrow of Louis Philippe in February 1848. As Minister of Finance he introduced the unpopular "45 centime" tax in order to balance the budget which was collapsing in the aftermath of the Revolution. After the election of Louis Napoléon as President in December 1848 his strong republican views meant he would no longer serve as Minister in the new régime. After Louis Napoléon's coup d'état in December 1851 he withdrew from politics and returned to private life until Napoléon III's fall in 1870. Louis-Antoine's father was a professor of rhetoric at the College of Sorèze which Bastiat had attended and so may well have known Louis-Antoine and his brother. He wrote a History of the Revolution of 1848 (1862-70) in 10 vols.

Pagnerre, Laurent (1805-1854)

Pagnerre was an ardent republican and democrat who worked as a publisher of radical books, an activist for free speech, and then as an elected member of the National Assembly following the revolution of February 1848. He was appointed the Director of a new bank, the Comptoir d'escompte de Paris, established in March 1848 by the Minister of Finance Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès to help solve the liquidity crisis caused by the revolution and the collapse of the banking system of the July Monarchy. He was elected at the same time as Bastiat in April 1848 and was probably well known to him since Bastiat served as Vice President of the Assembly's Finance Committee. Pagnerre also published one of Bastiat's popular pamphlets on "Capital" in the Almanac Républicain in 1849 .

Paillottet, Prosper (1804-78).

Prosper Paillottet was a successful businessman who was drawn to Bastiat's free trade association, L'Association pour la liberté des échanges, in the mid 1840s, joining it in its earliest days. Paillottet eventually became a firm friend of and companion to the ailing Bastiat, caring for him when he was very ill, in Italy. Paillottet was with Bastiat during his last few days and formed the Société des amis de Bastiat (Society of the Friends of Bastiat) only five days after his death in order to preserve his papers and drafts and to edit his collected works.

Paillottet made his living in the jewellry business, and his modest wealth enabled him to devote most of his energies to philanthropic causes. He was vice president of the Labor Tribunal (Conseil des Prud'hommes) and a member of the Commission for the Encouragement of Workers' Associations (Conseil de l'encouragement aux associations ouvrières) and of the recently formed Société d'économie politique (meetings of which Bastiat also attended). Paillottet was very active in the Association pour la liberté des échanges, even learning English in order to help Bastiat translate material on or by the Anti-Corn Law League. Much of this material probably ended up in Bastiat's book on the English Anti-Corn Law League, Cobden et la Ligue, ou l'agitation anglaise pour la liberté du commerce (1845), which consisted mostly of translations of Anti-Corn Law League pamphlets, newspaper articles, and speeches.

As Bastiat's health worsened, during 1850, Paillottet became his virtual secretary, editor, and research assistant, assisting with the editing and publishing of Bastiat's pamphlet Property and Plunder and the second edition of Economic Harmonies , which was published by the Société des amis de Bastiat.

On his death bed Bastiat authorized Paillottet to collect his manuscripts and papers and to publish them in an edition of his complete works, the first edition of which appeared in 1854-55, a second in 1862-64, and the various volumes of the series remained in print for much of the nineteenth century. When reading Paillottet's edition, which forms the basis of our translation, one is guided by the frequent and often intriguing footnotes and comments inserted by Bastiat's close friend throughout the volumes.

Paillottet wrote several articles and book reviews of his own that appeared in Le Journal des économistes, two articles of which were published separately in book form, Des Conseils de prud'hommes (???) , and De l'Encouragement aux associations ouvrières ( date ??? ) , an essay on intellectual property rights, De la Propriété intellectuelle ( ??? ) , and a translation of a religious work by William Johnson Fox, who had been a popular orator in the Manchester League and a unitarian minister, Des Idées religieuses (1877)

Parieu, Félix Esquirou de (1815-1893)

Félix Esquirou de Parieu (1815-1893), was a lawyer and Deputy who represented the Department of Cantal during the Second Republic (1848-1851). Between October 1849 and January 1851 he was the Minister of Eduction and during the Second Empire was Vice-President of the Council of State. He was Secretary of the Finance Committee of which Bastiat was Vice-President and delivered several reports to the Chamber on taxes on gifts and inheritance, income tax, the laws governing apprentices.

Pascal, Blaise (1623-62).

Blaise Pascal (1623-62) was a French mathematician and philosopher whose best-known work, Pensées (Thoughts), appeared posthumously. His Provincial Letters (1656) was a controversial work which attacked the casuistry of the Jesuit school.

Peel, Sir Robert (1788-1850).

Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850) was the leader of the Tories, served as Home Secretary under the Duke of Wellington (1822–27) and was prime minister twice (1834–35, 1841–46). He is best known for creating the Metropolitan Police Force in London, the Factory Act of 1844 which regulated the working hours of women and children in the factories, and the repeal of the Corn Laws in May 1846. The latter inspired Bastiat to lobby for similar economic reforms in France. When he was Prime Minister in 1841 the economy was in severe recession and to solve his budgetary problems he introduced an income tax in 1842 (not used since the Napoleonic Wars) which also permitted him to cut the level of tariffs on many goods such as sugar. He was sympathetic to the agitation to repeal the protectionist Corn Laws which he successfully manoeuvred through Parliament on 26 May 1846. The Tory Party, however, was irreparably divided, and on that same evening, he lost a vote of confidence on his Irish policy and had to resign.

Pereire, Émile (1800-1875)

Émile Pereire (1800-1875) and Isaac Pereire (Isaac Rodrigue) (1806-1880) were businessmen who founded the bank Crédit Mobilier in 1852. They came from Bordeaux and had business interests in banking, land holdings, railways, maritime trade, and insurance. Émile was sent to Paris to learn the banking business in 1822 and mixed in Saint-Simonian circles where he imbibed ideas about the need for a ruling elite of bankers and industrialists. The brothers had many business interests in Les Landes, such as the construction of the Bordeaux to Bayonne railway; the reforesting of Les Landes, and the Château Palmer vineyard.

Planat, Charles (1801-1858)

Charles Planat (1801-1858) was a businessman in Cognac and its mayor 1838-1848. During the revolution he was elected a Deputy representing Charente. He sat on the right in the Chamber, possibly with the moderate Republicans, and probably got to know Bastiat then.

Plutarch (46 CE - 125 CE)

Plutarch (46 CE - 125 CE) was active in politics and traveled to Rome several times as a public servant. In Rome, he was a popular philosopher and public figure and traveled in circles that included the emperors Trajan and Hadrian. Plutarch is known to have written 227 works of various sorts. Of these, Parallel Lives , a collection of biographies about Greek and Roman figures, and Morals , a collection of works on ethical, political, religious, and literary topics.

Price, Richard (1723-1791)

Richard Price (1723-1791) was a Welsh-born liberal Presbyterian minister and moral philosopher. Price is perhaps best known for his vigorous defence of both the American and the French Revolutions. His sermon on "The Love of One's Country" in 1791 stimulated Burke into writing his famous critique of the French Revolution.

Proclus Lycaeus (412-485 AD)

Proclus Lycaeus (412-485 AD) was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher whose commentaries on Plato were very influential.

Proteus

In Greek mythology Proteus was a sea god who, like the sea, could change his shape and form at will. He supposedly knew the past and the future but normally refused to reveal what he knew. Only when harassed and exhausted by his interrogator would he reveal what he knew.

Proudhon, Pierre Joseph (1809-65).

Proudhon was a political theorist, considered to be the father of anarchism. Proudhon spent many years as a printer and published many pamphlets on social and economic issues, often running afoul of the censors. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848 representing La Seine. In 1848 he became editor in chief of a number of periodicals, such as Le Peuple and La Voix du peuple , which got him into trouble again with the censors and for which he spent three years in prison, between 1849 and 1852. He is best known for Qu'est-ce que la propriété? Ou recherches sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement (1841) (Proudhon answered his own question with the statement that "property is theft"), Système des contradictions économiques (1846), and several articles published in the Journal des économistes . His controversy with Bastiat on the subject appears in in the form of letters between Bastiat and Proudhon, "Gratuité du crédit" ( OC, vol. 5, p. 94) .

Quesnay, François (1694-1774)

François Quesnay (1694-1774) was both a surgeon and an economist. He taught at the Paris School of Surgery and was the personal doctor to Madame Pompadour. As an economist he is best known as one of the founders of the physiocratic school, writing the articles on "Fermiers"and "Grains" for Diderot's Encylopédie (1756) and also Le Tableau économique (1762) and Physiocratie, ou constitution naturelle de gouvernement le plus avantageux au genre humain (1768). Molinari used a quote from Quesnay's essay "Le droit naturel" (Natural Law) (1765) on the title page of Les Soirées to sums up the book's main thesis: "It is necessary to refrain from attributing to the physical laws which have been instituted in order to produce good, the evils which are the just and inevitable punishment for the violation of this very order of laws." His major works were republished by the Guillaumin firm as vol. 2 of the Collection des principaux économistes (1840-48) edited by Eugène Daire.

Quijano, Garcia.

Garcia Quijano was a member of the Société d'économie politique and an occasional contributor to Le Journal des économistes.

Quintus Curtius Rufus (1st century AD)

Quintus Curtius Rufus was a Roman historian who lived during the 1st century A.D. His only surviving work is a lengthy history of Alexander the Great.

Quixote, Don

Don Quixote is the central character in Miguel de Cervantes's novel El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (The history of the valorous and wittie Knight-Errant Don-Quixote of the Mancha) (1605, 1615). The story concerns a Spanish nobleman named Alonso Quixano who has read so many books about chivalry that he has gone mad and has decided to travel the world as a "knight" to revive interest in the idea of chivalry and to right wrongs and bring justice to the world. He is accompanied by a simple farmer named Sancho Panza who becomes his "squire." The author Cervantes (1547-1616) served in the Spanish navy before being captured by Barbary pirates in 1575 and held captive for five years. He then worked purchasing supplies for the Spanish Armada as it was preparing to invade England in 1588, and then as a tax collector. In spite of (or perhaps because of) this chequered career his novel is full of interesting insights into Spanish society and economic relationships, often from a very liberal perspective. Bastiat cites Don Quixote several times in his writing, once seeing himself as a kind of "Don Quixote" in his fruitless battles against protectionism and other forms of government intervention in the economy, but most notably in his story "Barataria" (c. 1848) in which Sancho Panza is made dictator of an island and Don Quixote advises him on what policies to implement as a socialist of the day would do.

Raudot, Claude-Marie (1801-1879)

Claude-Marie Raudot (1801-1879) was a lawyer and magistrate who became a Deputy representing l'Yonne during the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy during the 1820s and then again from 1848-1851 and 1871-1876. He voted with the conservative right. In 1874 he was the President of the Budget Committee in the Third Republic.

Renouard, Augustin-Charles (1794-1878).

Augustin-Charles Renouard (1794-1878) was a lawyer with an interest in elementary school education. He was secretary general of the minister of justice, an elected deputy representing the Somme 1831-1842, and was made a Peer of France 1846-48. He also was vice-president of the Société d'économie politique and wrote or edited a number of works on economic and educational matters. He was particularly interested in the issue of trade marks and intellectual property taking issue with Molinari's view that an author's right to intellectual property was absolute and perpetual. Some of his works include a selection of Benjamin Franklin's writings, Mélanges de morale, d'économie et de politique (1824), Traité des brevets d'invention, de perfectionnement et d'importation (1825), and "L'éducation doit-elle être libre?"in Revue encyclopédique (1828); Traité des droits d'auteurs (1838).

Ricardo, David (1772-1823).

Ricardo was born in London of Dutch-Jewish parents. He joined his father's stockbroking business and made a considerable fortune on the London Stock Exchange. In 1799 he read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) and developed an interest in economic theory. He met James Mill and the Philosophic Radicals in 1807, was elected to Parliament in 1819, and was active politically in trying to widen the franchise and to abolish the restrictive corn laws. He wrote a number of works, including The High Price of Bullion (1810), on the bullion controversy, and his treatise On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). Liberty Fund has reprinted his collected works, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo (2004). Ricardo's On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) was translated into French by F.S. Constancio with notes by J.B. Say in (1818). It was reprinted with additions from the 3rd London edition of 1821 by Alcide Fonteyraud in a collection of his Complete Works published by Guillaumin in 1847 as volume XIII of the series Collections des principal économistes in which Molinari was also involved as an editor. Most of the Economists were orthodox Ricardians on the question of rent, with the exception of Bastiat.

Richard, Henry (1812-1888)

Henry Richard (1812-1888) was an English Congregational Minister and Member of Parliament who was active in the Peace Society, of which he was the secretary for 40 years (1840-1888), and the abolition of slavery.

Richardet, Victor. (1810-??)

Victor Richardet (1810-??) was a radical republican who voted with the left. He had been a road surveyor before being elected Deputy representing Salins-les-Bains (in the Jura) between 1849 and 1851. He went into exile after the coup d'état of Louis Napoléon of 2 December 1851.

Rodet, Denis Louis (1781-1852)

Denis Louis Rodet (1781-1852) was born in Bourg-en-Bresse and became a merchant in Bordeaux, Lyons, and London specialising in colonial goods and maritime insurance. He was a member of the Paris Chamber of Commerce, the Political Economy Society, and served on a Government Commission from 1848 examining tariff reform. He also wrote a Report for the Paris Chamber of Commerce, Acte de Navigation de l'Angleterre. Rapport fait à la Chambre de commerce de Paris (1850) on the impact and history of Britain's new Navigation Act which was enacted 29 June 1849. Joseph Garnier said he had one of the largest private libraries of books on political economy in Paris which he made available for the use of the economists, and that he was luke-warm on the question of complete free trade.

Rondot , Cyr-François-Natalis (1821-1900)

Cyr-François-Natalis Rondot (1821-1900) was an industrialist in the textile business, a member of the Chamber of Commerce of Lyon, an economist, and art historian. As a young man he went to China, South East Asia, and Africa in 1843 to negotiate treaties of commerce on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce of Rheims. In 1848 he co-authored with Léon Say a major inquiry into manufacturing in the city of Paris for the Paris Chamber of Commerce, Enquête sur l'industrie de Paris et du département de la Seine . He retired from industry in 1869 to write on art and art history.

Rossi, Pellegrino (1787-1848).

Pellegrino Rossi (1787-1848) was born in Italy and lived in Geneva, Paris, and Rome. He was a professor of law and political economy, wrote poetry, and ended his days as a diplomat for the French government. He moved to Switzerland after the defeat of Napoleon, where he met Germaine de Staël and the duc de Broglie. He founded with Sismondi and Etienne Dumont the Annales de législation et des jurisprudences . After the death of Jean-Baptiste Say, Rossi was appointed professor of political economy at the Collège de France in 1833, and in 1836 he became a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. In 1847 he was appointed ambassador of France to the Vatican but was assassinated in 1848 in Rome. He wrote Cours d'économie politique (1840), Traité de droit pénal (1841), and numerous articles in the Journal des économistes .

Rothschild Banking Family

Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744 -1812) founded a banking dynasty in the 1760s from his home town of Frankfurt. He sent his fifth son James Mayer de Rothschild (1792–1868) to set up a branch of the family business in Paris in 1812 which became heavily invested in mining, railways, and wine making (the Château Lafite). The Rothschilds also lent money to King Louis Philippe in the early 1830s to help him stabilise the finances of his regime, which led to the appointed of James as a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour.

Rothschild, James Mayer (1792-1868)

James Mayer de Rothschild, baron Jacob, (1792-1868) founded the Parisian branch of the famous banking family's business. He sided with the restored Bourbon monarchy in 1815, lending Louis XVIII 5 million franc in order to reestablish his regime after the fall of Napoleon and remain close to whatever government followed. He also was instrumental in funding the new states of Belgium, Greece, and Italy. In 1843 he obtained a very profitable railway concession, that of the Compagnie des chemins de fer du Nord. By 1847 he had become the wealthiest private individual with a fortune of 40 million francs (after the King of France).

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-78).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) was a Swiss philosopher and novelist who was an important figure in the Enlightenment. In his novels and discourses he claimed that civilization had weakened the natural liberty of mankind and that a truly free society would be the expression of the "general will" of all members of that society. He influenced later thinkers on both ends of the political spectrum. Bastiat often criticized Rousseau as he thought he was the inspiration behind much of the interventionist legislation introduction by the revolutionaries during the 1790s (especially Robespierre) and then later in the 1849 Revolution. He is best known for his book Du Contrat Social (The Social Contract) (1761); he was also the author of, among other works, the Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on Inequality) (1755), the autobiographical Les Confessions (1783), and the novels Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Emile , ou l'education (1762).

Russell, John, first Earl Russell (1792-1878).

English Whig and liberal member of Parliament. He was prime minister twice, in 1846-52 and in 1865-66. As leader of the opposition in 1845, Russell favored the repeal of the Corn Laws and advised the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, to take a similar stance.

Saint-Beuve, Pierre (1819-1855)

Pierre Saint-Beuve (1819-1855) was a lawyer, land owner, and factory owner in l'Oise. He was elected Deputy representing l'Oise in 1848-1851 and voted with the conservative right.

Saint-Chamans, Auguste, vicomte de (1777-1860)

Saint-Chamans was a deputy (1824-27) and a Councillor of State. He advocated protectionism and a mercantilist theory of the balance of trade. He is author of Du système d'impôt fondé sur les principes de l'économie politique (1820). Other works include Nouvel essai sur la richesse des nations (1821) and Traité d'économie publique, suivi d'un aperçu sur les finances de France (1852).

Saint-Gaudens, Jean (1799-1875)

Jean Saint-Gaudens (1799-1875) was a lawyer who opposed the July Monarchy. He was elected Deputy representing Basses-Pyrénées (1848-1849).

Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de (1760-1825).

Saint-Simon came from a distinguished aristocratic family and initially planned a career in the military, and he served under George Washington during the American Revolution. During the 1780s he gave up his military career to become a writer and social reformer. When the French Revolution broke out, in 1789, he renounced his noble status and took the simple name of Henri Saint-Simon. Between 1817 and 1822 Saint-Simon wrote a number of books that laid the foundation for his theory of "industry" (see the glossary entry on "Industry"), by which he meant that the old regime of war, privilege, and monopoly would gradually be replaced by peace and a new elite of creators, producers, and industrialists. His disciples, such as Auguste Comte and Olinde Rodrigues, carried on his work with the Saint-Simonian school of thought. Saint-Simon's views developed in parallel to the more-liberal ideas about "industry" espoused by Augustin Thierry, Charles Comte, and Charles Dunoyer during the same period (see entries for Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer). What distinguished the two schools of thought was that Saint-Simonians advocated rule by a technocratic elite and state-supported "industry," which verged on being a form of socialism, while the liberal school around Comte and Dunoyer advocated a completely free market without any state intervention whatsoever, which would thus allow the entrepreneurial and "industrial"classes to rise to a predominant position without coercion. Saint-Simon's best-known works include Réorganisation de la société européenne (1814), L'Industrie (1817), L'Organisateur (1819); and Du système industriel (1821).

Salvandy, Narcisse Achille de (1795-1856)

Count Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy (1795-1856) was liberal minded politician and writer in July Monarchy. He served as Minister of Eduction in1837 and supported Guizot in his reform of the French education system. He later was appointed vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies and then served as Ambassador to Spain and Turin.

Sarrans, Jean-Bernard (1796-1874)

Jean-Bernard Sarrans (1796-1874) was a journalist, historian, and politician. He was elected Deputy representing l'Aude in April 1848, was a member of the Chamber's Foreign Affairs Committee, and voted with the left.

Saulnier, Sébastien-Louis (1790-1835)

Sébastien-Louis Saulnier (1790-1835) was a member of the Council of State in 1811 and served as an administrator of Minsk in 1812 when Napoleon's troops occupied Russia. During the Restoration he worked as a journalist and founded the Revue britannique in 1825 which provided French readers with detailed analysis of events in Britain and America. He participated in a debate in the pages of the Review on the relative cost of government in the United States and France between General Lafayette, James Fenimore Cooper, and others in the early 1830s which Bastiat read with interest. He thought Saulnier exaggerated the cost of the American government in order to show French government expenditure in a better light. See, "Nouvelles observations sur les finances des États-Unis, en réponse a une brochure publiée par le général Lafayette," Revue britannique , Oct. 1831; Des finances des États-Unis comparées à celles de la France (1833), and De la Centralisation administrative en France (1833).

Say, Horace Émile (1794-1860)

The Say family played a very important role in liberal political economy circles in France for nearly 100 years. It began with Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) [see biography above], then his son Horace Émile Say (1794-1860), and his grandson Léon Say (1826-96).

Horace Émile Say (1794-1860) was the son of Jean-Baptiste Say. He married Anne Cheuvreux, sister of Casimir Cheuvreux, whose family were friends of Bastiat. Say was a businessman and traveled in 1813 to the United States and Brazil. A result of his trip was Historie des relations commerciales entre la France et le Brésil (1839). He became president of the Chamber of Commerce of Paris in 1834, a councillor of state (1849-51), headed an important inquiry into the state of industry in the Paris region (1848-51), and wrote a book advocating the reform of city tolls Paris, son octroi et ses emprunts (1847). Say was also very active in liberal circles, participating in the foundation of the Société d'économie politique, the Guillaumin publishing firm, the Journal des économistes , the Journal du commerce ; and was an important collaborator in the creation of the Dictionnaire de l'économe politique (1852-53) and the Dictionnaire du commerce et des marchandises (1837, 1852). In 1857 he was nominated to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques but died before he could join it formally.

Say, Jean-Baptiste (1767-1832)

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) was the leading French political economist in the first third of the nineteenth century. Before becoming an academic political economist quite late in life, Say apprenticed in a commercial office, working for a life insurance company; he also worked as a journalist, soldier, politician, cotton manufacturer, and writer. During the revolution he worked on the journal of the idéologues, La Décade philosophique, littéraire, et politique , for which he wrote articles on political economy from 1794 to 1799. In 1814 he was asked by the government to travel to England on a fact-finding mission to discover the secret of English economic growth and to report on the impact of the revolutionary wars on the British economy. His book De l'Angleterre et des Anglais (1815) was the result. After the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, Say was appointed to teach economics in Paris, first at the Athénée, then as a chair in "industrial economics" at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, and finally the first chair in political economy at the Collège de France. Say is best known for his Traité d'économie politique (1803), which went through many editions (and revisions) during his lifetime. One of his last major works, the Cours complet d'économie politique pratique (1828-33), was an attempt to broaden the scope of political economy, away from the preoccupation with the production of wealth, by examining the moral, political, and sociological requirements of a free society and how they interrelated with the study of political economy.

Sénard, Antoine (1800-1885)

Antoine Sénard (1800-1885) was a lawyer from Rouen who participated in the political banquets of 1847 which led to the overthrow of Louis Philippe in February 1848. He was elected to the Chamber in April 1848, and served as President of the Chamber 5-29 June 1848 and after the June Days uprising he was appointed Minister of the Interior by General Cavaignac. He was a staunch anti-bonapartist and did not have another high position after Louis Napoléon was elected President in December 1848.

Seneca (ca. 4 BC – AD 65)

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (ca. 4 BC – AD 65) was a Roman Stoic philosopher who was the tutor and an advisor to Emperor Nero. He advocated leading a simple life and the acceptance of one's fate in life. He committed suicide when ordered to by Nero who accused him of plotting against him.

Senior, Nassau William (1790-1864)

Nassau Senior (1790-1864) was a British economist who became a professor of political economy at Oxford University in 1826. In 1832 he was asked to investigate the condition of the poor and, with Edwin Chadwick, wrote the Poor Law Commissioners' Report of 1834. In 1843 he was appointed a correspondent of the Institut de France, In 1847 he returned to Oxford University. During his life he wrote many articles for the review journals, such as the Quarterly Review , the Edinburgh Review , and the London Review . His books include Lectures on Political Economy (1826) and Outline of the Science of Political Economy (1834).

Silguy, Count Jean Marie François Xavier de (1784-1864)

Count Jean Marie François Xavier de Silguy (1784-1864) was an engineer who worked for the Department of Bridges and Roads in Finistère (1810-1827), la Loire-Inférieure (1821-1830), les Landes and la Gironde (1830-1842), before becoming chief inspector (1842-1850). He worked on building canals and later on the reforestation of Les Landes.

Sismondi, Jean Charles Léonard de (1773-1842)

Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi (1773-1842) was a Swiss historian and economist. He wrote De la richesse commerciale (1803) which was quite Smithian in its support for the free market but after a trip to England when it was in the midst of an economic depression following the Napoleonic Wars he wrote a more critical work Nouveaux principes d'économie politique (1819) where he expressed his concern for the welfare of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Sismondi was an early theorist of the periodic economic crises which afflicted industrial societies. Molinari replied to Sismondi's criticisms in the Cours d'économie politique where he developed his theory of equilibrium to explain how markets gravitate or tend towards a point of equilibrium between supply and demand unless external disturbing factors are present, such as wars, famines, or perverse government regulations.

Smith, Adam (1723-90).

Smith was a leading figure in the Scottish enlightenment and one of the founders of modern economic thought with his work The Wealth of Nations (1776). He studied at the University of Glasgow and had as one of his teachers the philosopher Francis Hutcheson. In the late 1740s Smith lectured at the University of Edinburgh on rhetoric, belles-lettres, and jurisprudence which are available to us because of detailed notes taken by one of his students. In 1751 he moved to Glasgow, where he was a professor of logic and then moral philosophy. His Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, translated into French in 1774) was a product of this period of his life. Between 1764 and 1766 he traveled to France as the tutor to the duke of Buccleuch. While in France Smith met many of the physiocrats and visited Voltaire in Geneva. As a result of a generous pension from the duke, Smith was able to retire to Kirkaldy to work on his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations , which appeared in 1776 (French edition in 1788). Smith was appointed in 1778 as commissioner of customs and was based in Edinburgh, where he spent the remainder of his life. An important French edition of the Wealth of Nations was published by Guillaumin with notes and commentary by leading French economists such as Blanqui, Garnier, Sismondi, and Say and appeared in 1843.

Smith, John Prince- (1809-1874)

John Prince-Smith (1809-1874) was born in London, where he worked as a parliamentary reporter before moving to Hamburg in 1828 to write for an English-language newspaper there. While in Hamburg Prince-Smith discovered economics , especially the work of Richard Cobden and Bastiat, and began writing about British economic developments for his German readers. In 1846 he founded a German free-trade association and was elected deputy representing Stettin in the Prussian parliament.

Steuart, James (1713-1780)

James Steuart (1713-1780) was a Scottish lord and a supporter of the Stuart monarchy. His book An Inquiry Into the Principles of Political Economy (1767) was one of the first comprehensive works on economic thought published in English, which was eclipsed by the appearance of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1776. Steuart was also a mercantilist and a defender of exactly the kind of economic policies which Smith attacked in his work.

Storch, Henri-Frédéric (1766-1835).

Henri Storch was a Russian economist of German origin who was influenced by the writings of Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say. He was noted for his work on the economics of unfree labor (particularly that of serfdom), the importance of moral (human) capital to national wealth, comparative banking, and the greater wealth-producing capacity of industry and commerce compared with agriculture. Storch studied at the universities of Jena and Heidelberg before returning to Russia, where he taught, worked in various positions in education and government administration, and became a corresponding member of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. He was chosen to teach various members of the Russian royal family (tutor to the daughters of Tsar Paul I and then appointed by Alexander I to teach political economy to the grand dukes Nicholas and Michael). He became a state councillor in 1804 and head of the Academy's statistical section. In 1828 he was promoted to the rank of private councillor and appointed vice president of the Academy of Sciences, offices that he held until his death. His major theoretical work was his six-volume Cours d'économie politique, ou exposition des principes qui d éterminent la prospérité des nations (1815), which was based upon the lectures he gave to the grand dukes. J.B. Say republished without Storch's authority a new edition of his Cours d'économie politique in 1823 with extensive commentary and criticism.

Sturge, Joseph (1793-1859)

Joseph Sturge (1793-1859) was an English Quaker, pacifist, supporter of the Chartist movement, and abolitionist. He founded the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1823 and was active also in the London Peace Society. In 1854 he led an unsuccessful delation of Quakers to speak to Tsar Nicholas I of Russia to help prevent the outbreak of the Crimean War.

Thierry, Jacques-Nicolas Augustin (1795-1856)

Jacques-Nicolas Augustin Thierry (1795-1856) was a pioneering historian who is famous for his classical liberal class analysis of history and his extensive use of archival records in researching and writing this history. He began as the personal assistant to Saint-Simon (1814-1817) before joining Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer on their journal Le Censeur européen . It was here that he learned to analyze history using the social and economic theories developed by Comte and Dunoyer via the work of Jean-Baptiste Say. Thierry became interested in the ruling elites which governed nations, how they came to power (often through conquest as the Normans did of Saxon England), and the gradual emergence of free institutions such as the medieval communes and the Third Estate. He was favoured by Guizot and other political leaders of the July Monarchy who encouraged his archival research with an appointment to the Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres (1830) and the editorship of a massive collection of documents published as Recueil des monuments inédits de l'histoire du Tiers état (1850-1870). His collected writings from Le Censeur européen were later published as Dix ans d'études historiques (1834). His other works include Histoire de la conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands (1825), Lettres sur l'histoire de France (1827), and Essai sur l'histoire de la formation et des progrès du Tiers état (1850).

Thiers, Adolphe (1797-1877)

Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877) was a lawyer, historian, politician, and journalist. While he was a lawyer he contributed articles to the liberal journal Le Constitutionel and published one of his most famous works, the ten-volume Histoire de la révolution française (1823-27). He was instrumental in supporting Louis-Philippe in July 1830 and was the main opponent of Guizot. Thiers defended the idea of a constitutional monarchy in such journals as Le National . After 1813 he became successively a deputy, undersecretary of state, minister of agriculture, and minister of the interior. He was briefly prime minister and minster of foreign affairs in 1836 and 1840, when he resisted democratization and promoted some restrictions on the freedom of the press. He was also instrumental is planning the building of a huge system of military forts and a wall around Paris, known as "Thiers' wall or enclosure", which was constructed between 1841-44 at a cost of fr. 150 million. During the 1840s he worked on the twenty-volume Histoire de consulat et de l'empire , which appeared between 1845 and 1862. After the 1848 revolution and the creation of the Second Empire he was elected deputy representing Rouen in the Constituent Assembly. Thiers was a strong opponent of Napoleon III's foreign policies and after his defeat was appointed head of the provisional government by the National Assembly and then became president of the Third Republic until 1873. Thiers wrote some essays on economic matters for the Journal des économistes , but his protectionist sympathies did not endear him to the economists. He also wrote a book on property, De la propriété (1848) which Molinari critically reviewed in the JDE in January 1849.

Thompson, Thomas Perronet (1783-1869).

Thomas Perronet Thompson (1783-1869). Thompson had a colorful career as a soldier, politician, polymath writer, and pamphleteer and agitator for the Anti-Corn Law League. He was a member of the Philosophical Radicals who were inspired by utilitarian and reformist ideas of Jeremy Bentham. Thompson was active in urging Catholic emancipation, the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the abolition of slavery, and played a leading role in managing the reformist journal the Westminster Review . His most significant works include The True Theory of Rent (1829), Catechism on the Corn Laws; with a List of Fallacies and Answers (1827), Contre-Enquête: par l'Homme aux Quarante Ecus (1834) a defense of free trade written in response to a French government inquiry into tariff policy. He published a collection of his essays as Exercises, Political and Others. In Six volumes . (London: Effingham Wilson, 1842).

Thoré, Théophile, (also known as Thoré-Bürger) (1807-1869)

Théophile Thoré (also known as Thoré-Bürger) (1807-1869) was a French art critic who pioneered the study of Vermeer. He was involved in democratic politics throughout the 1840s. When the 1848 revolution broke out he founded a daily paper called La Vraie République (The True Republic) (it should be noted that the short-lived journal that Bastiat and his friends started in February/March 1848 was called La République française (The French Republic)) which was soon shut down by the government, and then in March 1849 he began another called Le Journal de la vraie République (the paper of the true republic) which was looted in June 1849 during the riots. He sought exile in Brussels until 1859 when he was amnestied and could return to France. His main political works were: La Vérité sur le parti démocratique (1840); La Recherche de la liberté (1845); La Restauration de l'autorité, ou l'Opération césarienne (1852).

Tranchère, Jules-Auguste Hovyn de (1816-1898)

Triptolemus

According to Greek mythology Triptolemus (Threefold Warrior) was a Greek god who was taught by Demeter the science of agriculture, and he in turn passed on this knowledge to the Greek people.

Urville, Jules Dumont d' (1790-1842)

Jules Dumont d'Urville (1790-1842) was a naval officer and explorer who in the 1820s explored New Guinea, New Zealand, Tonga, and other Pacific islands in his ships the Astrolabe and the Zélée. In the late 1830s he set out to explore Antarctica for which he was strongly criticised by the astronomer François Arago. Ironically for an explorer who took risks, he died in 1842 in the first large French railway crash with his wife and young child.

Vatimesnil, Antoine Lefebvre de (1789-1860).

Antoine François Henri Lefebvre de Vatimesnil (1789-1860) was the Advocate General of the Cour de Cassation (Supreme Court), a Councilor of State, and the first Minister of Eduction and Religion in 1828-29. He was a Deputy representing du Nord 1830-34 and a Deputy representing l'Eure 1849-1851. He resigned from politics following Louis Napoléon's coup d'état in December 1851.

Vidal, François (1812-1872)

François Vidal (1812-1872) was a lawyer, socialist writer and politician who was active in the 1840s. He was particularly interested in political economy and wrote for several socialist magazines such as Victor Considérant's La démocratie pacifique and Pierre Leroux's La Revue indépendante . In the early months of the February Revolution he was the Secretary of the Luxembourg Commission which introduced the state funded unemployment program the National Workshops. After Louis Napoléon's coup d'état of December 1851 Vidal dropped out of politics. His major works include Des Caisses d'épargne (1844); De la répartition des richesses, ou De la justice distributive en économie sociale (1846); Vivre en travaillant ! Projets, voies et moyens des réformes sociales (1848); and Organisation du crédit personnel et réel, mobilier et immobilier (1851).

Villèle, Jean-Baptiste, comte de (1773-1854).

Joseph de Villèle (1773-1854) was an Ultra Royalist during the Restoration and was Prime Minister and Minister of Finance 1821-28. Under his rule opposition groups were muzzled by strict censorship laws, the Chamber was stacked with new Peers created by the King, and 1 billion francs was set aside to reimburse aristocrats for property taken from them during the Revolution. His political reaction was a major cause of the Revolution of 1830 which saw the Bourbon King Charles X overthrown by Louis Philippe.

Visschers, Auguste (1804-1874)

Auguste Visschers (1804-1874) was a Belgian lawyer and peace activist. He chaired the Peace Congress which was held in Brussels in September 1848.

Vivien, Alexandre (1799-1854).

Alexandre-François-Auguste Vivien (1799-1854) was a lawyer, a member of Thiers' liberal group Société de la Morale Chrétienne, and was elected a Deputy representing l'Aisne in 1833. He was the Minister for Justice and Religion in the second government of Thiers in 1840 and was appointed to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (Legislation) in 1845. During the Second Republic he was elected a Deputy representing l'Aisne in April 1848, voted with the conservative right, and was appointed to the Committee which supervised the drawing up of the new constitution. He was briefly appointed Minister of Public Works in late 1848 before Louis Napoléon took power. He resigned after Louis Napoléon's coup d'état in December 1851. He wrote several articles for the JDE and a book Études administratives (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845).

Vuitry, Adolphe (1813-1885)

Adolphe Vuitry (1813-1885) was a lawyer, economist and politician. He was a Deputy representing l'Yonne during the July Monarchy and was the Chairman of the Chamber's Committee Responsible for Examining the Draft Law on Postal Taxes. He was the Undersecretary of State for Finance in 1851 in the Ministry of Léon Faucher and in 1863 he was appointed governor of the Bank of France.

Walras, Antoine Auguste (1801-1866)

Antoine Auguste Walras (1801-1866) was a professor of rhetoric, philosophy, and literature who also wrote on economics. He taught economics at the college of Évreux from 1832 and then at the Athénée in Paris in the 1830s. Guillaumin published his book on Théorie de la richesse sociale (Theory of Social Wealth) in 1849. He is best known as the father of Léon Walras (1834-1910) one of the founders of the Marginalist School of economics.

Wilson, James (1805-60).

James Wilson (1805-1860) was born in Scotland. He became an economic journalist working for the Manchester Guardian , was a supporter of free trade, founded the magazine The Economist in 1843, and was elected to parliament in 1847. His books include Influence of the Corn Laws (1839) and Capital, Currency, and Banking (1847), which was a collection of his articles from the Economist .

Wolowski, Louis (1810-76).

Louis Wolowski (1810-76) was a lawyer, politician, and economist of Polish origin. His interests lay in industrial and labor economics, free trade, and bimetallism. He was a professor of industrial law at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques from 1855, serving as its president in 1866-67, and a member and president of the Société d'économie politique. His political career started in 1848, when he represented La Seine in the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies. During the 1848 Revolution he was an ardent opponent of the socialist Louis Blanc and his plans for labor organization. Wolowski continued his career as a politician in the Third Republic, where he served as a member of the Assembly and took an interest in budgetary matters. He edited the Revue de droit français et etranger and wrote articles for the Journal des économistes . Among his books are Cours de législation industrielle. De l'organisation du travail (1844) and Études d'économie politique et de statistique (1848), La question des banques (1864), La Banque d'Angleterre et les banques d'Ecosse (1867), La liberté commerciale et les résultats du traité de commerce de 186 0 (1869), and L'or et l'argent (1870).

Glossary of Places↩

Adour River

The Adour is a r iver which flows through the Landes. It allowed the transportation of goods from "La Chalosse," the part of the department in which Bastiat lived, to the port of Bayonne, whence they could be exported. Eventually, sand deposits made navigation on this river more and more difficult.

Auch

Auch is the main city of the department of Le Gers, in the eastern part of the Département of Les Landes where Bastiat lived and which he represented in the Chamber. It is the historical capital of the old province of Gascogny.

Bourbon Palace.

Built by Louis XIV in 1722 for his daughter Louise Françoise. It is located on the Quai d'Orsay in Paris. It was confiscated during the Revolution (1791) and has been the location for the Chamber of Deputies since the Restoration.

La Chalosse.

Les Eaux-Bonnes

Les Eaux-Bonnes was a spa town in the Pyrenees near where Bastiat lived in Mugron. He went there periodically as his health deteriorated. It was in Eaux-Bonnes in June and July of 1850 that Bastiat wrote two of his best known essays "The Law"(June 1850) and "What is Seen and What is Not Seen" (July 1850).

Garonne River.

Has its source in the Pyrénées on the border between Spain and France and flows northward through the city of Toulouse before reaching Bordeaux on the coast.

Gironde.

Département in the Aquitaine region in southwest France, immediately north of the département of the Landes, on the Atlantic coast. The Gironde contains the port city of Bordeaux and is famous for its wines. Be- cause a number of liberal-minded deputies were sent to Paris from this region during the French Revolution, they were given the name of Girondins.

Les Landes.

Les Landes is a Département in the region of Aquitaine in south west France where Bastiat was born and grew up and represented in the Chamber of Deputies. Les Landes is short for "the heathlands of the Gascons." In Bastiat's day Les Landes consisted of predominantly poorly drained heathland ("la lande") which was burnt off to allow the grazing of large numbers of sheep. Later in the 19th century extensive pine forests were grown thus making possible the development of a lucrative timber industry.

The Luxembourg Palace

The Luxembourg Palace in the 6th arrondissement of Paris was a 17th century palace which was seized as "national property" during the Revolution (1791) and was used as a prison for a period during the Terror. In 1799 it became the seat of the French Senate and after 1814 housed the Chamber of Peers.

One of the first acts of the Provisional Government was the establishment of a "Commission du gouvernement pour les travailleurs" (Government Commission for the Workers, also known as the Luxembourg Commission) which oversaw the National Workshops program under the direction of the socialist Louis Blanc (1811-1882). The National Workshops were created on February 27, 1848 to create government funded jobs for unemployed workers. The Workshops were regarded by socialists as a key part of the revolution and as a model for the future reform of French society. Following an attempted coup by Blanc on 15 May, 1848 the Luxembourg Commission was closed down. After violent demonstrations in the streets of Paris 23-26 June the National Workshops were shut down as well.

Mugron.

Small town in the département of the Landes overlooking the Adour River, where Bastiat lived from 1825 to 1845. Bastiat was appointed justice of the peace in Mugron in May 1831. At the time it was a significant commercial center, with a port on the Adour River and about two thousand inhabitants (fifteen hundred now). Today, Mugron has a street, a square, and a plaza named after Bastiat.

Glossary of Newspapers and Journals↩

Le Censeur and Le Censeur européen

A journal founded by Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. From 1814 to 1815 its full name was Le Censeur, ou examen des actes et des ouvrages qui tendent à détruire ou à consolider la constitution de l'État; later, from 1817 to 1819, it was called Le Censeur européen ou Examen de diverses questions de droit public et de divers ouvrages littéraires et scientifiques, considérés dans leurs rapports avec le progrès de la civilisation. The journal was devoted to political and economic matters and was a constant thorn in the side of first Napoléon's empire and then the restored monarchy. It was threatened with closure by the authorities on several occasions and finally was forced to close in 1815. During this period of enforced leisure Comte and Dunoyer discovered the economic writings of Jean-Baptiste Say, and when the journal reopened, it tilted toward economic and social matters as a result. It was one of the most important journals of liberal thought in the early nineteenth century.

La Chalosse.

La Chalosse was a weekly journal published in the town of Saint-Sever to serve the needs of the Arrondissment of Saint-Sever. It appeared between December 1836 and March 1876. Bastiat's first published piece in the journal was a series on "The Canal beside the Adour" (18 June-20 Aug. 1837). He then published two more in 1838 on "Reflections on the Question of Dueling" (Feb. 1838) and "On the Basque Language" (April, 1838). Bastiat went to a school in Saint-Sever for a year in 1813 and stood unsuccessfully for election to the local council in 1832 and 1842. See, La Chalosse: Journal de l'arrondissement de Saint-Sever (11 Dec. 1836-26 March 1876).

Le Courrier français (1819-1846)

Le Courrier français (1820-1846) was a liberal and anti-clerical newspaper founded by the constitutional monarchist Auguste-Hilarion, comte de Kératry (1769-1859). It was suspended and threatened with legal action several times during the 1820s for its stand against the French intervention in Spain and for criticizing the established church. The banker Jacques Lafitte (1767-1844) supported it financially. It was more popular during the July Monarchy but still remained a small circulation paper and was forced to close in 1846. Hippolyte Castille was a regular contributor. Both Bastiat and Molinari also wrote for it on occasion.

La Démocratie pacifique (1843-1851)

La Démocratie pacifique : Journal des intérêts des gouvernements et des peuples. (1843-1851) was the most successful of the journals which supported the socialist ideas of Charles Fourier. It was successful partly because it downplayed the ultimate social solution proposed by Fourier (the formation of small communities - the phalanxes where living and production would all be done communally) and focused on its critique of the free market and incremental reforms brought about by legislation. It was also well run by Victor Considérant (1808-1893) whose wife subsidized its running costs. The editor Considerant was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848.

Dictionnaire de l'Économie Politique (1852-53)

The DEP is a two volume, 1,854 page, double-columned encyclopedia of political economy which was published in 1852-53. It is unquestionably one of the most important publishing events in the history of mid-century French classical liberal thought and is unequalled in its scope and comprehensiveness. The project was undertaken by the publisher Gilbert-Urbain Guillaumin (1801-1864) with the assistance of Charles Coquelin (1802-1852) as chief editor who died suddenly from a heart attack in August 1852 after having finished work on volume one. The aim was to assemble a compendium of the state of knowledge of liberal political economy with articles written by leading economists on key topics, biographies of important historical figures, annotated bibliographies of the most important books in the field, and tables of economic and political statistics. The Economists believed that the events of the 1848 Revolution had shown how poorly understood the principles of economics were among the French public, especially its political and intellectual elites. One of the tasks of the DEP was to rectify this situation with an easily accessible summary of the discipline. In keeping with their habit of calling themselves "The Economists" the editors and publisher of the Dictionary called it the "Dictionary of THE Political Economy".

The major contributors were the editor Coquelin (with 70 major articles), Gustave de Molinari (29), Horace Say (29), Joseph Garnier (28), Ambroise Clément (22), and Courcelle-Seneuil (21). Maurice Block wrote most of the biographical entries.

A massive undertaking like this would have taken several years to plan, write, and edit. It is likely that planning began at the end of 1848 and a preliminary announcement was made in the Guillaumin catalog of May 1849 stating that it was "in preparation." In a catalog from 1854 its price was listed as 50 fr.

We have made considerable use of the DEP in editing this translation as it provides a great deal of information about French government policy, economic data on a broad range of topics, contemporary literature on economic thought, and most importantly, the state of mind of the French political economists in the mid-19th century.

Another version of the DEP appeared in 1891-92 called the Nouveau Dictionnaire d'Économie Politique edited by Léon Say the grandson of Jean-Baptiste Say.

Molinari provided considerable background information about the DEP project in an article he wrote for the JDE at the end of 1853. 2331

Jacques Bonhomme [Journal] (June-July 1848)

Jacques Bonhomme (1848). Editor J. Lobet. (Paris: Impr. de Napoléon Chaix). Bastiat launched two short-lived journals directed at working people during the 1848 Revolution. The first was called La République française which appeared in February and March and the second called Jacques Bonhomme which appeared in June and July. The paper was directed at working people; "Jacques Bonhomme" (literally Jack Goodfellow) is the name used by the French to refer to "everyman," sometimes with the connotation that he is the archetype of the wise French peasant.

Bastiat uses the character Jacques Bonhomme frequently in his constructed dialogues in Economic Sophisms as a foil to criticize protectionists and advocates of government regulation. Bastiat joined Gustave de Molinari, Charles Coquelin, Alcide Fonteyraud, and Joseph Garnier in editing the journal, the first issue of which appeared just before the June Days uprising (23–26 June).

Jacques Bonhomme consisted of only four issues, which appeared from 11 June to 13 July, with a break between 24 June and 9 July. The first issue was a single page only on papier rose designed to be posted on the walls of buildings. On June 21 the government decided to close the so-called National Workshops, which were a government program to provide state-subsidized employment to unemployed workers, because of out-of- control expenses. This was promptly followed by a mass uprising in Paris to protest the decision, and troops were called in to suppress the protesters, causing considerable loss of life. While this was happening, Bastiat sent Molinari and the editorial committee an article he had written calling for the dissolution of the National Workshops, which appeared on the front page of the penultimate issue of Jacques Bonhomme in the last week of June 1848 ("To Citizens Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin"). Bastiat and Molinari closed the journal because of the violence which broke out in the streets as the army suppressed the rioters. It was in Jacques Bonhomme that Bastiat published the first draft of what was to become his essay "The State."

Le Journal des débats (1789-1944)

Journal founded in 1789 by the Bertin family and managed for almost forty years by Louis-François Bertin. The journal went through several title changes and after 1814 became Le Journal des débats politiques et littéraires . The journal likewise underwent several changes of political positions: it was against Napoléon during the First Empire; under the second restoration it became conservative rather than reactionary; and under Charles X it supported the liberal stance espoused by the Doctrinaires. Bastiat wrote 5 articles which appeared in the Journal: 2 letters to the editor in May 1846, a series of letters to Considerant which were late published as a separate pamphlet Property and Plunder (July 1848), a longer version of his essay on "The State" (Sept. 1848), and an essay on cutting the tax on salt in Jan. 1849. It should be noted that Bastiat published the longer version of his famous essay "The State" in the 25 September 1848 issue of the JDD. Gustave de Molinari was an editor in the 1870s. It ceased publication in 1944.

Le Journal des Économistes

The Journal des économistes: revue mensuelle de l'économie politique, des questions agricoles, manufacturières et commerciales was the journal of the Société d'économie politique (Political Economy Society) and appeared from December 1841 and then roughly every month until it was forced to close following the occupation of Paris by the Nazis in 1940. It was published by the firm of Guillaumin, which also published the writings of most of the liberals of the period.

The Journal des économistes was the leading journal of the free-market economists (known as "les économistes") in France in the second half of the nineteenth century. The editors of the JDE were as follows: the founding editor and publisher Gilbert-Urbain Guillaumin (1801-64) editor from December 1841 to 1842; Adolphe Blanqui (1798-1854) editor 1842-43; Hippolyte Dussard (1798-1876) editor 1843-45; Joseph Garnier (1813-1881) editor 1845-55; Henri Baudrillart (1821-1892) editor 1855-65; Joseph Garnier (1813-1881) editor (1866-81); Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912) editor October 1881-1909; and Yves Guyot (1843-1928) editor from 1910.

Bastiat published many articles in the journal, many of which were later published as pamphlets and books, and his works were all reviewed there. There are fifty-eight entries under Bastiat's name in the table of contents of the journal for the period 1841 to 1865.

Le Libre échange (29 Nov. 1846 - 23 Feb. 1848).

The weekly journal of the Association pour la liberté des échanges. It began in 1846 as Le Libre-échange: Journal du travail agricole, industriel et commercial but changed its name to the simpler Le Libre échange at the start of its second year of publication. After appearing for 72 issues it closed on 16 April 1848 as a result of the revolution when the advisory board decided to redirect their resources to fighting the rise of socialism. The first sixty-four issues were edited by Bastiat, the editor in chief, and Joseph Garnier (the last one edited by Bastiat appeared on 13 February, 1848); the last eight issues were edited by Charles Coquelin. The journal's editorial board included Anisson-Dupéron (pair de France), Bastiat, Adolphe Blanqui, Gustave Brunet (assistant to the mayor of Bordeaux), Campan (secretary of the Chamber of Commerce of Bordeaux), Michel Chevalier, Charles Coquelin, Charles Dunoyer, Léon Faucher, Alcide Fonteyraud, Joseph Garnier, Louis Leclerc, Gustave de Molinari, Prosper Paillottet, Horace Say, and Louis Wolowski. The first fifty-two issues were published as a book by the Guillaumin publishing firm under the title Le Libre-échange, journal de l'association pour la liberté des échanges (1847).

Le M émorial bordelais (1814-1862)

The Mémorial bordelais was published between March 1814 and October 1862. It was a daily newspaper published in the city of Bordeaux which covered political, commercial, maritime, and literary matters of interest to the inhabitants of the department of the Gironde. Bastiat was a frequent contributor during 1846 writing a total of 20 articles between February and October. They were designed to appeal to the merchants in the city to support the French Free Trade Association which he co-founded on 23 February 1846. A national association was formed in Paris on 10 May 1846. Bastiat's first articles in the journal announced a "Plan for an Anti-Protectionist League" (8-10 Feb. 1846).

Le Moniteur industriel (1839-)

Le Moniteur industriel (founded in 1839) became the journal of the protectionist "Association pour la défense du travail national" (Association for the Defense of National Employment) founded by Mimerel de Roubaix in 1846. It was the intellectual stronghold of the protectionists and became one of Bastiat's bêtes noires.

Le National (1830-1851)

Le National was an important liberal and increasingly republican newspaper during the July Monarchy. It was founded by Adolphe Thiers, François-Auguste Mignet, and Armand Carrel to oppose the reactionary policies of the duc de Polignac who was an ultra-royalist politician who was prime minister during the Restoration. The paper played a decisive role during the "three glorious days" and contributed to the success of Louis-Philippe in 1830. However, it was in constant conflict with the censors during the first half of the 1830s with the publisher spending three months in prison and the paper being repeatedly fined.

Under the editorship of Armand Marrast the ministry of François Guizot throughout the 1840s was subjected to severe criticism for its corruption and its interventionist foreign policy. Le National played an important role in the outbreak of the February Revolution of 1848 and many of its friends and supporters got positions in the new government. During 1848 it opposed the uprising of the June Days riots and later supported the candidature of General Cavaignac against Louis Napoleon for the presidency, positions also taken by Bastiat. It was forced to close after Louis Napoleon seized power in the coup d'état of December 1851.

La Patrie (1841-)

La Patrie (The Fatherland) was an independent newspaper founded in 1841. It initially supported Guizot's government but became increasingly critical after 1846. Its circulation was small (just over 3,000 subscribers) but it was quite influential. After the Revolution of 1848 and the creation of the Second Republic it remained a supporter of constitutional monarchy and supported Louis Napoléon's bid for the presidency in December 1848, perhaps in the forlorn hope he would destroy the republic and make a return to the monarchy possible.

La Presse (1836-)

A widely distributed daily newspaper, created in 1836 by the journalist, businessman, and politician Émile de Girardin (1806-81). Girardin was one of the creators of the modern press and pioneered the publication of novels in serial form which made his newspaper very successful. He was also the author of, among many works, the brochure Le Socialisme et l'impôt (1849), in which he advocated a single tax on capital and revenue and the transformation of the state into monopoly insurance company which would secure tax payers against harm according to the amount they paid in. Girardin also wrote and published in 1849 a series of booklets on current topics, Les 52 series , which included a strong attack on the practice of conscription. During the revolution Girardin's paper was suspended following the June Days uprising for criticising the prevarication of the government and he therefore supported Louis Napoleon's candidature for President in December 1848. However, he opposed Louis Napoleon's coup d'état in December 1851 and was sent into exile.

La République française (26 February - 28 March 1848)

La République française (Paris: Impr. de Napoléon Chaix, 26 February– 28 March 1848). Short-lived revolutionary magazine which appeared two days after the revolution broke out in February 1848. Edited by Bastiat, Hippolyte Castille, and Gustave de Molinari, it appeared daily in thirty issues between 26 February and 28 March. Accessed via BNF: Bibliothèque Nationale de France. La République française [Texte imprimé]: journal quotidien. 26 févr.–28 mars 1848 (no. 1–30). Publication: 1848. Notice no.: FRBNF32853034.

The format of the magazine was only one or two pages, so it could be handed out on street corners or pasted to walls and read by passers-by.

Glossary of Historical Events and Terms↩

Cholera Outbreak of 1849

A cholera epidemic swept through France in the summer of 1849 killing nearly 20,000 people, 14,000 of whom lived in Paris. It was thought to have originated in India. One of Bastiat's younger colleagues Henri Alcide Fonteyraud (1822-49) died in August from the disease which shook the small group of economists as he was a promising Ricardo scholar, was fluent in English, and regularly wrote on the activities of the English Anti-Corn Law League and free trade movement. London had been hit by cholera outbreaks in 1832, 1849, and 1854. The Broad Street outbreak of 1854 led to the pioneering work of Dr. John Snow who traced the cause back to contaminated water supplies.

Le Club de la Liberté du Travail (Club for the Freedom of Working, or "Club Lib")

At the first public meeting of the Free Trade Association held after the outbreak of the revolution, in the Montesquieu Hall on 15 March, a motion was discussed to form a political club to combat socialist ideas about the "right to work" which had become popular with the creation of the National Workshops which Louis Blanc had set up on 26 February. This was the inspiration for Charles Coquelin to set up "le Club de la liberté du travail" (the Club for the Freedom of Working, or "Club Lib" for short). Its first meeting was held on March 31 to discuss the question of "The Organization of Labour" with 3 socialists defending Louis Blanc's proposals and attacking free trade, and Coquelin, Fonteyraud, and Garnier defending the free market position of the "Liberty of Working". One of the Club's best public speakers was Alcide Fonteyraud (1822-1849) who died in the cholera epidemic which swept France in mid 1849. He was famous for his florid and witty style of speaking and his ability to mix references to the classics of French literature with the classics of political economy. Molinari relates how after a few weeks the club was forced to close because of violence and intimidation by socialist street thugs (Molinari called them "a gang or a herd of communists") and his regret that the economists had been too easily intimidated and had given up this attempt at spreading free market ideas too easily. 2332

Corn Laws

The Corn Laws were introduced by Parliament in the seventeenth century to maintain a high price for corn (in the British context this meant grain, especially wheat) by preventing the importation of cheaper foreign grain altogether or by imposing a duty on it in order to protect domestic producers from competition. The laws were revised in 1815 following the collapse of wheat prices at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The artificially high prices which resulted led to rioting in London and Manchester. The laws were again amended in 1828 and 1842 to introduce a more flexible sliding scale of duties which would be imposed when the domestic price of wheat fell below a set amount. The high price caused by protection led to the formation of opposition groups, such as the Anti-Corn Law League in 1838, and to the founding of the Economist magazine in 1843. Pressure for repeal came from within Parliament by members of Parliament, such as Richard Cobden (elected in 1841), and from without by a number of factors: the well-organized public campaigning by the Anti-Corn Law League; the writings of classical economists who were nearly universally in favor of free trade; the writings of popular authors such as Harriet Martineau, Jane Marcet, Thomas Perronet Thompson, and Thomas Hodgskin; and the pressure of crop failures in Ireland in 1845. The Conservative prime minister Sir Robert Peel announced the repeal of the Corn Laws on 27 January 1846, to take effect on 1 February 1849 after a period of gradual reduction in the level of the duty. The act was passed by the House of Commons on 15 May and approved by the House of Lords on 25 June, thus bringing to an end centuries of agricultural protection in England.

International Congress of the Friends of Peace (Paris, August 1849)

The first International Peace Congress was held in London in 1843 on the initiative of the American Peace Society and Joseph Sturge. Some 340 delegates attended, the bulk of which were British. The second was organized by Elihu Burritt and chaired by the Belgian lawyer Auguste Visschers and took place in Brussels in September 1848. The third Congress was held in Paris in August 1849 (22-24th) chaired by the novelist Victor Hugo and where Bastiat gave an important speech. According to Joseph Garnier, the organiser, there were 21 delegates from the U.S. (including two ex-slaves), over three hundred from England, 230 from France, 23 from Belgium, and a small number of delegates from other European countries. 2333 The 4th was held in Frankfurt in August (22-24th) 1850 with 600 delegates, the 5th in London in July 1851, the 6th in Manchester in 1852, and the 7th in Edinburgh in 1853. The Congresses came to an end with outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854.

Irish Famine and the Failure of French Harvests 1846-47

The failure of the potato crop in Ireland, known as the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1852, was caused by a disease which affected the potato crop (potato blight) and resulted in the deaths of 1 to 1.5 million people from famine and the emigration of a further million people out of a population of around 7 million. In addition to the failure of the potato crop there were other serious problems which were of concern, including the situation of tenant farmers unable to pay their rents, the continued export of food from Ireland during the famine, and restrictions on the free import of food from elsewhere in Europe. The famine gave impetus to the Anti-Corn Law League's efforts to dismantle British trade barriers which kept cheaper imported food from reaching Ireland. There were also crop failures in France in 1846-47 which led to price rises and hardship for many people.

The crop failures in 1846-1847 caused considerable hardship and a rise in food prices in 1847 across Europe. Some historians believe this was a contributing factor to the outbreak of revolution in 1848. The average price of wheat in France was 18 fr. 93 c. per hectolitre in 1845; which rose to 23 fr. 84 c. in 1846 (which had a poor harvest). Prices were even higher in the last half of 1846 and the first half of 1847 when the shortage was most acutely felt. In December 1846 it rose to 28 fr. 41 c; and reached a maximum of 37 fr. 98 c. in May 1847. The average price for the period 1832-1846 had been 19 fr. 5 c. per hectolitre. The lowest average price reached between 1800 and 1846 was 14 fr. 72 c. in 1834. See AEPS, pour 1848 (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848), pp. 179-80. The Economists believed that this could have been alleviated if there had been international free trade in grain and other food stuffs which would have allowed surpluses from some areas to be sold in areas where there were shortages. The successful repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain in May 1846 (but which not take full effect until 1849) by Richard Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League was a first step in this direction.

Navigation Acts

The Navigation Acts were a lynch pin of the British policy of mercantilism from its introduction in 1651 to its abolition in 1849. The Navigation Act Bill was passed by Oliver Cromwell's government to prevent merchandise from being imported into Britain if it was not transported by British ships or ships from the producer countries. The first act applied to commerce within Europe and generated a war with Holland (1652-1654). Extended to the colonies in 1660 and 1663, it generated a second war with Holland (1665-1667). The Molasses Act of 1733 was designed to force the American colonists to buy more expensive sugar from the British West Indies and discourage trade with the French West Indies. The renewal of this act in 1764 as the Sugar Act was a major source of conflict which led to the American Revolution. The repeal of the Navigations Acts in 1849 was part of a concerted effect to introduce a policy of free trade in Britain and its empire during the 1840s. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was the other major platform of this effort.

Political Clubs

On the very day the Republic was announced (25 February, 1848) the revolutionary socialist Auguste Blanqui started his "Le club de la société républicaine centrale" (Club of the Central Republican Society, also know as Club Blanqui) which was the perhaps the first of hundreds which sprang up in Paris between February and their suppression at the end of June 1848. Every shade of political opinion was represented with its own club, every suburb and district had its meeting halls and cafés where men and women gathered to discuss politics, and every magazine and journal had an affiliated club often headed by the editor. The larger clubs were able to mobilize their members to demonstrate in the streets in order to put pressure on the government to get their favoured legislation passed. Other important socialist clubs included Étienne Cabet's "La société fraternelle centrale" (the Central Fraternal Society), "Le club des travailleurs libres" (the Club of Free Workers), Alphonse Esquiros's "Le club de la montagne" (the Club of the Mountain), and Armand Barbès's "Le club de la révolution" (the Revolution Club).

July Monarchy (1830), February Revolution (1848), June Days (1848)

See "Revolution of 1848."

Revolution of 1848 (also "February Revolution").

Because France went through so many revolutions between 1789 and 1870, they are often distinguished by reference to the month in which they occurred.

Thus we have the "July Monarchy" (of 1830), when the restored Bourbon monarchy of 1815 was overthrown in order to create a more liberal and constitutional monarchy under Louis-Philippe, 26–29 July 1830; the "February Revolution" (of 1848), when the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe was overthrown and the Second Republic was formed, 23–26 February 1848; the "June Days" (23–26 June 1848), when a rebellion by some workers in Paris who were protesting the closure of the government-subsidized National Workshops work-relief program was bloodily put down by General Cavaignac; the "18th Brumaire of Louis-Napoléon," which refers to the coup d'état that brought Louis-Napoléon (Napoléon Bonaparte's nephew) to power on 2 December 1851 and that ushered in the creation of the Second Empire— the phrase was coined by Karl Marx and refers to another date, 18 Brumaire in the Republican calendar, or 9 November 1799, when Napoléon Bonaparte declared himself dictator in another coup d'état. Bastiat was an active participant in the 1848 Revolution, being elected to the Constituent Assembly on 23 April 1848 and then to the Legislative Assembly on 13 May 1849.

Glossary of Groups and Organizations↩

The Academy of Moral and Political Sciences

The Académie des sciences morales et politiques (the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences) is a French learned society and one of the five academies which comprise the Institute of France. The Academy was founded in 1795 as part of a restructuring of the pre-revolutionary Royal Academies. It was abolished in a restructuring made by Napoleon in 1803 in order to remove the many members who had opposed his rule. It was reconstituted by King Louis-Philippe in October 1832 on the advice of François Guizot and Pierre-Louis Roederer as the Académie Royale des Sciences Morales et Politiques (Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences).

There are 50 members of the Academy who are elected by their peers. There are also additional "corresponding" members. In 1832 there were 5 sections: philosophy, moral science, law and jurisprudence, political economy, and history. In January 1847 the membership of the 2nd section (Morale) included Dunoyer (1832), Droz (1832), Lucas (1836), Toqueville (1838), Beaumont (1841), and Alban de Villeneuve (1845). The 4th section (Économie politique et Statistique) had as full members - Dupin (1832), Villermé (1832), Rossi (1836), Blanqui (1838), Passy (1838), and Duchatel (1842). Bastiat was made a "corresponding" (or junior) member of the 4th section on 24 January, 1846 when he was elected with 20 votes (out of a possible 21) by the other full members of the Academy. 2334 Dunoyer had promoted Bastiat's candidature by presenting copies of Bastiat's two books which had appeared since his arrival in Paris: his book on Cobden and the League (1845) and the first series of the Economic Harmonies (January 1846). Bastiat was very proud of this position and included it as part of his credentials on the cover of the books and pamphlets he published. For example, L'État. Maudit argent, par M. Frédéric Bastiat, Représentant du peuple, Membre correspondant de l'Institut, et du Conseil général des Landes. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849). His younger friend and colleague, Gustave de Molinari also never became a full member of the Academy - he too was elected a corresponding member on 28 March, 1874. 2335

To become a full member one had to wait for an existing member to die after which an election by the other sitting members would be held to fill the empty "chair". After Pellegrino Rossi's assassination in Rome, his chair was filled by Léon Faucher in 1849, which was the only possibility Bastiat might have had for promotion within the Academy. Michel Chevalier was elected in 1851 to replace Louis Villermé and Louis Wolowski was elected in 1855 to replace Adolphe Blanqui. Bastiat's friend and colleague Joseph Garnier had to wait until 1873 before he was elected to replace Charles Dupin.

Many of the Economists and other classical liberals were members of the Academy, such as the following (with the year they were elected): Charles Dunoyer (1832); Joseph Droz (1832); Charles Comte (1832); Pellegrino Rossi (1836); Alexis de Tocqueville (1838); Hippolyte Passy (1838); Adolphe Blanqui (1838); Gustave de Beaumont (1841); Léon Faucher (1849); Louis Reybaud (1850); Michel Chevalier (1851); Louis Wolowski (1855); Horace Say (1857); Augustin-Charles Renouard (1861); Henri Baudrillart (1866); Joseph Garnier (1873); Frédéric Passy (1877); Léon Say (1881). 2336

Anti-Corn Law League.

The Anti-Corn Law League (also known as the "Corn League"or "League") was founded in 1838 by Richard Cobden and John Bright in Manchester. Their initial aim was to repeal the law restricting the import of grain ("corn laws"), but they soon called for the unilateral ending of all agricultural and industrial restrictions on the free movement of goods between Britain and the rest of the world. For seven years they organized rallies, meetings, public lectures, and debates from one end of Britain to the other and managed to have proponents of free trade elected to Parliament. The Tory government resisted for many years but eventually yielded in 1846. The abolition was announced by Peel in January, the House passed the legislation in May and the House of Lords agreed on 25 June 1846, when unilateral free trade became the law of Great Britain. The repeal was to take effect gradually over a period of 3 years. The League was the model for the French Free Trade Association and Bastiat's first published book was on Cobden and the League (July 1845).

Association pour la liberté des échanges (The French Free Trade Association).

The French Free Trade Association was modeled on the English Anti-Corn Law League which was founded in 1838 in Manchester by Richard Cobden and John Bright and which was successful in having the Corn Laws repealed in June 1846 (the House of Commons passed the first act of repeal in January 1846). A group of French free traders founded a Free Trade Association in the port city of Bordeaux on 23 February 1846 and then a national association in Paris on 1 July 1846. Frédéric Bastiat was the secretary of the Board, presided over by François d'Harcourt and had among its members Michel Chevalier, Auguste Blanqui, Joseph Garnier, Gustave de Molinari, and Horace Say. The first public meeting of the Paris Association for Free Trade was held in Montesquieu Hall on August 28, 1846. The journal of the Association was called Le Libre-Échange and was edited and largely written by Bastiat. The first issue appeared on 29 November 1846 and it closed on 16 April 1848 after 72 issues. The last issue edited by Bastiat appeared on 13 February 1848. Subsequent issues were edited by Charles Coquelin as Bastiat became increasingly busy during the Revolution, editing and distributing the magazine La République française and then standing for the April elections to the Constituent Assembly (which he won representing his home district of Les Landes).

Association pour la défense du travail national (Association for the Defense of National Employment)

"Association pour la défense du travail national" (Association for the Defense of National Employment) was a protectionist group founded in October 1846 to defend the interests of industrialists and manufacturers. It was led by Antoine Odier (1766-1853) and Pierre Mimerel de Roubaix (1786-1872) who merged several regional protectionist associations together in order to better organise against the newly formed national French Free Trade Association which had been founded in July 1846 in Paris. It was based in Paris in the rue Hauteville and run by a Central Committee on which the banker and manufacturer Antoine Odier served as president and Auguste Mimerel as vice-president. As the name implies, the Association's tactic was to present themselves as defenders of French labor and employment in the factories rather than as lobbyists for the interests of factory owners. Their journal was Le Moniteur industrial . The Association lobbied successfully between March and July 1847 to defeat a major reform of French tariff policy which was being considered by the Chamber of Deputies. The free traders at the Journal des Économistes mocked the Association by calling it the "Association prohibitionniste de Paris" (The Prohibitionist Association of Paris) or the "Comité central de la prohibition" (The Central Committee for Prohibition).

The Chamber of Deputies and the Electoral Class

Deputies were elected to a term of 5 years, one fifth of whom would be elected each year, and were not paid a salary, which meant that only government civil servants (who could sit in the Chamber concurrently with their government job) 2338 or the wealthy were able to afford to run for office. Deputies could not initiate legislation which was a prerogative of the King. The Chamber consisted of 258 Deputies in 1816, 430 in 1820, 459 in 1831, and 460 in 1839. General elections were held in July 1831, June 1834, November 1837, March 1839, July 1842, and August 1846.

The following is a summary of the elections held between 1839 and 1846:

the 5th legislature of the July Monarchy was elected in stages on 2 March and 6 July 1839. The Republican and so-called "third party" coalition won with 240 seats; the Conservative block got 199; and the Legitimists won only 20. King Louis-Philippe lacked a majority and dissolved the government on 16 June 1842.

the 6th legislature of the July Monarchy was elected on 9 July 1842. The Conservatives won with 266 seats; and the "Opposition" won 193. King Louis-Philippe dissolved the government on 16 July 1846.

the 7th legislature of the July Monarchy was elected on 1 August 1846. The Conservatives won with 290 seats; and the Opposition won 168. The government was dissolved when the Revolution of February 1848 broke out.

Bastiat was elected to the Constituent Assembly in the election of 23 April 1848 to represent the département of Les Landes. 2339 He was the second delegate elected out of 7 with a vote of 56,445. He served on the Comité des finances (Finance Committee) and was elected 8 times as vice-president of the committee (such was the regard of his colleagues for his economic knowledge) and he made periodic reports to the Chamber on Finance Committee matters. He was also asked to join the Committee on Labour but did stay long as he wanted to focus on financial matters.

Bastiat was also elected to the Legislative Assembly in the election of 13 May 1849 to represent the département of Les Landes. 2340 He received 25,726 votes out of 49,762. Because of his deteriorating health Bastiat was less able to speak in the Chamber and his attendance fell off. However, he was able to write articles on matters before the Chamber which he distributed.

Girondins.

Group of liberal-minded and moderate republican deputies and their supporters within the Legislative Assembly (1791-92) and National Convention (1792-95), in the early phase of the French Revolution. They got their name from the fact that many of the deputies came from the Gironde region in southwest France, near the major port city of Bordeaux. An important meeting place for the Girondins, where they discussed their ideas and strategies, was the salon of Madam Roland (1754-93). In their bitter rivalry with other groups within the Jacobin group (in particular Robespierre and the Mountain faction), they disputed the proper treatment and punishment of the deposed king, the war against Austria, and the other monarchical powers that threatened France with invasion, and how far the radical policies of the revolution needed to be pushed. They were defeated politically by the radical Jacobins in May 1793 and many were executed in late 1793, such as Jacques Pierre Brissot (1754-1793), Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud (1753-1793), Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), and Étienne Clavière (1735-1793).

The Party of Order.

The "Comité de la rue de Poitiers" (later known as the "Party of Order") was a group of conservative politicians who came together in May 1848 on the rue de Poitiers following an unsuccessful demonstration of radicals at the National Assembly. The group (between 200 and 400) met weekly and were made up of a broad coalition of conservative, legitimist, Bonapartist, and liberal groups. They supported General Cavaignac's suppression of the riots in June 1848 and then Louis Napoleon's run for president of the Republic in December. Towards the end of 1848 the group began to be called the "Party of Order" and it became increasingly monarchical and conservative. In the national election of January 1849 the Party of Order's slogan was "Order, Property, Religion" and it fought bitterly against the party of the left (The Mountain and the Social Democrats). The Party of Order won a majority of seats (450) to the Left's 180. Moderate republicans won 75.

Physiocrats.

The Physiocrats, also known as "les Économistes" (the Economists), were a group of 18th century French economists and reform minded bureaucrats who came to prominence in the 1760s and who believed that the economy was guided by natural laws and that the state should not interfere in its operation. The word "Physiocracy" was coined by Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours (1739-1817) to give a name to this movement. It is composed of two Greek words "physis" (nature) and "kratein" (to rule or govern) and thus means "the rule of nature" . Their school consisted of the following individuals: François Quesnay (1694-1774), Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727-17811), Mercier de la Rivière (1720-1794), Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759), the Marquis de Mirabeau (1715-1789), and Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours (1739-1817). They coined the expression "laissez-faire" to describe their preferred government policy. They believed that agricultural production was the source of wealth and that all barriers to its expansion and improvement (such as internal tariffs, government regulation, and high taxes) should be removed. The strategy of the Physiocrats was to educate others through their scholarly and journalistic writings as well as to influence monarchs to adopt rational economic policies via a process of so-called "enlightened despotism". This strategy met with very mixed results, as Turgot's failed effort to deregulate the French grain trade in the 1770s attests. The group of free market classical liberal political economists of which Molinari was a member also referred to themselves as "the Economists" and we have kept that practice in this book. Thus, the term "the Economists" can either refer to the 18th century Physiocrats or to the group of 19th century free market who followed in their footsteps.

The Economists of the 1840s were very conscious of their intellectual roots in the Physiocratic movement of the 18th century. When the Guillaumin publishing firm published their monumental history of economic thought in 15 volumes under the editorship of Eugène Daire four of the volumes were devoted to the writings of the Physiocrats - two volumes by Turgot in 1844 and a collection of miscellaneous writings by Quesnay and others in 1846.

The Socialist School

The rise of socialist ideas in the twenty odd years before the 1848 Revolution is one of the targets of Bastiat's writings. Some of the leading figures of the French socialist school are the Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Charles Fourier (1772-1837), Étienne Cabet (1788-1856), Pierre Leroux (1798-1871), Victor Prosper Considérant (1808-93), Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-65), Louis Blanc (1811-82). During the 1840s the work of Proudhon on property was a serious challenge to the economists [ Qu'est-ce que la propriété? (1841)] as was the writings and political activities of Louis Blanc on "the right to work" and the National Workshops. Bastiat spent much time criticizing the ideas of Proudhon on property, interest, and profit, and Louis Blanc's views on the right to work. Other issues which were challenged by the socialists included the morality of profits, interest, and rent; the private ownership of property (versus communal ownership); the justice of the current system of land ownership.

Société d'économie politique (Political Economy Society)

The Société d'économie politique (Political Economy Society) was founded in 1842 by the Comte d'Esterno and Pellegrino Rossi with the name "Réunion des economistes." 2341 It failed to attract members because of its academic tone and folded after a few meetings. Later in the year, another attempt at forming a society was made by Adolphe Blaise, Joseph Garnier, and Guillaumin which began meeting regularly from 15 November 1842. It attracted considerably more members because of its more relaxed and open format (Garnier estimates about 60 by its second meeting) where the members would meet every month for a meal in a restaurant before beginning a more formal discussion of topics selected by the committee. Its membership was drawn from members of the Institute, ex-parliamentarians, educators, journalists, judges, and several active in commerce and industry. The meetings were held in the Maison-Dorée restaurant which was located at 20, Boulevard des Italiens in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. It opened in 1839 and had a reputation for excellent food and wine (it boasted a wine cellar of 80,000 bottles) and attracted regular customers such as Honoré de Balzac and Alexandre Dumas.

The Society's first president was Charles Dunoyer, who served from 1845 to 1862, and Joseph Garnier was made permanent secretary in 1849. Its membership in 1847 was about fifty and grew to about eighty at the end of 1849. A summary of its monthly meetings was published in Le Journal des économistes . It is not known when Bastiat joined the Society, but he was invited to one of its monthly meetings in May 1845 for a welcome dinner in his honour so he could meet the members of the Society after his break-though essay on French and English tariffs (published in the JDE October 1844) and his book on Cobden and the League (published by Guillaumin in May 1845). 2342 He is first mentioned in the minutes for August 1846, when the Society hosted a banquet in honor of Richard Cobden, and Bastiat was one of several members of the Society to make a formal toast to "the past and present defenders of free trade in the House of Lords and the House of Commons." 2343

The Society was managed by 2 presidents (Charles Dunoyer and Hippolyte Passy), 2 vice-presidents (Horace Say and Charles Renouard), a permanent secretary (Joseph Garnier), and a treasurer (Guillaumin). Summaries of the meetings were published by Joseph Garnier, the permanent secretary and vice president of the society, in the Journal des économistes. In 1889 summaries of the Society's meetings were published by Guillaumin: Annales de la Société d'Économie politique (1889).

Glossary of Key Ideas & Concepts↩

Association and Organization

Under the influence of socialist writers like Charles Fourier, Louis Blanc, and Proudhon during the 1840s the words "organization" and "association" became slogans used by the socialists to oppose the advocates of free trade and free markets. For these socialists, "L'Organisation" meant the organisation of labor and industry by the state for the benefit of the workers; and "l'Association" meant cooperative living and working arrangements as opposed to private property, exchange on the free market, and the family. Socialists believed that the exploitation of workers caused by the market and by wage labour would only come to an end when workers, with the assistance of the state, created "organizations" and "associations" of workers which would own the workshops or industries and pay the workers a guaranteed wage (what they called "le droit au travail" or "the right to a job") which would cover the full amount of their contribution to production. The profit of the owner or the capitalist would be dispensed with and workers would therefore get a "just" wage. The most influential of the socialist works on this topic was Louis Blanc's influential pamphlet L'Organisation du travail (1839) which was reprinted many times during the 1840s.

What the classical liberal economists found very frustrating was the fact that supporters of the free market were also firm believers in "organization" and "association" but only if they resulted from voluntary actions by individuals and were not the result of government coercion and legislation. This covered nearly every association created in the free market, such as factories, workshops, banks, retail shops, and so on. Bastiat frequently uses these words in his writings in both the socialist sense in order to mock or criticize them (when he does this he capitalises the words), and the liberal sense. When he does the latter he does not capitalise them.

A good example of Bastiat's opposition to the idea of socialist organisation is the disparaging term "la grande organisateur" (the great organizer) 2344 which he used in an economic sophism he wrote in March 1848, after the Revolution had broken out in February and socialist ideas began to be implemented for the first time in the National Workshops. Here he mocks the folly of believing that one individual or government could centrally plan or organize an entire economy as many socialists of his day believed.

Free Banking

The theory of "la liberté des banques" (free banking) refers to the theory developed by Charles Coquelin in the mid 1840s that private banks in a completely free market would compete to provide banking services even in such things as the issuing of money, which would no longer be a government monopoly. Larry White states that "Proponents of free banking have traditionally pointed to the relatively unrestricted monetary systems of Scotland (1716–1844), New England (1820–1860), and Canada (1817–1914) as models. Other episodes of the competitive provision of banknotes took place in Sweden, Switzerland, France, Ireland, Spain, parts of China, and Australia. In total, more than sixty episodes of competitive note issue are known, with varying amounts of legal restrictions. In all such episodes, the countries were on a gold or silver standard (except China, which used copper)." 2345 Charles Coquelin wrote a series of articles on free banking in the early 1840s for La Revue des Deux-Mondes and these ideas were further developed in his major book on the subject, Du Crédit et des Banques (1848). 2346 Several, but not all, of the economists advocated free banking, most notably Molinari and Bastiat.

Laissez-faire

In English the phrase "laissez-faire"has come to mean the economic system in which there is no regulation of economic activity by the state. Other terms have also been used to mean the same thing, such as the "Manchester School" or "Cobdenism," thus linking this policy prescription to the ideas of Richard Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League. The origins of the term "laissez-faire"are not clear. One account attributes the origin to the merchant and Physiocrat Vincent de Gournay (1712-59), who used a slightly longer version of the phrase, "laissez faire, laissez passer" (let us do as we wish, let us pass unrestricted), to describe his preferred government economic policy. Another Physiocrat, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727-81), attributes the phrase "laissez-nous faire" (let us do as we wish), to the seventeenth-century merchant Legendre, who used the phrase in an argument with the French minister of finance Colbert about the proper role of government in the economy. Yet a third Physiocrat, François Quesnay (1694-1774), combined the term with another phrase: "Laissez-nous faire. Ne pas trop gouverner" (Let us do as we wish. Do not govern us too much) to make the same point. A contemporary of Bastiat, Joseph Garnier in the entry for "laissez faire, laissez passer"in the DEP (1853) explained "laissez-faire" to mean "laissez travailler" (leave us free to work as we wish) and "laissez passer"to mean "laissez échanger" (leave us free to trade as we wish). 2347

Malthusianism and French Political Economy

Most of the political economists thought that Malthus' "law of population growth", in a slightly modified form, was one of the natural laws of political economy.

The original version of Malthus's Law states:

I said that population, when unchecked, increased in a geometrical ratio; and subsistence for man in an arithmetical ratio... This ratio of increase, though short of the utmost power of population, yet as the result of actual experience, we will take as our rule; and say, That population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years or increases in a geometrical ratio… It may be fairly said, therefore, that the means of subsistence increase in an arithmetical ratio. Let us now bring the effects of these two ratios together… No limits whatever are placed to the productions of the earth; they may increase for ever and be greater than any assignable quantity; yet still the power of population being a power of a superior order, the increase of the human species can only be kept commensurate to the increase of the means of subsistence, by the constant operation of the strong law of necessity acting as a check upon the greater power. 2348

In an elaboration of what this law meant in practice which Malthus included in the 2nd revised edition of 1803 (but removed in later editions) was the following harsh statement about who could or could not be admitted to a seat at "nature's mighty feast":

A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he does not work upon the compassion of some of her guests. 2349

The economists who were orthodox Malthusians were harshly criticised by socialists like Proudhon for being "sans entrailles" (heartless) in the willingness to condemn the poor for the hardship they suffered as a result of having large families. One of the leading French Malthusians, Joseph Garnier, explained this away as a piece of unfortunately chosen rhetoric on Malthus' part and tried to mollify it by arguing that, although the poor had no just claim to the property of others, they could appeal to the good nature and sense of charity, voluntarily given, of others who were better off.

The most outspoken defender of orthodox Malthusianism in France was Joseph Garnier (1813-1881) who was editor of the JDE from 1845 to 1855. He edited and annotated the Guillaumin edition of Malthus's book which appeared in 1845 as well as a second edition in 1852 with a long Foreword defending Malthus against his critics. Garnier wrote the biographical article on "Malthus" and a long entry on "Population" (which was an extended defense of Malthusianism) for the DEP (1852-53). He also published a condensed version of Malthus' On the Principle of Population in 1857 with copious commentaries and many appendices. 2350 A second edition of Garnier's epitome was published and edited by Molinari in 1885 following shortly after Garnier's death in 1881. 2351

Perhaps under the influence of Bastiat who rejected orthodox Malthusianism, some of the political economists, like Molinari, realised that Malthus had underestimated the ability of the free market, free trade, and industrialization to increase output at a faster pace than population growth. One of Bastiat's criticisms of Malthusianism was that it did not distinguish between unthinking plants and animals, which were subject to Malthusian population traps, and thinking and reasoning human beings who could adapt their behaviour to changing circumstances. The question whether mankind's reproductive behavior was like that of a plant or a creature capable of reason was crucial in Bastiat's rethinking of Malthus's theory in the period between 1846, when he wrote an article on "On Population" for the JDE 2352 and 1850 when the Economic Harmonies appeared. Bastiat came to believe that, unlike plants and animals, humans were thinking and reasoning creatures who could change their behavior according to circumstances:

Thus, for both plants and animals, the limiting force seems to take only one form, that of destruction . But man is endowed with reason, with foresight; and this new factor alters the manner in which this force affects him. 2353

He also came to the conclusion that there was a significant difference between the "means of subsistence" and the "means of existence" - the former being fixed physiologically speaking (either one had sufficient food to live or one did not) and the latter being an infinitely flexible and expanding notion which depended upon the level of technology and the extent of the free market. 2354 Malthus focused on the former, whilst Bastiat (and Say) and later Molinari were focused on the latter.

The Means of Subsistence vs. the Means of Existence

In Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population (1st ed. 1798; 2nd revised and enlarged ed., 1803; 5th ed. 1817) he formulated a "law of population growth" which was "that population, when unchecked, increased in a geometrical ratio; and subsistence for man in an arithmetical ratio." (See the glossary entry on Malthusianism and French Political Economy" for a fuller quote).

For Malthus, "the means of subsistence" (in French "les moyens de subsistance"), is the bare minimum number of calories required to ensure the survival of a human being. This amount was biologically determined so when a population, whether of rabbits or human beings, grew faster than the food supply some would weaken and eventually die from lack of food.

However, there was another school of thought, which included Jean-Baptiste Say and Frédéric Bastiat, which argued that beyond a certain level of very basic economic activity another factor came into play for human beings, namely "les moyens d'existence" (the means of existence) or what today would be called "the standard of living." After beginning as a fairly orthodox Malthusian, Bastiat, following Say, eventually came to the conclusion that there was a significant difference between the "means of subsistence" and the "means of existence" - the former being fixed physiologically speaking (either one had sufficient food to live or one did not) and the latter being an infinitely flexible and expanding notion which depended upon the level of technology and the extent of the free market. Bastiat therefore rejected the idea that the poor were condemned to hovering just above or just below the means of subsistence. The productivity of the free market, if it were unshackled from its protectionist chains and high levels of taxation, would dramatically raise the standard of living of all people.

His more optimistic view about the ability of markets to produce sufficient food and of people to plan the size of their own families put Bastiat at loggerheads with the more orthodox political economists, some of whom like Joseph Garnier and Gustave de Molinari remained ardent Malthusians.

Phalanstery (Phalanx).

Self-sustaining community of the followers of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. He envisaged that new communities of people would spring up in order to escape the injustices of free-market societies and industrialism. He borrowed the Greek word "phalanxes" for his new self-supporting communities, each of which would consist of about sixteen hundred people who would live in a specially designed building, called in French a phalanstère, or "phalanstery." A number of communities modelled on his ideas were set up in North America—in Texas, Ohio, New Jersey, and New York. Fourier's ideas had some influence in French politics during the revolution of 1848 through the activities of Victor Considerant and his "right to work" movement.

The Right to Work (Right to a Job) (Le Droit au Travail)

The "right to work" ( le droit au travail, which one might translate in English as the "right to a job" using "travail" as a noun) had been a catch phrase of the socialists throughout the 1840s. What they meant by this term was that the state had the duty to provide work for all men who demanded it. In contrast, the classical liberal economists called for the "right of working," or the "freedom to work" ( la liberté du travail, or le droit de travailler using "travail" as a verb), by which they meant the right of any individual to pursue an occupation or activity without any restraints imposed upon him by the state. The latter point of view was articulated by Charles Dunoyer in his De la liberté du travail (1845) and the socialist perspective was provided by Louis Blanc in L'Organisation du travail (1839) and Le Socialisme, droit au travail (1848) and by Victor Considérant in La Théorie du droit de propriété et du droit au travail (1848).

The socialists claimed that it was the duty of the government to provide every able-bodied Frenchman with a job and the job creation program initiated by the Provisional Government in the first days of the revolution, called the National Workshops, was designed to carry this out. The Economists fiercely opposed this scheme and Bastiat used his position in the Finance Committee to argue strenuously against it. Matters came to a head in May 1848, when a committee of the Constituent Assembly was formed to discuss the issue of "the right to work" just prior to the closing of the state-run National Workshops, which prompted widespread rioting in Paris. In a veritable "who's who" of the socialist and liberal movements of the day, a debate took place in the Assembly and was duly published by the classical liberal publishing firm of Guillaumin later in the year along with suitable commentary by such leading liberal economists as Léon Faucher, Louis Wolowski, Joseph Garnier, and Bastiat. 2355

In spite of his and the other Economists' opposition Chapter 2, Article 13, of the Constitution of November 4, 1848 explicitly stated that "The Constitution guarantees citizens the liberty of work and industry. Society favours and encourages the development of work by means of free primary education, professional education, equality of relations between employers and workers, institutions of insurance and credit, agricultural institutions, voluntary associations, and the establishment by the state, the departments and the communes of public works suitable for employing idle hands; it provides assistance to abandoned children, to the sick and the old without means, which their families cannot help."

This article raises the problem which concerned the Economists deeply of the difference between the free market idea of "the liberty of work and industry" (la liberté du travail et de l'industrie) and the socialist idea of the "right to a job" (la liberté au travail) which increasingly became an issue during the Revolution. The Constitution of November 1848 specifically refers to the former but also seems to advocate the latter with the phrase "public works suitable for reemploying the unemployed".

The Socialist Critique of Property and the Economists' Replies

The socialist critique of property came to a head in February 1848 when Louis Blanc and his colleagues set up the National Workshops during the chaos of the early days of the Provisional Government. Socialists within the Constituent Assembly also attempted, unsuccessfully, to have a "right to a job" clause inserted into the new Constitution of the Second Republic. The economists and their liberal allies confronted the socialist challenge both within the Chamber (e.g. Léon Faucher, Louis Wolowski, and Alexis de Tocqueville) and with a series of pamphlets and books with Bastiat's dozen of so anti-socialist pamphlets written between June 1848 and July 1850 being particularly noteworthy. The socialist critique of property rights began with Louis Blanc, L'Organisation du travail (The Organization of Labour) (1839) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Qu'est-ce que la propriété? (What is Property? (1840) and continued throughout the 1840s with works such as that by Prosper Considerant, Théorie du droit de propriété et du droit au travail (1845). The Economists responded with works by Michel Chevalier and Charles Dunoyer, De la Liberté travail (On the Liberty of Working) (1845) and many shorter articles by Bastiat in the late 1840s, before unleashing a flood of material during the Second Republic. The lengthy work by the conservative politician and historian Adolphe Thiers, De la propriété (1848) is the best known of these.

Endnotes↩↩

1 For a more detailed description of the publication history of the Oeuvres completes, see " Note on the Editions of the Oeuvres Complètes " and the bibliography.

2 "Bastiat's Letters, Articles, and Books Listed in Chronological Order"

can be found at the Online Library of Liberty website </pages/bastiat-chrono-list>.

3 See "Bastiat's Theory of Class: The Plunderers vs. the Plundered" in Further Aspect of Bastiat's Thought , in CW3, pp. 473-85.

4 Bastiat uses this term in ES3 6 "The People and the Bourgeoisie", p. 000-00. See "Chamber of Deputies and Elections" in Appendix 2: The French State and Politics , below, pp. 000.

5 See David A. Wells' translation of Essays on political economy (1877); Patrick James Stirling's translation of Harmonies of Political Economy (1860, 1870, 1880) and Economic Sophisms (1873); and Hayden Boyers' translation of Economic Harmonies (FEE, 1964), Arthur Goddard's translation of Economic Sophisms (FEE, 1964), and Seymour Cain's translation of WSWNS (FEE, 1964).

6 See, "Letter from an Economist to Lamartine of the Right to Work" (JDE, Jan. 1845), below, pp. 000.

7 EH II "Needs, Efforts, and Satisfactions," pp. 000. FEE p. 24.

8 See "Free Credit"( Oct. 1849 to March 1850), below, pp. 000.

9 See below, pp. 000.

10 ES1 10 "Reciprocity" (JDE, Oct. 1845), in CW3, pp. 57-60.

11 ES2 10 "The Tax Collector" (c. 1847), in CW3, pp. 179-87.

12 WSWNS 7 Trade Restrictions, in CW3, pp. 427-32.

13 ES2 16 "The Right Hand and the Left Hand" (LE, 13 Dec. 1846), in CW3, pp. 240-48.

14 Oeuvres complètes de Frédéric Bastiat, mises en ordre, revues et annotées d'après les manuscrits de l'auteur (Paris: Guillaumin, 1854-55). 6 vols. Edited by Prosper Paillottet with the assistance of Royer de Fontenay, but they are not credited on the title page. A listing of the volumes are as follows:

Vol. 1: Correspondance et mélanges (1855); Vol. 2: Le Libre-Échange (1855); Vol. 3: Cobden et la Ligue ou L'agitation anglaise pour la liberté des échanges (1854); Vol. 4: Sophismes économiques. Petits pamphlets I (1854); Vol. 5: Sophismes économiques. Petits pamphlets II (1854); Vol. 6: Harmonies économiques (1855)

15 Vol. 7: Essais, ébauches, correspondance (1864).

16 Oeuvres complètes de Frédéric Bastiat . 7 volumes, ed. Jacques de Guenin (Institut Charles Coquelin, 2014); and Oeuvres complètes de Frédéric Bastiat . 7 volumes (Paris: Institut Coppet, 2015). < http://editions.institutcoppet.org/produit/oeuvres-completes-de-frederic-bastiat/ >.

17 Two other contributions merit at least a footnote. In his review of François Vidal's book De la répartition des richesses ou de la justice distributive en économie sociale (Paris : Capelle, 1846), Bastiat deals with epistemological problems of economic analysis. And in "curious economic phenomenon," Bastiat anticipates the so-called "Laffer curve" and shows that it not only applies to public finance, but to monopoly theory as well; see also his "Liberty and Peace, or the Republican Budget," published in vol. 2 of the Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat .

18 Roughly speaking, the watershed between early and mature writings is the year 1845, when Bastiat travelled to England to observe the condition of the working classes under advanced capitalism and meet the leaders of the free-trade movement. His "considerations on the métayage system" are for example an early work even though they were published in 1846 (I owe this latter information to Jacques de Guenin and Jean-Claude Paul-Dejean).

19 See Bastiat, Harmonies économiques (2 nd ed., Paris: Guillaumin, 1851), chap. XVI, in particular pp. 444f. He later also argued that everybody, not just land owners, benefited from a population increase. See Bastiat, Harmonies économiques , chap. VII, p. 199 and chap. IX.

20 See Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail (Paris: Administration de Librairie, 1841 [1839]).

21 See in particular Jean Baptiste Jobard, Nouvelle économie sociale ou monautopole industriel, artistique, commercial et littéraire : fondé sur la pérennité des brevets d'invention, dessins, modèles et marques de fabrique (Paris : Mathias, 1844) ; idem, Organon de la propriété intellectuelle (Paris: Mathias, 1851).

22 He develops this argument in more detail in his chapter on competition in Economic Harmonies (chap. X). The letter to Jobard is polite in tone. Bastiat is much more upfront in a review, also contained in the present volume, of Dunoyer's De la liberté du travail (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845), where he ridicules Jobard's position. Notice however that this review was published only posthumously in his Oeuvres . For a general survey of the debate on patents at the time, see in particular F. Machlup and E. Penrose, "The Patent Controversy in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of Economic History , vol. 10, no. 1 (1950), pp. 1-29; B. Lemennicier, "Propriété intellectuelle et protection des idées: la bataille du XIXe siècle," in A. Madelin, Aux sources du modèle liberal français (Paris: Perrin, 1997).

23 Not to be confused with the founder of positivism, Auguste Comte. Bastiat praises Charles Comte's Traité de legislation, Ou exposition des lois générales suivant lesquelles les peuples prospèrent, dépérissent ou restent stationnaires (4 vols., Paris: Sautelet, 1826-27) in a report on a commemorative speech held in Comte's honour at the Académie des sciences morales et politiques , also contained in the present volume. Comte had been a lifetime secretary of the Académie ever since its foundation in 1832. Bastiat was a corresponding member. The work of the authors who influenced Bastiat most is discussed in Mark Weinburg, "The Social Analysis of Three Early 19 th century French liberals: Say, Comte, and Dunoyer," Journal of Libertarian Studies , vol. 2, no. 1 (1978), pp. 45-63. See the glossary entry on "Charles Comte."

24 See Comte, Traité de la propriété (2 vols, Paris: Chamerot and Ducollet, 1834), vol. II, chap. XXIX, p. 38.

25 See ibid., chap. XXXI, pp. 99-101.

26 See Modeste et al., De la propriété intellectuelle: études (Paris: Dentu, 1859). In the 20 th century, Murray Rothbard was the most effective advocate of the Comte-Bastiat position. See Rothbard, "Patents and Copyrights," Man Economy, and State (3 rd ed., Auburn, Al.: Mises Institute, 1993), chap. 10, pp. 652-660. Interestingly, some recent libertarian scholarship denies the existence of intellectual property rights – essentially along the lines of Blanc, Coquelin, Walras, and Proudhon, yet without seeing any need for subsidies or monopolies to encourage intellectual work. See in particular T.G. Palmer, "Intellectual Property: A Non-Posnerian Law and Economics Approach," Hamline Law Review , vol. 12, no. 2 (1989), pp. 261-304; idem, "Are Patents and Copyrights Morally Justified? The Philosophy of Property Rights and Ideal Objects," Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy , vol. 13, no. 3 (1990), pp. 817-865; N.S. Kinsella, "Against Intellectual Property," Journal of Libertarian Studies , vol. 15, no. 2 (2001), pp. 1-53.

27 Similarly, Pierre Joseph Proudhon denied the existence of such rights and called for public art subsidies to encourage intellectual production. See Dominique Sagot-Duvauroux (éd.), La propriété intellectuelle c'est le vol ! (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002). This is a republication of Proudhon's Les majorats littéraires (1863) along with papers by Léon Walras, Jules Dupuit, Frédéric Bastiat, and Louis Blanc. A collection of essays by contemporary philosophers and novelists on copyrights is in Jan Baetens, Le combat du droit d'auteur (Brussels : Les impressions nouvelles, 2001).

28 According to Böhm-Bawerk, the most important authors of this current were Thompson, Sismondi, Proudhon, Rodbertus, and Marx. See Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest , vol. I: History and Critique of Interest Theories (South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, 1959), pp. 242-248.

29 See J.Ch.L. Simonde de Sismondi, Nouveaux principes d'économie politique (2 nd ed., Paris: Delaunay, 1827), pp. 110-112. Böhm-Bawerk portrays the author as a pioneer of exploitation theory, stating that "Sismondi outlined a doctrine which has all the essential features of the theory of exploitation with one exception. He refrains from pronouncing an adverse judgment on interest!" Böhm-Bawerk, History and Critique of Interest Theories , p. 244.

30 Ibid., p. 246.

31 In his posthumously published Theory of Property , however, Proudhon performed a complete volte-face. He now argued that private property was the greatest revolutionary force and, in fact, the only countervailing power against the encroachments of the State. Still he made various exceptions to this principle, for example, holding that capital goods could not be bequeathed. See Proudhon, Théorie de la propriété (Paris: Librairie internationale, 1866).

32 His pacifist individualist anarchism approach brought him into conflict with authoritarian state socialists like Louis Blanc, with collectivist enemies of the State such as Mikhail Bakunin, and, most famously, with Karl Marx.

33 See Proudhon, Organisation du crédit et de la circulation, et solution du problème social sans impôt, sans emprunt, sans numéraire, sans atteinte à la propriété (Paris: Pilhes, 1848). Other editions appeared in 1848 and the following years with Garnier publishers. An English translation is Proudhon, Solution to the Social Problem (New York: Vanguard Press, 1927).

34 Ibid., p. 45.

35 See Proudhon, Intérêt et principal: Discussion entre M. Proudhon et M. Bastiat sur l'intérêt des capitaux (Paris: Garnier, 1850) ; Bastiat, Gratuité du crédit : discussion entre M. Fr. Bastiat et M. Proudhon (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850). There was no more follow-up to this debate.

36 See Bastiat, Harmonies économiques , chap. VII, p. 206. See also letter no. 8 to Proudhon. The same point had also been made by the American economist Carey. Shortly after Bastiat's death, the latter charged the Frenchman with plagiarism, but later recognized Bastiat's integrity.

37 Bastiat dealt only incidentally (letter no. 10 to Proudhon) with the distinction between interest and profit that would be much discussed by later economists. Also, following the example of the classical economists, Bastiat generally neglected the analysis of the impact of money on the economy. Among the very few exceptions is the already mentioned paper on "cursed money" – its curse is that people tend to cherish errors about its nature that are of great consequence. A modern assessment of this paper is in Mark Thornton, "Frédéric Bastiat's Views on the Nature of Money," Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics , vol. 5, no. 3 (2002). The author concludes: "Not only does he explain the inevitable consequences of mercantilist monetary policy, but he also goes on to explain the critical weaknesses of modern equilibrium approaches to monetary theory and monetarism. As one views the world and sees global economic chaos, growing class conflict, widely divergent economic opportunity, and perpetual war, Bastiat provides a clear and concise guide to its cause." (ibid., p. 86) Bastiat also wrote a paper on the problems of exporting money: "Sur l'exportation du numéraire," Œuvres complètes (3rd ed., 1863), vol. II, pp. 112-116 [Also, below, pp. 000]. And in letter no. 12 to Proudhon he discusses various monetary questions, for example, fractional-reserve banking. The latter is illicit in his eyes; however, arguing along the lines of his friend Charles Coquelin (to whom he refers in letter no. 10), Bastiat holds that free competition would curb excessive monetary production through banks.

38 See Böhm-Bawerk, History and Critique of Interest Theories , pp. 191-194 (footnotes on p. 461).

39 Ibid., p. 191.

40 Ibid., p. 194.

41 See ibid., pp. 111-116.

42 T.19 (1844.10.15) "De l'influence des tarifs français et anglais sur l'avenir des deux peuples" (On the Influence of French and English Tariffs on the Future of the Two People), JDE, T. IX, Oct. 1844, pp. 244-71. [OC1, pp. 334-86.] [CW6]

43 Hippolyte Dussard (1798-1876) was a journalist, essayist, and economist. He edited the JDE 1843-45 and was a co-editor with Eugène Daire of the Works of Turgot for the Collection des Principaux Économistes published by Guillaumin. Dussard was also a businessman involved with the Paris to Rouen railway, and during the Second Republic he was appointed the prefect of la Seine-Inférieure and was elected to the Council of State.

44 Count Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy (1795-1856) was liberal minded politician and writer in July Monarchy. He served as Minister of Eduction in1837 and supported Guizot in his reform of the French education system. He later was appointed vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies and then served as Ambassador to Spain and Turin.

45 In the article which was published in JDE there is mention of "the state of ignorance in which the press systematically keeps the French public with regard to affairs in England." and "details of this Association here, whose existence the press in Paris has scarcely revealed to us." He returned to this topic in the Introduction to his first book Cobden and the League (1845) where he says " the subsidized monopolistic press has kept it hidden for so long ." and " the profound, general and systematic silence that the French press seems to have imposed on itself," and " I know that it is rash nowadays to give offence to the periodical press. It manipulates us all arbitrarily . Woe betide anyone who seeks to escape its despotism which must be absolute! Woe betide anyone who arouses its wrath which is deadly!" CW6 (forthcoming).

46 Les Eaux-Bonnes was a spa town in the Pyrenees near where Bastiat lived in Mugron. He went there periodically as his health deteriorated. From this letter it appears that Bastiat met Muiron there and they became friends. It was in Eaux-Bonnes in June and July of 1850 that Bastiat wrote two of his best known essays "The Law"(June 1850) and "What is Seen and What is Not Seen" (July 1850).

47 Félix Coudroy (1801-74) was the son of a doctor from Mugron and was a boyhood friend and eventually a neighbour of Bastiat's in Mugron. He studied law in Toulouse and Paris but a long illness prevented him from practicing. Coudroy and Bastiat were both members of a local discussion group in Mugron, "The Academy," where they pursued their intellectual interests for over 20 years.

48 Charles Dunoyer (1786-1862) was a journalist; an academic (a professor of political economy); a politician; the author of numerous works on politics, political economy, and history; a founding member of the PES (1842) of which he was the permanent president; and a key figure in the French classical liberal movement of the first half of the nineteenth century.

49 Félix Coudroy, "De l'influence de l'esprit et des procédés de la Ligue sur les progrès de la civilisation," JDE, T. 12, N° 48, Novembre 1845, pp. 349-368.

50 Prosper Paillottet (1804-78) was a successful businessman in the jewelry industry and was active in the French Free Trade Association. He became a close friend of Bastiat and in his final days spent time with him in Rome and agreed to become his literary executor, forming a group called the "Société des amis de Bastiat" (Society of the Friends of Bastiat) which would preserve his papers and edit his collected works.

51 See below, pp. 000.

52 Hortense Cheuvreux (née Girard) (1808-1893) was married to Jean Pierre-Casimir Cheuvreux (1797-1881), who was a wealthy textile merchant and was active in liberal circles in Paris, helping to fund their activities. Hortense ran an important salon from their Paris home and became a close friend of Bastiat's. In 1877 she published Bastiat's letters to her family in Lettres d'un habitant des Landes which are quite personal and show a very side to Bastiat.

53 Roger de Fontenay (1809-91) was a member of the PES and an ally of Bastiat in their debates in the Société on the nature of rent (they rejected the orthodox Ricardian view) and Malthus's theory of population (they rejected his pessimism). Fontenay worked with Prosper Paillottet in publishing Bastiat's 2nd edition of Economic Harmonies in 1851 and his Œeuvres complètes in 1854 for which he wrote a lengthy introduction.

54 Ronce says that Bastiat had asked Paillottet to send him some books he had forgotten to bring with him from Paris, namely Jeremy Bentham's Essay on Political Tactics: Containing Six of the Principal Rules Proper to be Observed by a Political Assembly (1791) and a copy of the Constitution , "in case he had a chance to reflect on the changes that were taking place there."

55 Bastiat is referring to Roger de Fontenay, Du revenu foncier (Paris: Guillaumin, 1854).

56 Henry C. Carey (1793-1879) was an American economist who argued that national economic development should be promoted by extensive government subsidies and high tariff protection. There were several topics on which he was close to the French economists, most notably his idea that economies are governed by the operation of natural laws which are observable by men, and that there is no inherent reason why the interests of economic actors are not "harmonious" in a free society. His best known book is The Harmony of Interests, Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial (1851).

57 Harmonies économiques , par M. Frédéric Bastiat. (Compte-rendu par M.A. Clément), JDE, T. 26, N° 111, 15 juin 1850, pp. 235-47.

58 Henry Charles Carey, Principles of Political Economy (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1837-1840), 3 vols.

59 Henry Charles Carey, The Harmony of Interests agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial (Philadelphia: J. S. Skinner, 1851).

60 "Les Harmonies Économiques. Lettre de M. Carey; Réponse de MM. Bastiat et A. Clément," JDE, T. 28, no. 117, 15 Jan. 1851, pp. 38-54. Bastiat's Letter can be found in CW1, Letter 209, pp. 297-302.

61 "Observations de M. H.C. Carey, au sujet de la dernière note de Frédéric Bastiat," JDE, T. 29, N° 121, 15 May 1851, pp. 43-51.

62 P. Paillottet, "Correspondance. Au sujet des reclamations de M.H. Carey," JDE, T. 29, N° 122, 15 June 1851, pp. 156-60.

63 Paillottet cites Réflexions sur les pétitions de Bordeaux, le Havre et Lyon, concernant les douanes, par Frédéric Bastiat, membre du Conseil général du département des Landes. (A Mont-de-Marsan, chez Delaroy, imprimeur de la Préfecture et de l'Echévé, Avril 1834). 16 pp. This can be found in CW2.1, pp. 1-9.

64 "Lettre de M. Carey," JDE, T. 21, no. 129, 15 Jan. 1852, pp. 81-83.

65 See the glossary entry on "Service for Service."

66 His last formal speech in the Chamber was on 12 Dec. 1849, on "The Tax on Wine and Spirits", CRANL, vol. 4, p. 159-65. OC5, pp. 468-93. CW2.16, pp. 328-47. He last spoke in the Chamber in a debate on plans to give money to Workers' Associations on 9 Feb. 1850, CRANL, vol. 5, p. 452; also see below pp. 000.

67 Andral was Bastiat's doctor in Paris.

68 Bastiat's estranged wife Clotilde Hiard had died on 10 February 1850 and it was rumoured that they had had a son, but Bastiat never mentioned either in his correspondence. His aunt Justine who had raised him when his own parents had died when he was quite young still lived in Mugron and Bastiat visited her frequently.

69 Bastiat would die on 24 December.

70 See Bastiat's letter to Richard Cobden about his own trip to Italy for similar stories, Letter 199 to Cobden (Pisa, 18 Oct. 1850), CW1, pp. 282-83.

71 Eugène de Monclar (1800-1882) was Bastiat's first cousin and a priest. Like Bastiat, he worked in the family commercial firm, which he left to study law. Shortly after becoming a lawyer, he studied for the priesthood. He visited him in Rome and gave Bastiat the last rites when he died on December 24, 1850.

72 Bastiat is possibly referring to Charles Planat (1801-1858) who had been a businessman in Cognac and its mayor 1838-1848. During the revolution he was elected a Deputy representing Charente. He sat on the right in the Chamber, possibly with the moderate Republicans, and probably got to know Bastiat then.

73 Gilbert-Urbain Guillaumin (1810-1864) was a mid-19th century French classical liberal publisher who founded a publishing dynasty which lasted from 1835 to around 1910 and became the focal point for the classical liberal movement in France. His firm became the major publishing house for liberal ideas in the mid nineteenth century. Guillaumin helped found the JDE in 1841 with Horace Say (Jean-Baptiste's son) and Joseph Garnier. The following year he helped found the PES which became the main organization which brought like-minded classical liberals together for discussion and debate.

74 See above for information about the controversy between Carey and Bastiat over a charge of plagiarism, pp. 000.

75 Horace Say (1794-1860) was the son of Jean-Baptiste Say. He married Anne Cheuvreux, sister of Casimir Cheuvreux, whose family were friends of Bastiat. Say was a businessman and was very active in liberal circles, participating in the foundation of the PES, the Guillaumin publishing firm, the JDE , and was an important collaborator in the creation of the Dictionnaire de l'économe politique (1852-53) and the Dictionnaire du commerce et des marchandises (1837, 1852).

76 This is a wry reference to his earlier efforts to reform the postal system in France during 1848. He wanted to drastically cut the cost of sending and receiving letters so ordinary people could afford to communicate with each. He wanted to eliminate the tax on sending letters, and charge a flat rate for pre-paid stamps paid by the sender (not the recipient) which was modeled on the British Uniform Penny Post which had been introduced in 1840. See below for some essays he wrote on this topic, pp. 000.

77 Bastiat,"On Competition,"which first appeared in l'Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle (no date given) and then rewritten with a very different first half for the JDE , May 1846. It was then revised again and appeared as Chap. X "Competition" in the first edition of Economic Harmonies . See below, pp. 000.

78 Bastiat, "Population" which first appeared in Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle (probably mid-1846) and then republished as "On Population" in JDE , Oct. 1846. A revised version of this article appeared as chap. 16 in the 2nd, posthumous edition of Economic Harmonies (1851), with extensive explanatory notes by Fontenay. See below, pp. 000.

79 Bastiat, "Natural and Artificial Organisation", JDE , January 1848, which was republished with minor changes as the opening to the 1st edition of EH ; "Economic Harmonies: I., II., and III. The Needs of Man" JDE , 1 Sept. 1848 and "Economic Harmonies IV", JDE , 15 Dec. 1848. These 4 articles on "Economic Harmonies" were slightly changed and appeared as chapters 1-3 in the 1st edition of EH . See below, pp. 000.

80 Bastiat, Capital and Rent (published as a pamphlet in February 1849), and his lengthy discussion with Proudhon on Free Credit which appeared between October 1849 and March 1850. See below, pp. 000.

81 See in particular the discussion of Bastiat's ideas on land credit and rent in the April 10, 1850 meeting of the Political Economy Society, as reported in the JDE , 15 April 1850, T. XXVI, pp. 99-101. See below, pp. 000.

82 Ambroise Clément (1805-86) was an economist and secretary to the mayor of Saint-Étienne for many years. He was a member of the PES from 1848, a regular writer and reviewer for the JDE , and was made a corresponding member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1872.

83 Harmonies économiques , par M. Frédéric Bastiat. (Compte-rendu par M.A. Clément), JDE , T. 26, N° 111, 15 June 1850, pp. 235-47.

84 See the glossary entry on "Service for Service."

85 Joseph Garnier (1813-81) was a professor, journalist, politician, and activist for free trade and peace. He was appointed the first professor of political economy at the École des ponts et chaussées in 1846 and was one of the leading exponents of Malthusian population theory. Garnier was one of the founders of L'Association pour la liberté des échanges and (with Bastiat) of the 1848 liberal broadsheet Jacques Bonhomme .

86 "La deuxième édition des Harmonies économiques de Frédéric Bastiat," par M. Joseph Garnier, JDE , T. 29, N° 124, 15 August 1851, pp. 312-16.

87 Molinari, "Nécrologie. Frédéric Bastiat, notice sur sa vie et ses écrits," JDE , T. 28, N° 118, 15 février 1851, pp. 180-96.

88 Molinari, "Nécrologie," pp. 195-96.

89 See Letter 180 To Fontenay 3 July 1850, CW1, p255-56. Also, Letter 158 to Félix Coudroy (Jan. 1850), Letter 167 To Prosper Paillottet (19 May 1850), Letter 174 To Hortense Cheuvreux (15 June 1850), Letter 175 To Prosper Paillottet (23 June 1850), Letter 180 To Fontenay (3 July 1850), Letter 181 To Hortense Cheuvreux (4 July 1850), Letter 182 To Horace Say (4 July 1850), Letter 184 To Casimir Cheuvreux (14 July 1850), Letter 185 To Richard Cobden (3 Aug. 1850), Letter 188 To Richard Cobden (9 Sept. 1850), Letter 196 To Bernard Domenger (8 Oct. 1850), Letter 203 To Félix Coudroy (11 Nov. 1850), Letter 206 To Prosper Paillottet (8 Dec. 1850), Letter 209 Bastiat's long letter to JDE (no date).

90 Nothing is known about M. Soustra other than Ronce describes him as one of Bastiat's friends.

91 By the end of 1849 Bastiat had completed 10 chapters of a much longer work and decided to published what he had as Economic Harmonies . This appeared in print in January 1850. He died before he could complete his project and his friends Prosper Paillotttet and Roger de Fontenay edited his papers and published a longer second edition of the work with 25 chapters in July 1851.

92 Armand Bertin (1801-1854) was the son of François Bertin who founded Le Journal des débats. He began working for his father's journal in 1822, took over as editor when he died in 1841, and remained with it until his death. The journal became one of the leading journals in France with authors like Hector Berlioz, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo writing for it. Politically it was rather conservative, opposing many liberal reforms during the July Monarchy . After 1848 it took a more moderate conservative position and economists like Michel Chevalier and Bastiat were able to have some essays published in it, most notably Bastiat's essay "The State" in September 1848, most likely because of their strong anti-socialist position.

93 Possibly a reference to Saint-Marc Girardin (1801-1873) who was a literary critic, professor of history at the Sorbonne (succeeding François Guizot), and a Deputy during the July Monarchy. During Bastiat's time he wrote multi-volume works on "passion in drama" and collections of criticism.

94 In his correspondence Bastiat complained about "un petit bouton" (a pimple or lump) in his larynx which made it difficult for him to swallow and talk. It might have been throat cancer. See, Letter 191. To Louise Cheuvreux (Sept. 14, 1850), CW1, p. 272.

95 It was written in March 1849 when the Chamber was debating whether or not public servants could also sit in the Chamber as elected representatives, and whether Ministers should be chosen from among the Deputies or outside the Chamber (Bastiat opposed both as "conflicts of interest"). It was also published as a pamphlet, Incompatibilités parlementaires (Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest) (1849). OC5, pp. 518-61; CW2.19, pp. 366-400. See also Bastiat's speeches in the Chamber on amending the electoral law, below, pp. 000.

96 Bastiat mentions Thiers on two occasions in the pamphlet, once on the matter of proposals for parliamentary reform, and once on colluding with Guizot to overthrow the government of Molé. It is not clear which one he is referring to here.

97 See note 000 above on the matter of Carey's charging Bastiat with plagiarism.

98 Even at this late stage in his illness Bastiat is able to joke about his well known theory of "the seen" and "the unseen."

99 Michel Chevalier (1806-87) was a liberal economist and alumnus of the École polytechnique and a Minister under Napoleon III. Initially a Saint-Simonist, he was appointed to the chair of political economy at the Collège de France in 1840 and became a senator in 1860. He was an admirer of Bastiat and Cobden and played a decisive role in the free trade treaty signed between France and England in 1860 (Chevalier was the signatory for France, while Cobden was the signatory for England).

100 We have not been able to locate this review by Chevalier.

101 Letter 8. Bayonne, 8 Dec. 1821. To Victor Calmètes, OC1, pp. 6-8; CW1, pp. 15-16.

102 T.3 (1834.??) "On a New Secondary School to Be Founded in Bayonne" (D'un nouveau collège à fonder). Published in an unnamed Bayonne newspaper in 1834. OC7.2, pp. 4-10; CW1, p. 415-19.

103 T.199 (1848.03.05) "Curée des Places" (The Scramble for Positions), La République française , 5 March 1848. OC7.54, p. 232; CW1, pp. 431-32.

104 T.247 (1850.??) Baccalaureate and Socialism (Baccalaureate et socialisme). Written in early 1850 for a Parliamentary commission on free education; also published as a pamphlet, Baccalauréat et Socialisme (The Baccalaureate and Socialism) (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850). OC4, pp. 442-503; CW2.11, pp. 185-234. Quote p. 208.

105 See pp. 000.

106 The restored Bourbon monarchy of 1815 was overthrown in late July 1830 in order to create a more liberal and constitutional monarchy under Louis-Philippe, which was known as the "July Monarchy."

107 Étienne Vincent Arago (1802-1892) was the youngest brother of the famous Arago family. It is possible that Bastiat knew Étienne as they were both in Sorèze attending school at the same time (c. 1815).

108 Letter 18. Bayonne, 5 Aug. 1830. To Félix Coudroy, OC1, pp. 24-27; CW1, pp. 28-30. Quote on p. 30.

109 T.131 (1847.05.300 "Two Losses against One Profit" (Deux pertes contre un profit. À M. Arago, de l'Académie des Sciences), LE , 30 May 1847, no. 27, pp. 215-16. OC2, pp. 384-91; ES3.7 in CW3, pp. 287-93.

110 The Ancient Greek school of thought known as "Pyrrhonism", after its founder Pyrrho of Elis (360-c.270 BC), advocated a form of scepticism, or the idea that nothing can be known for certain. In other words, that knowledge of the world can be erroneous, our senses can be deceived, and our emotions can lead us astray.

111 Mount Olympus is the highest mountain in Greece and was thought to be the dwelling place of the Greek gods; Mount Parnassus is a mountain in central Greece which played an important role in the cult of Dionysius (Bacchus) who was the god of wine and wine making; Naiads were believed by the Greeks to be a female nymph who presided over streams and bodies of fresh water; Dryads were believed by the Geeks to be be tree spirits, especially of oak tress.

112 Aphrodite (Venus) was the god of beauty and love, whose husband Hephaestus (the god of blacksmiths) made a belt or girdle for her which accentuated her physical shape; Cupid (Love) was the god of desire and love who filled a person with uncontrollable desire by shooting them with one of his arrows. He wore a blindfold to suggest he lacked discrimination in whom he shot with his arrows.

113 Iris was a goddess of the sea and the sky and served as a messenger of the gods.

114 Apollo was the son of Zeus and one of the most of the Greek gods. He was considered to be a sun god and one of his tasks was to drive a chariot across the sky pulling the sun in its wake.

115 Sébastien-Louis Saulnier (1790-1835) was a journalist who founded the Revue britannique in 1825 which provided French readers with detailed analysis of events in Britain and America.

116 Cooper provides his account of how he became involved in the debate in A Letter to his Countrymen (1834), pp. 7-11.

117 [Unsigned], "Rapprochemens entre les dépenses publiques de la France et celles des états-unis," Revue britannique , May 1831; Saulnier, "Nouvelles observations sur les finances des États-Unis," Revue britannique , Oct. 1831; "Observations de M. Harris, citoyen de la Pennsylvanie, ancien envoyé des États-Unis à Saint-Petersbourg, sur les Finances des Étas-Unis," Revue britannique , Nov. 1831.

118 Saulnier, Nouvelles observations sur les finances des États-Unis (1831).

119 Saulnier gives the figure of 36 fr. 94 c. paid on average by Americans while the French paid 33 fr. 60c. in Nouvelles observations sur les finances des États-Unis , pp. 53-54.

120 Under the old regime in France the most hated of the taxes imposed on the peasantry were the forced labour obligations or "corvées" which required local farmers to work a certain number of days every year (8) for their local lord or on various local and national road works. They were abolished in 1818 only to be reintroduced in 1824 (2 days per year) and increased to 3 days per year in 1836 with the further refinement of some individuals being able to buy their way of service for a money payment. US had corvée ???

121 Militia obligations in US ???

122 Bastiat uses the phrase "spoliateur et oppresseur" which might be his first use of the term "spoliateur" (plunderer) in his writings. See the glossary entry on "Bastiat's Theory of Plunder and Plunders."

123 Bastiat lists the occupations which were either supplied by the state, highly regulated by state, or goods which the state had a monopoly of production (tobacco).

124 François Faurie (1785-1854) was a merchant from Bayonne who was elected Deputy representing Basses-Pyrénées from 1831 to 1837.

125 "To the Electors of the Département of the Landes" (Nov. 1830), CW1, pp. 341-67. Quote p. 346.

126 His reports to the General Council include "The Tax Authorities and Wine" (January, 1841), CW2, pp. 10-23. Reports to other local bodies include "On the Wine-Growing Question" (22 January, 1843), CW2, pp. 25-42; "On the Allocation of the Land Tax" (July 1844), below, pp. 000.

127 "To the Electors of the District of Saint-Sever" (1846), CW1, pp. 352-67.

128 "To the Electors of the District of Saint-Sever" (1846), CW1, pp. 363-65.

129 "To the Electors of the District of Saint-Sever" (1846), CW1, p. 355.

130 General Jean-Maximien Lamarque (1770-1832) was a general under Napoleon and was exiled in 1815 for three years. After his return he wrote a book defending the idea that France could still have a standing army if it were run on more economical lines. In the Landes, he showed a great interest in improving agriculture and the means of communication and transport. He was elected deputy of the Landes in 1828 and 1830 and was an influential speaker in the Chamber, and was President of the Conseil Général of Les landes in 1831.

131 See below, pp. 000, pp. 000, pp. 000, pp. 000.

132 Bastiat confuses the definition of a gramme and a metre which was established in 1793 during the Revolution. A gramme was defined as "the absolute weight of a volume of pure water equal to the cube of the hundredth part of a metre, and at the temperature of melting ice". A metre was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole.

133 See, Cécile Mondonico-torri, "Les réfugiés en france sous la monarchie de juillet: l'impossible statut," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine , 2000/4 (no 47-4), pp. 731-745.

134 See, No. 165 "Loi relative aux Étrangers réfugiés qui résideront en France" (A Paris, au palais des Tuileries, le 21 Avril 1832) in Bulletin des lois de la République française. IXe Série. Règne de Louis-Philippe Ier, roi des Français. Ire Partie, contenant les lois rendues pendant l'année 1832. Tome IV. Nos. 55 à 81. (Paris: Imprimerie nationale des lois, Janvier 1833), pp. 192-93.

135 Antoine Simon Durrieu (1775-1862) was a Landais native who rose to the rank of Major General during the campaign in Russia in 1812. He joined the local regiment in Bayonne in 1793 and served with distinction in most of the major battles of the Napoleonic Wars. He continued to serve in the military during the Restoration, was ennobled in 1830, awarded the Legion of Honour in 1834, made a Peer in 1845, and was elected to represent the Department of Les Landes between 1834-1845 and again 1851-52.

136 Bastiat had had family business interests in Spain and Portugal when he worked for his grandfather's trading company and then later in 1840 when he tried to set up an insurance company there.

137 CW1, pp. 309-12.

138 CW1, pp. 305-8.

139 La Chalosse: Journal de l'arrondissement de Saint-Sever (11 Dec. 1836-26 March 1876).

140 "Reflections on the Petitions" (April 1834), CW2, p. 1.

141 T.19 [1844.10.15] "On the Influence of French and English Tariffs on the Future of the Two People" (De l'influence des tarifs français et anglais sur l'avenir des deux peuples), JDE , T. IX, Oct. 1844, pp. 244-71 [OC1, pp. 334-86] [CW6]

142 See in the Introduction to CW3 "Bastiat's Rhetoric of Liberty: Satire and the 'Sting of Ridicule'", pp. lviii-lxiv.

143 Chap. 5 "Public Works," in WSWNS in CW4, pp. 419-21.

144 "Free Credit", below pp. 000.

145 Robert Leroux, A ux fondements de l'industrialisme: Comte, Dunoyer et la pensé libérale en France (Paris: Hermann, 2015).

146 Jacques-Nicolas Augustin Thierry (1795-1856) was a pioneering historian who is famous for his classical liberal class analysis of history and his extensive use of archival records in researching and writing this history. He began as the personal assistant to Saint-Simon (1814-1817) before joining Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer on their journal Le Censeur européen . It was here that he learned to analyze history using the social and economic theories developed by Comte and Dunoyer via the work of Jean-Baptiste Say. Thierry became interested in the ruling elites which governed nations, how they came to power (often through conquest as the Normans did of Saxon England), and the gradual emergence of free institutions such as the medieval communes and the Third Estate. See the glossary entries on "Charles Comte" and "Charles Dunoyer."

147 Bastiat, Cobden et la ligue, ou l'Agitation anglaise pour la liberté du commerce (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845). The long Introduction to this book will appear in CW6 (forthcoming).

148 T.8 (1837.06.?? "Untitled Fragment" (on a shareholder in a canal company) (no date). [OC7.69, p. 289] [CW1, p. 410]

149 1846.11.11 "Aux rédacteurs du National (2) (To the Editors of Le National (2)), Courrier français , 11 novembre 1846. [OC7.35, p. 159] [CW6]

150 ES1 9 "An Immense Discovery" (Oct. 1845), CW3, pp.54-57 ; ES1 10 "Reciprocity" (Oct. 1845), CW3, pp. 57-60; ES1 16 "Blocked Rivers pleading in favor of the Prohibitionists" (late 1845), CW3, pp. 80-81; and ES2 7 "A Chinese Tale" (late 1847), CW3, pp. 163-67.

151 ES1 17 "A Negative Railway" (c. 1845), CW1, pp. 81-83.

152 The building of a canal which would link the Mediterranean and the Atlantic was discussed on 15 June 1837 by the Chamber of Deputies. Part of it would run alongside (latéral) the Garonne river, linking Toulouse and Bordeaux, and a branch would link up with the Adour river which flowed into Bayonne. See, Procés-verbaux de la chambre des députés. Session de 1837. Vol. 6, Part 1, Juin et Juillet 1837. Annexes no. 249 à 269 (Paris: A. Henry, 1837), pp. 247-58.

153 C. Deschamps, Des travaux à faire pour l'assainissement et la culture des landes de Gascogne, et des canaux de jonction de l'Adour à la Garonne (Paris: Carilian-Goeury, 1832).

154 Ministère des Travaux publics. Administration générale des Ponts et chaussées et des mines. Lois des 27 juin 1833, 3 juin 1834, 30 juin 1835, 14 mai, 2 et 25 juin, 12 et 19 juillet 1837, 21 juin et 3 juillet 1838. Situation des travaux au 31 décembre 1838. (Paris: Imprimerie royale, mai 1839). The figure of fr. 900,000 is found on p. 175.

155 Jean-Baptiste de Baudre (1773-1850) was a senior engineer in the Department of Bridges and Roads who helped develop the ports of Calais and Bordeaux, the Garonne Canal, and the Adour and Garonne rivers. He was the chief engineer working on the Garonne lateral canal after 1828.

156 Count Jean Marie François Xavier de Silguy (1784-1864) was an engineer who worked for the Department of Bridges and Roads in Finistère (1810-1827), la Loire-Inférieure (1821-1830), les Landes and la Gironde (1830-1842), before becoming chief inspector (1842-1850). He worked on building canals and later on the reforestation of Les Landes.

157 Jean Maximilien Lamarque, Souvenirs, mémoires et lettres du général Maximien Lamarque, publiés par sa famille (Paris: H. Fournier jeune, 1835), vol. 2, p. 149, 180 where he talks about the military benefits of such a canal.

158 Louis Galabert (1773-1841) was a colonel in the Army and then a Deputy who represented the Département of Gers between 1831-34 (Gers adjoined Les Landes). From the mid-1820s onwards he was best known for his advocacy of the "Pyrénées canal" which would connect Toulouse with the Atlantic coast via the Adour river. See, Louis Galabert, Canal des Pyrénées, joignant l'Océan à la Méditerranée, ou continuation du Canal du Midi depuis Toulouse jusqu'à Bayonne (Paris: Félix Locquin, 1831).

159 Barnabé Brisson (1777-1828) was an engineer and the Chief Inspector of the Department of Bridges and Roads. He discussed the plans for the Bordeaux-Bayonne-Marseille canals in his book Essai sur le système général de navigation intérieure de la France (1829). See, p. 26 for a discussion of "IXe Ligne, de Bordeaux et de Bayonne à Marseille" and p. 126 for his estimation of the costs.

160 Barnabé Brisson, Essai sur le système général de navigation intérieure de la France (Paris: Carilian, 1829), pp. 121-27.

161 Bastiat would substantially change his view on this topic later as he became more sceptical of the benefits of government regulation of or participation in the economy after he came across the writings of Richard Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League in 1844.

162 Here Bastiat is giving the reader a premonition of his future thinking on two topics which were to become his hallmark in the late 1840s, namely the idea of "the seen" and "the unseen" which he developed in the story of "The Broken Window" in What is Seen and What is not Seen (1850) (in CW3, pp. 405-7) and the "ricochet effect." See "The Sophism Bastiat never wrote: The Sophism of the Ricochet Effect," in CW3, pp. 457-61.

163 Bastiat had a considerable interest in share-cropping as he had inherited from his grandfather a large number of share-croppers with his farm in Mugron. He attempted unsuccessfully to improve their economic efficiency and output by setting up a school for their sons to train them in modern agricultural techniques (which he described in "Proposal for the Creation of a School for Sons of Sharecroppers" (1844) in CW1, pp. 334-40, an article "Thoughts on Share Cropping" in JDE (February, 1846) (in this volume below, pp. 000), and several comments in "On the Bordeaux to Bayonne Railway Line" (May 1846) in CW1, pp. 312-16.

164 Bastiat would reverse his opinion later in "Thoughts on Share Cropping" (JDE, Feb. 1846) when he came to believe that sharecropping was to be preferred over agricultural wage labour because it was a more cooperative economic endeavour, a voluntary association between "capital" (the private landowner) and "labour" (the sharecropping farmer and his family) which produced a "fairer" distribution of output, even though it might be less than that of the tenant farmers. See below, pp. 000.

165 Bastiat uses the phrase "un mot eur immense et multiple" to describe the power of the Adour river to drive the region's economic development. Bastiat returned to this metaphor of "le moteur social" (the social engine, or driving force) in his treatise Economic Harmonies in Chapter 22 "The Social Motor". Here, the driving force of economics has been internalised. It is no longer a source of physical power such as a river or a steam engine, but the mind and will of individual human beings who pursue their self-interest by avoiding pain and seeking well-being.

166 Since Bastiat's land holdings were on this side of the river what follows is partly autobiographical.

167 Bastiat wrote an amusing economic sophism called "The Fear of a Word" ( LE , 20 June 1847) (ES313, CW3, pp. 318-27)) in which an economist explains to an artisan that what was holding France back was an irrational fear of the word "free trade" as well as the competition with England and other nations which this would produce.

168 The "octroi" or the tax on goods brought into a town or city was imposed on consumer goods such as wine, beer, food (except for flour, fruit, milk), firewood, animal fodder, and construction materials. All of these products had to pass through tollgates which had been built on the outskirts of the town or city where they could be inspected and taxed. For example, King Louis XVI had 57 "barrières d'octroi" (tollgates) built around the outskirts of the city of Paris for this purpose. In 1841 it was estimated that 1,420 communes throughout France imposed the octroi tax upon entry into their cities and towns, raising some fr. 75 million in revenue. The money was used to pay for the maintenance of roads, drains, lighting, and other public infrastructure..

169 Six years later Bastiat presented a more detailed proposal to local winegrowers, "Memoir Presented to the Société d'agriculture, commerce, arts, et sciences du département des Landes on the Wine-Growing Question), 22 January 1843, in CW2, pp. 25-42.

170 This distinction between living off rent from land and "travail" (working, or laboring on the land) is another topic on which Bastiat would later change his mind. In his long debate with Proudhon on the legitimacy of charging interest on loans and rent from land Bastiat argued that the charging of interest and rent were "services" which were voluntarily undertaken and productive for both parties to the exchange. See, Free Credit. A Discussion between M. Fr. Bastiat and M. Proudhon (1850) below, pp. 000.

171 Bastiat uses the phrase "la classe laborieuse" (the working or labouring class).

172 In 1837 when this was written he was 36.

173 This sentence suggests that Bastiat regards the services provided by "lawyers, doctors, solicitors and notaries" as productive activities of a "working class" but he does not state this definitively as he would do later.

174 Bastiat uses the phrase "la classe oisive" (the idle class). He used this expression on two other occasions in his work. In his "Introduction" to his book on Cobden and the League (1845) he refers to the "enserfment" of the working class by the English ruling elite, "la class oisive", which had its origin in the Norman Conquest and not in the spread of the free market; and in an short article "Anglomania and Anglophobia" (1847) (in CW1, pp. 320-34) he praises the French Revolution for having destroyed so much aristocratic landownership on the night of 4th August 1789, thus breaking the back of the French "classe oisive."

175 The French term for this was "morcellement". The economists were divided over the pros and cons of large-scale versus small-scale farming. The Physiocrats and Adam Smith believed that small-scale farming was more profitable because the farmer had a very direct and close personal interest in making it so. In the 19th century Sismondi shared this view based upon his study of the Italian peasantry. On the other hand the English traveller Arthur Young thought that the poverty in rural France on the eve of the French Revolution was due to the excessive subdivision of farms which made them unprofitable to run. This view was also shared by Thomas Malthus. McCulloch believed that the greater productivity of British agriculture could be explained by its inheritance laws which encouraged the preservation of larger estates. See A. Legoyt, "Morcellement," DEP, vol. 2, pp. 242-50, and E. de Parieu, "Succession," DEP, vol. 2, pp. 670-78. See also Molinari's discussion of this in "The Fourth Evening" in Les Soirées (1849). His solution was to turn the family farm into a business run by an entrepreneur and to expand the size of farms to lower costs.

176 Find good quote in this from EH 1/2/3 below

177 Under the Old Regime there existed the law of entail ("substitution") which was designed to preserve aristocratic land holdings by preventing them from being sold or divided. During the Revolution the Law of 1791 required the equal division of property among the children.

178 T.5 (1834.04) "Reflections on the Petitions from Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Lyons Relating to the Customs Service" (Réflexions sur les pétitions de Bordeaux, Le Havre et Lyon, concernant les Douanes). We have no information about this piece other than the date provided by Paillottet. [OC1, pp. 231-43] [CW2, pp. 1-9].

179 Procès-verbal des séances de la Commission instituée pour examiner les impôts sur les boissons (1830). Paris 23 August, 1830.

180 According to Horace Say there were 27,727 individuals (1852 figures) employed, composed of two "divisions" - one of administrative personnel (2,536) and the other of "agents on active service" (24,727). See Horace Say, "Douane", DEP, vol. 1, pp. 578-604 (figures from p. 597).

181 See the glossary entry on "French Tariff Policy."

182 "Reflections," CW2, p. 2.

183 Not much had changed by January 1847 when Bastiat published "The Utopian" in LE . Here Bastiat dreams of being given dictatorial powers to reform France. After listing all the radical reforms he would like to introduce in one flourish, he recoils at the end and renounces his powers because he is moving too fast and "the nation will not follow (me)." See

T.102 (1847.01.17) "The Utopian" (L'utopiste), LE , 17 Jan. 1847, no. 8, pp. 63-64; [OC4, pp. 203-12] CW3, pp. 187-98.

184 See above, pp. 000.

185 T.12 (1841.01) "The Tax Authorities and Wine" (Le Fisc et la vigne). OC1, pp. 243-59; CW2, pp. 10-23.

186 T.19 (1844.10.15) "On the Influence of French and English Tariffs on the Future of the Two People" (De l'influence des tarifs français et anglais sur l'avenir des deux peuples), JDE , T. IX, Oct. 1844, pp. 244-71. [OC1, pp. 334-86] [CW6]

187 T.13 (1843.01.22) "Memoir Presented to the Société d'agriculture, commerce, arts, et sciences du département des Landes on the Wine-Growing Question" (Mémoire présenté à la société d'agriculture, commerce, arts et sciences, du département des Landes sur la question vinicole). [OC1, pp. 261-83] [CW2, pp. 25-42]

188 T. 266-68. A series of 3 essays on "Free Trade. State of the Question in England," Sentinelle des Pyrénées , May-June 1843 [CW6].

189 T.15 (c. 1844) "Freedom of Trade" (Liberté du commerce). Unnamed newspaper in the south of France 1844. [OC7.4, pp. 14-20] [CW1, pp. 421-25]

190 T.17 (1844.??) "On the Allocation of the Land Tax in the Department of Les Landes" (De la répartition de la contribution foncière dans le Département des Landes). [OC1, pp. 283-333.] Below, pp. 000.

191 See Bastiat's letters postmarked Madrid and Lisbon written between July and November 1840 for details of his trip, in CW1, Letters 22-26, pp. 33-43; and 2 letters to Félix Coudroy on his plans for the new Association, "Letter 27. Paris, 2 Jan. 1841. To Félix Coudroy" and "Letter 28. Paris, 11 Jan. 1841. To Félix Coudroy," in CW1, pp. 43-45.

192 Georges Humann (1780-1842) was born in Strasbourg, became a businessman, and was an elected Deputy representing the Lower Rhine during the July Monarchy, supporting the moderate liberal faction., He was appointed Minister of Finance several times between 1832-36 and again between 1840-42. He opposed the increase in expenditure caused by Thiers' public works program to build a military wall around Paris beginning in 1841, and in order to balance the budget he attempted to impose new taxes on wine and alcohol which affected the wine growing region where Bastiat lived. These measures resulted in a number of popular revolts over the summer of 1841 in places like Toulouse and Bordeaux.

193 Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877) was a conservative liberal lawyer, historian, politician, and journalist. During the July Monarchy he was briefly Minister for Public Works (1832-34), Minister of the Interior (1832, 1834-36), and Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs (1840). In 1840 he was instrumental in planning the construction of "Thiers' Wall" around Paris between 1841-44.

194 The walls and forts were built between 1841-44 at a cost of fr. 150 million. They were completed the year before Bastiat arrived in Paris to attend the welcome dinner organised for him by Guillaumin and the Political Economy Society. See the glossary entry on "The Fortifications of Paris."

195 François Arago, Sur les Fortifications de Paris (Paris: Bachelier, 1841) and Études sur les fortifications de Paris, considérées politiquement et militairement (Paris: Pagnerre, 1845).

196 Michel Chevalier (1806-87) was a liberal economist and alumnus of the École polytechnique and a Minister under Napoleon III. Initially a Saint-Simonian, he was appointed to the chair of political economy at the Collège de France in 1840 and became a senator in 1860. He was an admirer of Bastiat and Cobden and played a decisive role in the free trade treaty signed between France and England in 1860 (Chevalier was the signatory for France, while Cobden was the signatory for England). On the fortifications of Paris: Michel Chevalier, Les fortifications de Paris, lettre à M. Le Comte Molé (Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1841) and Cours d'Économie politique fait au Collège de France par Michel Chevalier (Bruxelles: Meline, Cans, 1851), vol. 2, "Douzième leçon. Concours de l'armée française aux travaux des fortifications de Paris," pp. 183-96. First ed. 1844.

197 Patricia O'Brien, "L'Embastillement de Paris: The Fortification of Paris during the July Monarchy," French Historical Studies , Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring, 1975), pp. 63-82.

198 He mentions his opposition to their construction in a letter to Félix Coudroy, "Letter 28. Paris, 11 Jan. 1841. To Félix Coudroy", in CW1, p. 45.

199 Le Libre-échange (Free Trade) was the weekly journal of the Association pour la liberté des échanges (French Free rade Association). It began on 29 November 1846 and lasted until 16 April 1848, when it was closed down as a result of the February Revolution. The first sixty-four issues were edited by Bastiat, who resigned in 13 February 1848 because of his failing health, and the last eight issues were edited by Charles Coquelin.

200 Bastiat was involved in two short-lived revolutionary magazines in 1848. The first appeared two days after the revolution broke out in February and was called La République française. It appeared daily and was edited by Frédéric Bastiat, Hippolyte Castille, and Gustave de Molinari. It lasted for 30 issues between 26 February and 28 March. The second, Jacques Bonhomme , was edited by Bastiat, Molinari, Charles Coquelin, Alcide Fonteyraud, and Joseph Garnier. The journal appeared biweekly and was handed out on the streets of Paris but only lasted for four issues between 11 June and 13 July.

201 Letter 28. Paris, 11 Jan. 1841. To Félix Coudroy, CW1, p. 44.

202 Gilbert-Urbain Guillaumin (1810-1864) was a mid-19th century French classical liberal publisher who founded a publishing dynasty which lasted from 1835 to around 1910 and became the focal point for the classical liberal movement in France. His firm became the major publishing house for liberal ideas in the mid nineteenth century. Guillaumin helped found the JDE in 1841 with Horace Say (Jean-Baptiste's son) and Joseph Garnier. The following year he helped found the PES which became the main organization which brought like-minded classical liberals together for discussion and debate.

203 The French Free Trade Association was modeled on the English Anti-Corn Law League which was founded in 1838 in Manchester and which was successful in having the Corn Laws repealed in January 1846. A group of French free traders founded a Free Trade Association in the port city of Bordeaux in February 1846 and then a national association in Paris in July 1846 of which Bastiat was the secretary of the Board and the editor of its weekly journal Le Libre-échange (29 November 1846 to 16 April 1848).

204 See T.44-46 "Plan for an Anti-Protectionist League" (in 3 parts), Mémorial bordelais , 8, 9, 10 February, 1846, in CW6 (forthcoming). And then the final announcement on the eve of the Association's launch on 23 February, T.48 "The Free Trade Association in Bordeaux", Mémorial bordelais , 18 Feb. 1846, in CW6 (forthcoming).

205 See the glossary on "The Anti-Corn Law League."

206 Approximately 4.9 million acres.

207 Approximately 2,641 US gallons.

208 Indirect taxes were levied on drink, salt, sugar, tobacco, gun powder, and other goods. According to the budget for 1848 (for which we have the most detailed figures) the government raised fr. 307.9 million in indirect taxes which represented 22.4% of its total revenue of fr. 1.37 billion. See the glossary entry on "Indirect Taxes."

209 See the glossary entry on "Octroi."

210 Bastiat would return to this problem in much more detail in a Report he gave to the General Council of Les Landes "On the Allocation of the Land Tax in the Department of Les Landes" (July 1844). See below, pp. 000.

211 This is a sly reference by Bastiat to one of the key slogans of the socialist movement which was developing in France during the 1840s. By also using the word Bastiat is showing that there is another, non-socialist, liberal meaning of the word. See the Introduction to T. 23 "Letter to Lamartine" below, pp. 000; and the glossary entry "Association and Organisation."

212 The July Monarchy (1830-48) had very strict rules which limited freedom of association and speech. All public organisations and magazines had to be approved by the government, and in the case of magazines, "caution money" (a deposit) had to be paid as security for any possible future violation of the censorship laws.

213 Some of the totals in the original tables are incorrect. We have corrected them.

214 There was very onerous legislation which regulated every aspect of the operation of Cabarets, such as rules governing regular inspections, hours of opening and closing, inspections of the quality of the drinks served, and acceptable behaviour in a public space. That wine growers would be subject to the same regulations was an affront to their dignity as Bastiat makes clear. See on the laws governing Cabarets in Formulaire municipal , Volume 2, "Cabarets", pp. 289-304.

215 One of the first acts of the new July Monarchy in August 1830 was to launch an inquiry into the alcohol tax. See, Procès-verbal des séances de la Commission instituée pour examiner les impôts sur les boissons (1830). It recommended reductions which the regime later came to regret as the budget deficit increased, hence Humann's desire to see the regime revert to the higher rates which prevailed before 1830.

216 Additional autobiographical information about Bastiat's relationship with his sharecroppers can be found in T.47 (1846.02.15) "Thoughts on Sharecropping" (Considérations sur le métayage), JDE , T.13, no. 51, Feb. 1846, pp. 225-239. [CW4 below]

217 See the glossary on "The Chamber of Deputies and the Electoral Class."

218 A summary of French government budgets for the years 1814-147 can be found in A. Bernard, "Résumé des Budgets de la France de 1814 à 1847", in Annuaire de l'Économie politique 1849 (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849), pp. 67-76. Total income for 1842 was fr. 1,334,762,321 (p. 70) and total expenditure was fr. 1,440,974,148 (p. 71) which produced a deficit of fr. 10,621,182 or 8%. The complete budget data can be found in Collection complete des lois, decrets, ordonnances, reglemens et avis du Conseil d'Etat …. Année 1841 , par J.B. Duvergier. Volume 41 (Paris: Chez A. Guyot et Scribe, 1841), 25 juin - 10 juillet 1841 "Loi potant fixation du budget des dépenses de l'exercise 1842", pp. 394-441.

219 John C. Calhoun, "A Disquisition on Government" (1849) in Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun , ed. Ross M. Lence (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), pp. 17-19.

220 James Mayer de Rothschild (1792–1868), the fifth son of Mayer Rothschild, set up a branch of the family banking business in Paris in 1812 which became heavily invested in mining, railways, and wine making. The Rothschilds also lent money to King Louis Philippe in the early 1830s to help him stabilise the finances of his regime, which led to the appointed of James as a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour.

221 See the Introduction to "The Canal beside the Adour" for details about these essays, above, pp. 000.

222 T.19 [1844.10.15] "On the Influence of French and English Tariffs on the Future of the Two People" (De l'influence des tarifs français et anglais sur l'avenir des deux peuples), JDE , T. IX, Oct. 1844, pp. 244-71 [OC1, pp. 334-86] [CW6]

223 He quotes from the following works: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)

Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws (1748); Buffon, Natural History (1749-88); James Steuart, An Inquiry Into the Principles of Political Economy (1767); François-Jean Chastellux, De la félicité publique (1776); Jacques Necker, De l'administration des finances (1784); Destutt de Tracy, Commentaire de l'Esprit des Lois (1806); Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1817); Jeremy Bentham, Théorie des peines et des récompenses (1818); Jean-Baptiste Say, Cours complet d'économie politique (1826); Nassau William Senior, Two Lectures on Population (1828); Joseph Droz, Économie politique ou Principes de la science des richesse (1829); Sismondi, Études sur l'économie politique (1837); and and some essays by Charles Comte, who also wrote Traité de Législation (1826) and Traité de la propriété (1834).

224 For example, we learn in this article that Bastiat's commune of Mugron had a population of 10,038 inhabitants (1844) and had suffered a decline in numbers over the previous 15 years (1829-1843); that the main agricultural activities were the following: 4,486 hectares of field crops; 1,887 hectares of vines; and 3,250 hectares of heath which probably supported grazing and sheep herding. We also learn that 29 sharecropping farms had disappeared from Mugron "in our time" (presumably during "his" life). Elsewhere he tells us that he had 150 sharecroppers working some of his land. See, "On the Bordeaux to Bayonne Railway Line" (19 May, 1846) CW1 2.3, p. 315. Bastiat provides other tables of data on the population and agricultural productivity of Les Landes in "Thoughts on Sharecropping" (JDE, Feb. 1846), below, pp. 000.

225 On the complexities of the land tax, see Nicolas Jean Baptiste Boyard, Encycolpedie Roret. Nouveau manuel complet des contributions directes, guide des contribuables et des comptables de toutes les classes, dépendant de la direction générale des contributions directes (Paris: la librairie encyclopédique de Roret, 1846).

226 On French taxes in general, see Félix Esquirou de Parieu, Traité des impôts, considérés sous le rapport historique, économique et politique en France et à l'étranger (Paris: Guillaumin, 1862-63). 3 vols; and H. Passy, "Impôt," DEP, vol. 1, pp. 898-914.

227 See the glossary entry on "French Government Budgets for Fiscal Years 1848 and 1849." ???

228 See the Editor's Introduction to his essay "On Population" (JDE, June 1846) where Bastiat's interest in Malthusianism is discussed. This essay was extensively revised and was included as Chap. XVI in EH2. Below, pp. 000.

229 French government administrative regions in descending order of size from largest to smallest are the following: regions, départements, arrondissements (districts"), cantons ("municipalities" or "counties"), and communes ("villages" or "towns"). Bastiat's home in the town (or commune) of Mugron is located in the region of Aquitaine, in the Département of Les Landes, in the arrondissement of Dax, in the canton of Coteau de Chalosse. See the map at the front of the book for details.

230 It should be noted that Bastiat was a wine grower during this period and so would have had first hand knowledge of wine prices.

231 Bastiat uses a number of terms to describe the quantity of wine under discussion. We have used throughout the term "barrique" (barrel) which in Bordeaux contained 225 litres.

232 Gascon dialect for "pine plantations."

233 Here Bastiat is close to the Hayekian insight about how free market prices carry information about local conditions and the needs of consumers which are beyond the grasp of government officials and bureaucrats.

234 When a government issues Treasury bonds, it pays interest based on the face value of the bond and not on the capital paid by the lender.

235 A discussion of the law of 1821 concerning the assessment of land tax can be found in Georges Bonjean, Révision et conservation du Cadastre approprié aux besoins de la propriété foncière: péréquation de l'impôt ; Titres. - Bornages. - Hypothèques. - Crédit agricole etc ; enquete officieuse du Président Bonjean, continuée et rédigée par Georges Bonjean, Louis Bernard Bonjean (Paris: A. Durand et Pedone-Lauriel, 1874), pp. 58 ff.; and pp. 154 ff.

236 The source for this quotation cannot be located.

237 ( Bastiat's note. ) Assuming that interest varied only in the ratio of 3 to 4 percent from one region to another.

238 ( Bastiat's note. ) These comparisons are taken from the report by the Director of Direct Taxation published in 1836. [Editor: we have not been able to locate this source.] At that time, four cantons had not yet been registered, so that the official document was able to give only approximate information on the apportionment of the share of these cantons among their various types of cultivation. Since then the Director has been good enough to send me rectification statements, and I owe it to the truth to say that the anomalies that I point out in the text are less shocking in these final statements than in the provisional tables. I do not have the time to redo the work in the light of the new bases, but one should not lose sight of the fact that what the heath lands pay in addition in these four cantons, the pine forests and field crops pay that much less, for the share of the cantons has not changed.

239 Maransin is a forested region in the South West of Les Landes départment.

240 See, Statistique de la France, publiée par France Ministère de l'Intérieur, de l'Agriculture et du Commerce. Tomes IIIe et IVe de la Statistique agricole du Royaume. (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1841).

241 Literally "The Great Heath". It is a large region in the North of the department, covered in heath at the beginning of the 19 th century. (Lande meaning heath). Throughout the 19 th century, pine forests were planted to stabilize the soil, giving rise to an important wood and resin industry.

242 Here Bastiat here uses the expression "moyens d'existence" which we have translated as "standard of living" (literally "the means of existence") in order to contrast his terminology from that of the strict Malthusians who preferred Malthus's expression "moyens de subsistance" (means of subsistence"). Malthus never used the expression "means of existence". Bastiat, following Say, had come to the conclusion that there was a significant difference between the "means of subsistence" and the "means of existence" - the former being fixed physiologically speaking (either one had sufficient food to live or one did not) and the latter being an infinitely flexible and expanding notion which depended upon the level of technology and the extent of the free market. Malthus focused on the former, whilst Bastiat (and Say) and later Molinari were focused on the latter interpretation.

243 Bastiat uses the term "moyens d'existence" which we have translated here as "living" and elsewhere as "standard of living".

244 For another discussion by Bastiat on the depopulation of his home region see his "Speech on the Tax on Wine and Spirits" (12 Dec., 1849) in the Chamber of Deputies, CW2 328-47, especially pp. 331-34. He notes that, in order to avoid paying taxes on the wine they bought and consumed, share-croppers chose to grow vines on the poorer flat land in order to make their own wine and thus avoid the taxes. As income from farming declined, share-croppers were forced to leave the land, thus depopulating the region. Bastiat blamed all this on "the customs war on the one hand, the war of city tolls on the other, and the combined taxes", pp. 332-3.

245 Bastiat has created a composite quote which paraphrases Malthus's thought. It most likely comes from the opening two paragraphs of An Essay on the Principle of Population , Book I, Chap. II "Of the general Checks to Population, and the Mode of their Operation": "The immediate check may be stated to consist in all those customs, and all those diseases, which seem to be generated by a scarcity of the means of subsistence; and all those causes, independent of this scarcity, whether of a moral or physical nature, which tend prematurely to weaken and destroy the human frame. These checks to population, which are constantly operating with more or less force in every society, and keep down the number to the level of the means of subsistence, may be classed under two general heads — the preventive, and the positive checks". These paragraphs are the same in both the 5th edition (1817) and the 6th (1826). Bastiat had access to Thomas Robert Malthus, Essai sur le principe de population, ou Exposé des effets de cette cause sur le bonheur du genre humain: suivi de quelques recherches relatives à l'espérance de guérir ou d'adoucir les maux qu'elle entraîne, Traduit de l'anglais sur la 5me édition, par Pierre Prévost et Guillaume Prévost. Nouvelle édition revue ... etc. après MM. Adriano Balbi et Jean Julien d'Omalius d'Halloy (Bruxelles: Adolphe Wahlen & C°, 1841).

246 Nassau William Senior, Two Lectures on Population: Delivered Before the University of Oxford, in Easter Term, 1828. To which is added, a Correspondence between the Author and the Rev. T.R. Malthus (London: Saunders and Otley, 1828), pp. 9-10.

247 Bastiat might have in mind the sharp criticism of Malthus by Proudhon for being "heartless" towards the poor. Proudhon focused on a passage in the 2nd revised 1803 edition of The Principle of Population (which was removed in subsequent editions), that a poor man "has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him." See, Thomas Robert Malthus, An essay on the principle of population: or, a view of its past and present effects on human happiness (London: J. Johnson, 1803), p. 531. Proudhon quoted this passage in his 1846 book which would have been known to Bastiat, Système des contradictions économiques, ou philosophy de la misère (Paris: Guillaumin, 1846), vol. 1, chap. 1, p. 24.

248 Bastiat makes a similar argument in a letter to the Chamber of Deputies in May 1846. See, T.66 (1846.05.19) "On the Railway between Bordeaux and Bayonne. A Letter addressed to a Commission of the Chamber of Deputies" (Du chemin de fer de Bordeaux à Bayonne. Lettre adressée à une commission de la Chambre des députés), Le Mémorial bordelais , 19 May 1846. [OC7.22, pp. 103-8] [CW1, p. 312-16].

249 Bastiat uses the phrase "l'obstacle répressif" (repressive or harsh check). This is not Malthus's terminology.

250 Some of these may have been some of the 150 sharecroppers who worked on his own land.

251 The Marquis de Chastellux (1734-1788) came from an old Burgundian family and became a general in the French Army, fighting in the Seven Years War (1756-63). He was a friend of Voltaire and was known for his plays and his work on De la félicité publique (On Pubic Happiness) (1776). In 1780 he was sent by the French government to assist the Americans in their War of Independence, seeing action in the Battle of Yorktown, and he became friends with James Madison and Thomas Jefferson with whom he corresponded.

252 François-Jean Chastellux, De la félicité publique: ou considérations sur le sort des hommes dans les différentes époques de l'histoire. Nouvelle édition, augmentée de notes inédites de Voltaire. 2 vols. (Paris: Renouard, 1822). 1st ed. 1776. Quote, vol. 1, pp. 181-82.

253 In his "Speech on the Tax on Wine and Spirits" (December 1849) Bastiat blamed the heavy and shifting burden of tax for causing great hardship for sharecroppers. CW2, pp. 328-47, especially p. 331.

254 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Des signes d'un bon gouvernement" (The Signs of Good Government) in The Social Contract, Book III, Chap. IX in The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, ed. from the original manuscripts and authentic editions, with introductions and notes by C. E. Vaughan . (Cambridge University Press, 1915), Vol. 2. < /titles/711#Rousseau_0065-02c_308 > (French language version); and the English translation by Maurice Cranston, Penguin edition, p. 130.

255 Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws , Book XXIII, chap. X. O'Keeffe translation.

256 We have not been able to locate the source of this quotation.

257 Jacques Necker, De l'administration des finances (1784) in Œuvres complètes de M. Necker, Jacques Necker, publiées par M. le Baron de Staël, son petit-fils (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1821). Vol. 4, Chap. IX, "Sur la population du royaume," p. 292.

258 I could not find the exact quote but it probably comes from James Steuart, An Inquiry Into the Principles of Political Economy: Being an Essay on the Science of Domestic Policy in Free Nations (London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, 1767). Vol. 1, Book I, Chap V "In what Manner, and according to what Principles, and political Causes, does Agriculture augment Population."

259 Jeremy Bentham, Théorie des peines et des récompenses, Théorie des peines et des récompenses, Ouvrage extrait des manuscrits de M. Jérémie Bentham, jurisconsulte anglois. Par Et. Dumont (Paris: Bossange et Masson, 1818). 2nd ed. Tome II, Livre IV, Chap. XI "De la population," p. 362.

260 ( Bastiat's note. ) Perhaps it is proper to observe that all the authors quoted up to now, including Chastellux and Bentham, wrote before the publication of Malthus' work.

261 Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, "Des lois dans le rapport qu'elles ont avec le nombre des habitants" in Commentaire de l'Esprit des Lois , in Oeuvres de Montesquieu avec éloges, analyses, commentaires, remarques, notes, réfutations, imitations , Tome VIII (Paris: Dailbon, 1827), Book XXIII, pp. 368-73.

262 Jean-Baptiste Say, "Des moyens d'existence des hommes" in Cours complet d'économie politique pratique. Ouvrage destiné à mettre sous les yeux des hommes d'état, des propriétaires fonciers et les capitalistes, des savans, des agriculteurs, des manufacturiers, des négocians, et en général de tous les citoyens, l'économie des sociétés, par Jean-Baptiste Say, Seconde édition entièrement revue par l'auteur, publiée sur les manuscrits qu'il a laissés et augmentée de notes par Horace Say, son fils (Paris: Guillaumin, 1840), Tome II, 6e partie, chap. II, p. 128.

263 J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Études sur l'économie politique . 3 vols. (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1837). "Second essai. Du revenu social", vol. 1, p. 128.

264 Joseph Droz, "De la population" in Joseph Droz, Jean-Baptiste Say, Économie politique ou Principes de la science des richesses, par Joseph Droz, suivi du Catéchisme d'économie politique de J.-B. Say, augmenté de notes et d'une préface par M. Charles Comte (Bruxelles: Société typographique belge, 1841), Book III, chap. VI, p. 155.

265 Charles Comte, "De la multiplication des pauvres, des gens à places, et des gens à pensions," Le Censeur européen , 1818, Tome VII, p. 6.

266 A wine growing region in the eastern part of Les Landes, straddling Les Landes and Le Gers, a neighboring department.

267 Statistique de la France, publiée par France Ministère de l'Intérieur, de l'Agriculture et du Commerce. Tomes IIIe et IVe de la Statistique agricole du Royaume. (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1841).

268 ( Bastiat's note .) It goes without saying that I am not taking responsibility for the statistical facts recorded in this official document.

269 This document is not available to us.

270 Bastiat goes into more detail about this "revolution in farming" which he saw going on around him in his article on sharecropping. The following section is no doubt partly an autobiographical account of his own experiences dealing with share croppers on his own land. See, T.47 [1846.02.15] "Thoughts on Sharecropping" (Considérations sur le métayage), JDE , T.13, no. 51, Feb. 1846, pp. 225-239. [Not in OC] [CW4, pp. 000].

271 Bastiat uses the phrase "la liberté de travailler" (liberty of working) which should not be confused with the socialists' call for "le droit au travail" (the right to a job).

272 The tax authorities.

273 Bastiat is reminding his fellow members of the General Council they were part of the 5% of the population who were allowed to vote during the July Monarchy, or "la classe électorale" (the electoral or voting class) as Bastiat called them. When that régime collapsed in February 1848 universal manhood suffrage was introduced. See the glossary on "The Chamber of Deputies and the Electoral Class."

274 The Luxembourg Palace housed the Chamber of Peers from 1814 until the February 1848 Revolution, during which the socialist Louis Blanc and his supporters took over the building and made it the headquarters of the "Government Commission for the Workers" (known as the Luxembourg Commission).

275 The Duke de Nemours was a title given by King Louis XIV to his brother, Philippe de France (1640-1701), duc d'Orléans, who passed it down to his son, and so on. The most recent holder of the title in Bastiat's time was Louis Philippe d'Orléans who gave it up when he assumed the French throne in 1830, passing it on to his youngest son Louis who retained the title until his death in 1896. Thus here Bastiat is referring the King and his son.

276 This is the first time Bastiat uses the term "couches" (social strata). See Footnote 000 below for details.

277 CW6 (forthcoming).

278 See the glossary on "Rowland Hill."

279 Rowland Hill, Post Office Reform; its Importance and Practicability (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1837).

280 Bastiat states below that this was equivalent to 10 centimes in French currency at that time.

281 "Le sel, la poste et la douane" (Salt, the Mail, and the Customs Service), JDE , May 1846, T. XIV, pp. 142-152. ES2 12 in CW3, pp. 198-214.

282 Bastiat says this was 4 times the English rate.

283 C.S. "Postes, DEP, vol. 2, pp. 421-24.

284 A. Piron, Du service des postes et de la taxation des lettres au moyen d'un timbre (Paris: H. Fournier, 1838).

285 Michel-Charles Chégaray (1802-1859) was a magistrate and conservative politician who, like his contemporary Bastiat, was born in Bayonne in the south west of France. Apart from this, he had very little in common with Bastiat and they were adversaries in most political and economic matters. He presented a Report to the Chamber on an inquiry into the cost of sending letters in July 1844, Rapport fait au nom de la Commission chargée d'examiner la proposition de M. de Saint-Priest, relative aux tarifs de la poste aux lettres. Seance du 5 Juillet 1844. In Procès-verbaux des séances de la chambre des Députés. Session 1844, tome XI, du 5 au 12 juillet 1844. Annexes nos 190 à 204. (Paris: A. Henry, 1844). No. 190, pp. 1-63.

286 Adolphe Vuitry (1813-1885) was a lawyer, economist and politician. He was a Deputy representing l'Yonne during the July Monarchy and was the Chairman of the Chamber's Committee Responsible for Examining the Draft Law on Postal Taxes. He was the Undersecretary of State for Finance in 1851 in the Ministry of Léon Faucher and in 1863 he was appointed governor of the Bank of France. The Reports Bastiat mentions could be the following: Projet de réforme postale, par un directeur comptable des postes. 23 février 1846 (Impr. de Robin, (s. d.)).The Report was presented to the Chamber by Adolphe Vuitry on 13 April 1846: No. 115. Chambre des Députés. Session 1846. Rapport fait Au nom de la Commission chargée d'examiner le projet relatif à la taxe des lettres, par M. Vuitry, Député de l'Yonne. Séance du 13 avril 1846 , pp. 317-67. In Procés-verbaux des séances de la chambre des députés. Session 1846. Tome V. Du 7 au 14 avril 1846. Annexes Nos. 107 à 132 . (Paris: A. Henry, 1846).

287 "Postal Reform" (Réforme postale), Mémorial bordelais , 23 Apr. 1846; and "Postal Reform. 2nd article" (Réforme postale. 2e article), Mémorial bordelais , 30 Apr. 1846.[CW4]. See below, pp. 000 and pp. 000.

288 "Le sel, la poste et la douane" (Salt, the Mail, and the Customs Service), JDE , May 1846, T. XIV, pp. 142-152. This article later appeared in ES2 XII.

289 "L'utopiste" (The Utopian), LE , 17 January 1847. This article also appeared in ES2.11.

290 For his speech on postal reform in the Chamber, see below, pp. 000. CRANC, vol. 3, pp. 442-443; Alexis Belloc, Les Postes françaises. Recherches historiques sur leur origine, leur développement, leur législation (Firmin-Didot, 1886), p. 507.

291 Bastiat was born in the city of Bayonne in the south west of France. The distance between Bayonne and Paris is about 414 miles or 666 km. The distance between Paris to Orléans is 240 miles or 386 km

292 King Charles X made slight changes to the price of sending letters which had been established under the Directory in a Royal Ordinance of 1827. See, Arthur de Rothschild, Histoire de la poste aux lettres depuis ses origines les plus anciennes jusqu'à nos jours (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1873), p. 166.

293 The relationship between the coins was 1 franc = 100 centimes = 20 sous.

294 This is a very loose paraphrase of a quote which Bastiat likes to use. For example, he uses variations of it 5 times in the Economic Harmonies , suggesting that he was quoting from memory. The original comes from Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, Part I. In Maurice Cranston's translation it reads "It is always the same pattern, always the same rotation. He (the savage) has not the intelligence to wonder at the greatest marvels; and we should look in vain to him for that philosophy which a man needs if he is to know how to notice once what he has seen every day." See, J.J. Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality , Part I, p. 90 (Cranston trans.) A Discourse on Inequality, translated with an Introduction and Notes by Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984).

295 "C.S." gives different figures but the proportions are the similar. See, "C.S." "Postes" in DEP , vol. 2, p. 423.

296 Bastiat uses the word "la proie" to suggest that "the Fisc" is a predatory animal.

297 Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) was a poet and statesman and as an immensely popular romantic poet, he used his talent to promote liberal ideas. During the campaign for free trade organised by the French Free Trade Association between 1846 and 1847 Lamartine often spoke at their large public meetings and was a big draw card. He was a member of the Provisional Government in February 1848 and offered Bastiat a position in the government, which he declined.

298 See the glossary entry on "The Fortifications of Paris."

299 Gustave de Molinari, Biographie politique de M. A. de Lamartine. Extraits de la Revue générale biographique, politique et littéraire, publié sous la direction de M. E. Pascallet. Deuxième Edition (Paris: Lacombe, 1843).

300 For example, they shared the stage at a Free Trade meeting in Marseille on 24 August 1847 and Lamartine's speech was published as a separate pamphlet, Discours de M. de Lamartine, dans l'Assemblée marseillaise du Libre échange, le 24 août 1847 (Lyon: Léon Boitel, 1847).

301 See his recollections in "Political Manifestos of April 1849," in CW1, pp. 390-91. Also Dean Russell, Frédéric Bastiat , p. 82.

302 Letter 94 to Coudroy (Paris, 29 February, 1848), CW1, p. 144.

303 Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) was a political theorist whom many people consider to be the father of anarchism. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848 representing La Seine. He is best known for his book Qu'est-ce que la propriété? (What is Property?) (1841), the answer to which he thought was "property is theft." Proudhon and Bastiat engaged in a several month long debate on the morality of property, interest, and rent in late 1849. See, "Free Credit", below, pp. 000.

304 Victor Prosper Considerant (1808-93) was a follower of the socialist Charles Fourier and edited the most successful Fourierist magazine La Démocratie pacifiste (1843-1851). He was elected Deputy to represent Loiret in April 1848 and Paris in May 1849. The Fourierists advocated a utopian, communistic system for the reorganization of society. He was also an advocate of the "right to work" (the right to a job), an idea which Bastiat opposed.

305 Louis Blanc (1811-1882) was a journalist and historian who was active in the socialist movement. Blanc founded the journal Revue du progès and published therein articles that later became the influential pamphlet L'Organisation du travail (1839). During the 1848 revolution he became a member of the provisional government and promoted the National Workshops.

306 An extract of "Théorie du droit de propriété" can be found in Victor Considerant, Contre M. Arago: réclamation adressée à la Chambre des députés par les rédacteurs du feuilleton de la Phalange : suivi de la théorie du droit de propriété (Paris: Au bureau de la Phalange, 1840), pp. 49-64. It was republished in July 1848 at the height of the debate about right to work legislation which was taking place in the National Assembly: Victor Considerant, Droit de propriété et du droit au travail (Paris: Librairie phalanstérienne, 1848).

307 Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail. Association universelle. Ouvriers. - Chefs d'ateliers. - Hommes de lettres . (Paris: Administration de librairie, 1841. First edition 1839).

308 Lamartine, "Du droit au travail et de l'organisation du travail" in La Politique de Lamartine (1878), vol. 2, p. 151.

309 See the glossary on "The Right to Work."

310 Reprinted in Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail (5ème édition), revue, corrigée et augmentée d'une polémique entre M. Michel Chevalier et l'auteur, ainsi que d'un appendice indiquant ce qui pourrait être tenté dès à présent (Paris: au bureau de la Société de l'industrie fraternelle, 1847). "Réponses à diverses objections." Chevalier's article, pp. 121-35; and Blanc's response from 17 Feb. 1845, pp. 135-48. Chevalier quote from pp. 125-26. See also, Michel Chevalier, Lettres sur l'Organisation du travail, ou études sur les principales causes de la misère et sur les moyens proposées pour y remédier (Paris: Capelle, 1848) and Question des travailleurs : l'amélioration du sort des ouvriers, les salaires, l'organisation du travail (Paris: Hachette, 1848).

311 Dunoyer, Charles. De la liberté du travail, ou simple exposé des conditions dans lesquelles les force humaines s'exercent avec le plus de puissance. 3 vols. Paris: Guillaumin, 1845.

312 Alphonse de Lamartine, "Du droit au travail et de l'organisation du travail," Le Bien Public , déc. 1844. Later published as a pamphlet: Du droit au travail et de l'organisation du travail (Mâcon: Chassipollet, 1845). See also, La Politique , vol. 2, XXIX, pp. 145-65.

313 T.19 [1844.10.15] "On the Influence of French and English Tariffs on the Future of the Two People" (De l'influence des tarifs français et anglais sur l'avenir des deux peuples), JDE , T. IX, Oct. 1844, pp. 244-71 [OC1, pp. 334-86] [CW6].

314 Lamartine, "De la crise des subsistances" (1 Oct. 1846), Le Bien public , which provoked Bastiat's reply T.60 [1846.10.15] "Second Letter to M. de Lamartine" (Seconde lettre à Monsieur de Lamartine), JDE , 15 October 1846, T. 15, No. 49, pp. 265-70. [OC1.13, pp. 452-60]. See below, pp. 000.

315 See Bastiat's article on "Natural and Artificial Organisations" (JDE, January 1848) where he explores this idea further, below pp. 000.

316 See below, p. 000.

317 See Glossary entries on "Malthus" and "Malthusianism and French Political Economy."

318 T.17 [1844.??] "On the Division of the Land Tax in the Department of Les Landes" (De la répartition de la contribution foncière dans le Département des Landes) [OC1, pp. 283-333] [See above, pp. 000.

319 T.66 [1846.05.19] "On the Railway between Bordeaux and Bayonne. A Letter addressed to a Commission of the Chamber of Deputies" (Du chemin de fer de Bordeaux à Bayonne. Lettre adressée à une commission de la Chambre des députés), Le Mémorial bordelais , 19 May 1846 [OC7.22, pp. 103-8] [CW1, p. 312-16]

320 T.47 [1846.02.15] "Thoughts on Sharecropping" (Considérations sur le métayage), JDE , T.13, no. 51, Feb. 1846, pp. 225-239. [Not in OC] [CW4, pp. 000]; and T.81 [1846.10.15] "On Population" (De la population), JDE , 15 Octobre 1846, T. XV, no. 59, pp. 217-234. A revised version of this article appeared as chap. 16 in the 2nd, posthumous edition of Economic Harmonies (1851), with explanatory notes by Fontenay. Not in the OC.

321 EH2, chap. 16, "On Population," CW5 (forthcoming).

322 Pope Pius IX put the DEP on the Index of Banned Books on 12 June 1856 for "religious reasons," presumably for the article on "Malthus" written by Joseph Garnier which advocated various forms of birth control. See, Molinari's comments on this, L'Économiste belge , Supplément to the edition of 20 November, 1856, p. 5; and the "Beacon for Freedom of Expression" database of banned books and the entry for the DEP <http://search.beaconforfreedom.org/search/censored_publications/publication.html?id=9709582>. Joseph Garnier, "Malthus," DEP, vol. 2, pp. 126-29.

323 See the glossary on "The Social Mechanism" and "Natural and Artificial Organisation," JDE, 15 January, 1848, below pp. 000.

324 See the glossary on "Harmony and Disharmony."

325 See the glossary on "Disturbing and Restorative Factors."

326 See the glossary entry on "Service for Service."

327 See below, pp. 000.

328 Bastiat, Cobden et la ligue, ou l'Agitation anglaise pour la liberté du commerce (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845). Introduction, pp. i-xcvi.

329 These speeches by Bastiat will be included in CW6.

330 Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825) was an aristocrat and soldier who, after the French Revolution, became a writer and influential social reformer. he was an early theorist of the idea of "industrialism," that the old regime of war, privilege, and monopoly would gradually be replaced by peace and a new elite of creators, producers, and industrialists. The movement split into a socialist branch, the Saint-Simonian school led by Auguste Comte and Olinde Rodrigues, and a classical liberal school led by Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. The Saint-Simonians advocated rule by a technocratic elite, state-supported "industry," and the "organisation" of labour by bureaucratic planners.

331 Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was a socialist and founder of the phalansterian school, also known as "Fourierism", which advocated a utopian, communistic system for the reorganization of society. The population was to be grouped in "phalansteries"of about 1,800 persons, who would live together as one family and hold property and work in common.

332 This statement is somewhat ironic as this charge of going against the masters of economic thought (Malthus and Ricardo) would be leveled against Bastiat himself by his economist friends in response to several of his innovations in economic theory presented in several essays in the JDE and in the Economic Harmonies (1850), notably his theory of value, rent, and population growth.

333 In their theoretical work both Bastiat and Molinari made the importance of economic laws central to their understanding of economic theory, Bastiat in Economic Harmonies (1850) and Molinari in Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare (Evening on Saint Lazarus Street) (1849) the subtitle of which was "Discussions on Economic Laws and the Defence of Property".

334 A contemporary of Bastiat, Joseph Garnier, in the entry for "laissez faire, laissez passer"in the DEP (1853) explained "laissez-faire" to mean "laissez travailler" (leave us free to work as we wish) and "laissez passer"to mean "laissez échanger" (leave us free to trade as we wish). See glossary on "Laissez-faire."

335 The English lawyer and social theorist Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) wrote the class book on utopia which he called Utopia (meaning "no-place" or "good-place") in 1516. Among many other things, on the island there was no private property, widespread use of slaves, and an internal passport required for travel.

336 James Harrington (1611-77) was an English republican political theorist who wrote an account of an ideal republican society in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656). His views on voting by ballot and the rotation of office were considered radical in his day.

337 François Fénelon (1651-1715) was a French Roman Catholic archbishop, theologian, poet and writer. He was appointed the tutor to the King's family. Today is remembered as the author of The Adventures of Telemachus (1699) which was thinly veiled critique of the doctrine of the divine right of kings, for example when the hero Telemachus visits Idomeneus, King of Salente and asks him very pointed questions about the nature of good rulership.

338 Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a successful English manufacturer, philanthropist, and socialist theoretician. He made his fortune with a cotton mill in New Lanark in Manchester. The reforms he introduced in his factory became the model for creating "villages of cooperation," which culminated in the establishment of a model community, New Harmony, in Indiana, in 1824.

339 Bastiat provides a similar list of socialist utopian writers in the article "Economic Harmonies: I., II., and III. The Needs of Man" in JDE, 1 September, 1848. See below, pp. 000.

340 The following were political economists: Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Robert Malthus, James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Nassau Senior, Desttut de Tracy, Jean-Baptiste Say, Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, Joseph Droz. The following were politicians who introduced liberal economic reforms: Thomas Jefferson, Richard Cobden, Thomas Peronnet Thompson, William Huskisson, and Robert Peel.

341 Bastiat called these men "mechanics" who wanted to build and run society like a machine. See "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (JDE, 15 January 1848), below, pp. 000.

342 ( Bastiat's Note .) In saying that people ought to enjoy the free exercise of their faculties, it of course remains a fact that I do not in the least intend to deny the government the right and duty of repressing the abuse that can result from this. On the contrary, economists consider that this is its principal and almost sole mission.

343 The long quote comes from La Politique de Lamartine , vol. 2, pp. 148-49; and then 149-50.

344 After the fall of the monarchy in August 1792 the Legislative Assembly called for an election based upon universal manhood suffrage to create a Constituent Assembly (also known as the National Convention) which would draw up a new constitution for the republic. It remained in power between September 1792 and October 1795. After the fall of Robespierre in July 1795 the Convention was replaced by a new constitutions and a new government called the Directory.

345 Bastiat uses the phrase "précisément l'harmonie du monde social dans la liberté de leur action" (the harmony of the social world precisely in the freedom of their action). This is his earliest uses of the term "harmony" used in this way.

346 Prosper Enfantin (1796-1864) was a banker and manager of the Paris-Lyon railroad who became interested in the ideas of Saint-Simon who believed that industrial society should be managed by an elite of scientists and engineers. Enfantin was regarded as one of Saint-Simonism's "high priests."

347 Lamartine, La politique , vol. 2, p. 159.

348 This criticism by Lamartine of the "coldness" of economics might have been one of the spurs to Bastiat writing his engaging, amusing, and clever "economic sophisms" over the coming year, beginning in April, shortly after this was written. These were collected and published in January 1846 as the first series of Economic Sophisms . He explicitly noted that he wanted to overcome the accusation made against political economy that it suffered from "de sécheresse et de prosaïsme" (dry and dull or prosaic) and that economists were "secs et froids" (dry and cold). See, ES2.2 "Two Moral Philosophies," ES2 2 in CW3, pp. 131-38. Quote on p. 135.

349 Alphonso the Wise (Alfonso X) (1221-1284) was king of Leon and Castile from 1252-1284 and was reputed to have said that if he had been present at the creation of the world he would have had a few words of advice for the Creator on how better to order the universe. During his reign he attempted to reorganize the Castillian sheep industry, raised money by debasing the currency, and imposed high tariffs in order to prevent the inevitable price rises which resulted. Bastiat liked this story about Alfonso so much that he referred to it several times in his work.

350 The purpose of what would later become Bastiat's Economic Sophisms was to refute the economic errors (sophisms) which were deliberately spread by the protectionists in order to deceive "the dupes", the ignorant and gullible general public.

351 Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (1749-1827) was an astronomer and mathematician who was appointed Minister of the Interior under Napoleon in 1799 and a Peer in the Restoration. He contributed to the restructuring of the French high school system under Napoléon by ensuring that mathematics was a crucial part of the curriculum. His major work was the multi-volume Mécanique céleste (Celestial Mechanics) (1799-1805). He used his new mathematical models to explain the perturbations in the orbits of Saturn, Jupiter, and the moon and discovered that they were oscillations which repeated themselves over time within precise limits.

352 François Arago (1786-1853).

353 See Arago's biography of "Laplace" in Œvres complètes de François Arago, secrétaire perpétuel de l'Académie des sciences. Publiées d'après son ordre sous la direction de M. Jean Augustin Barral (Paris: Gide et J. Baudry, 1855), vol. 3, p. 478.

354 This could a reference to either the Idéologues, like Destutt de Tracy, or the Economists, like Jean-Baptiste Say. In Lucien Bonaparte's Memoirs he tells us that his brother Napoléon boasted that he invented the term "ideologue" to ridicule the liberal reformers around Destutt de Tracy who dared to tell him how to run the government. He also called them "metaphysicians" and "chercheurs d'idées" (idea hunters) and "les bavards" (chatter boxes). See, Théodore Iung, Lucien Bonaparte et ses mémoires: 1775 - 1840 d'après les papiers déposés aux archives étrangères et d'autre documents inédits . 3 vols. (Paris: Charpentier, 1882). vol. 2, p. 243. Napoléon's most extended rant against the economists can be found in one of the conversations recorded by Count de Las Cases in 23 June 1816 while Napoléon was incarcerated on Sainte-Hélène. He was quoted as saying that "The Emperor fought against the Economists whose principles could be true in principle (leur annoncé) but became harmful (vicieux) in their application." (p. 332). See, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, ou, Journal où se trouve consigné, jour par jour, ce qu'a dit et fait Napoléon durant dix-huit mois, par le comte de Las Cases (Paris: L'Auteur, tous les libraires de France et de l'etranger, 1823). vol. 4, pp. 331-38. In turn, Jean-Baptiste Say wrote a lengthy critique of Napoleon's economic ideas in "Erreurs où peuvent tomber les bons auteurs qui ne savent pas l'économie politique," Mélanges et correspondance d'économie politique: ouvrage posthume de J.-B. Say; publié par Charles Comte, son gendre (Paris: Chamerot, 1833), pp. 380-405.

355 La Politique de Lamartine , vol. 2, p. 164

356 La Politique de Lamartine , vol. 2, p. 165.

357 See his article "On Competition," JDE May 1846, below pp. 000.

358 Bastiat refers several times to humans as "un être actif" (an acting or active being) and to "l'action humaine" (human action). Here he refers to "des agents intelligents et libres" (fee and intelligent agents or actors). See the glossary on "Human Action."

359 Bastiat says "stérilité" which might be childlessness, or the use of contraception.

360 This is an idea which Bastiat took up again in his famous essay on "The State" which first appeared in his revolutionary street magazine Jacques Bonhomme in June 1848 and then in a revised and longer version in the upmarket Journal des Débats in Sept. 1848. See, T.212 [1848.06.11] "The State" (L'État), Jacques Bonhomme , no. 1, 11-15 June 1848, p. 2 [OC7.59, pp. 238-40] [CW2, pp. 105-6]; and T.222 [1848.09.25] "The State" (L'État), Journal des Débats , 25 Sept. 1848, pp. 1-2; also published as a pamphlet: L'État. Maudit argent! (The State. Damned Money) (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849). [OC4, pp. 327-41] [CW2, pp. 93-104]

361 Bastiat uses the phrase "comme élément harmonique dans le jeu des lois sociales" which is only the second time he used the word "harmonique".

362 Charles Comte, Traité de Législation , 1826 ed, vol. 1, Livre II, Chap. XI. De l'action des lois de la morale, et des obstacles que cette action rencontre quelquefois dans celle des gouvernemens, dans des institutions publiques, ou dans des erreurs populaires," p. 507-8. Similar arguments were made by Herbert Spencer against compulsory or government charity (but not voluntary charity) as early as 1842 in "The Proper Sphere of Government". See, Herbert Spencer, The Man versus the State, with Six Essays on Government, Society and Freedom , ed. Eric Mack, introduction by Albert Jay Nock (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1981). < /titles/330#lf0020_head_018 >.

363 Bastiat says "une communauté de droit" (a community of entitlements).

364 Bastiat is giving here the standard Malthusian response of the Economists of his day. He was later to repudiate much of this orthodoxy in an article and in Economic Harmonies much to the regret of his colleagues. See, Bastiat, "De la population" (On Population), JDE , Octobre 1846, below, pp. 000; and EH, Chap. 16 "Population" See also the glossary on "Malthusianism."

365 La Politique de Lamartine , vol. 2, p. 151.

366 "For the sake of living" - "propter vitam vivendi perdere causas" (to destroy the reasons for living for the sake of life) which comes from Juvenal, Satyricon VIII, verses 83–84.

367 Bastiat uses the older 18th century expression "la police" which meant state and bureaucratic regulation of the economy.

368 Here Bastiat uses the term "l'économie sociale" (social economy) which is one he often used in his writing. By this he meant something broader than the more limited sphere of "pure political economy" which encompassed the traditional economic matters of production, trade, and the buying and selling goods and services. "Social economy" included all aspects of human activity in the social realm, namely any human activity which was voluntary and involved groups of individuals coming together for social purposes. In other words, what we would today call sociology. In late 1847 Bastiat had an opportunity to give some lectures at the School of Law on social economy, or what he called in a letter to his friend Félix Coudroy the "Harmonie des lois sociales" (the Harmony of Social laws). These lectures were later to become part of his book Economic Harmonies . See, Letter 81. Paris, Aug. 1847. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, p. 78), CW1 , pp. ???

369 Bastiat's view of the proper and legitimate functions of the state was that it should do less than the standard "limited government" envisaged by Adam Smith and his followers, namely police, defence, courts, some public goods like roads, possibly some education, and the provision of money. Bastiat believed in "ultra-minimal government" since he believed that many roads, all education, and even money could be provided privately. He also thought the national standing army should be demobilised and replaced by local militias, and that only in grave emergencies should the government provide some temporary and limited relief to the poor during emergencies (such as crop failures). These minimal state activities would be funded by a 5% tariff on both imports and exports until they could be replaced by single flat income tax. All other taxes would be abolished. Although he did not go as far as his younger friend and colleague Gustave de Molinari did in wanting to see the private provision of "security," he was much more radical than most of his colleagues in the Political Economy Society. See the debates in the Society on "The Limit of the Functions of the State" which were held in October 1849, January and February 1850, below, pp. 000, pp. 000. and pp. 000.

370 La Politique de Lamartine , vol. 2, p. 164.

371 The same quotation was used by Bastiat on the title page of his first series of Economic Sophisms (1846). It comes from Bentham's Théorie des peines et des récompenses (1811) in a passage at the end of chapter XIV on "Abolition du taux fixe de l'intérêt de l'argent dans les entreprises commerciales". It seems to be an insertion by the editor (Bowring) from Bentham's Manual of Political Economy . The quotation makes sense when one realises that it concerns the proper functions of government and what politicians and regulators can learn from political economy. Here Bentham is arguing for a hands off approach, or a policy of laissez-faire: "Je terminerai ce précis comme je l'ai commencé, en répétant que l'économie politique doit être considérée comme une science plutôt que comme un art. Il y a beaucoup à apprendre , et peu à faire. Les abeilles font le miel par instinct; il suffit de leur laisser une ruche tranquille, des champs et des bois pour y amasser leur récolte; mais, parce qu'on a besoin d'une partie de leur miel, il faut étudier leur nature, il faut connaître l'économie de ce petit peuple, pour ne pas nuire à la reproduction de ses travaux." (I will end this precis as I began it, by repeating that political economy ought to be regarded as a science rather than an art. There is much to learn and little (for the government) to do. The bees make honey by instinct. It is sufficient to leave their hive in peace, and also the fields and woods for them to harvest their crop. However, because we need part of their honey it is necessary to understand the economy of these little creatures ("people") in order not to harm their productive labour.) The English language version is somewhat different. In the 1825 edition the editor paraphrases Bentham in a chapter dealing with "Bentham and Adam Smith" on political economy and much of it seems to have been taken from the Manual of Political Economy : "In conclusion, political economy is a science, rather than an art. There is much to be learned respecting it and little to be done. Is it inquired what ought governments to do, that wealth may be increased—the answer is, Very little, and nothing rather than too much. What ought to be done for the increase of population ?—Nothing. In the greater number of states, the best methods of augmenting population and wealth, would consist in abolishing those laws and regulations whereby it has been sought to increase them, provided such abolition were gradually and carefully accomplished. The art therefore is reduced within a small compass: security and freedom is all that industry requires. The request which agriculture, manufactures, and commerce presents to governments, is modest and reasonable as that which Diogenes made to Alexander: " Stand out of my sunshine." We have no need of favour, we require only a secure and open path." See, Oeuvres de Jeremy Bentham, vol. 2 (Bruxelles: L. Hauman, 1829), p. 246; and The Rationale of Reward (London: (London: John and H. L. Hunt, 1825), p. 229.

372 La Politique de Lamartine , vol. 2, p. 164.

373 Bastiat uses the term "la simplification of government" which we have translated as the reduction in size of government" which fits better the contrast he draws between the slogans " Société contrainte, gouvernement compliqué" (coerced society, big or complicated government) and " Société libre, gouvernement simple" (free society, small or simple government).

374 This is a another very early use of the terms disturbing and restorative factors. See the glossary on "Disturbing and restorative Factors."

375 Bastiat makes an issue of slogans and banners in this section so it is worth looking at the slogans he chose to put on the banners of the magazines he edited in the coming years. He was very taken with a phrase used by Lamartine in a speech he gave for the French Free Trade Association in Lyon in August 1847, "la vie à bon marché" (life at low prices). Bastiat made this one of the three slogans he used on the banner of the Association's journal Le Libre-Échange which was edited and largely written by Bastiat and which appeared between 29 Nov. 1846 to 16 April 1848. The others were "on ne doit payer d'impôt qu'à l'État" (one ought to pay taxes only to the state) and "les produits s'achètent avec les produits" (products are bought with other products). In the first magazine he and Molinari and others produced and handed out in the streets of Paris in February and March 1848, La Republique française , the slogans used were "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) and "Justice, Économie, Ordre" (Justice, Economie, and Order). His second revolutionary magazine, Jacques Bonhomme , appeared in June and July 1848 and had as its primary slogan Lamartine's "la vie à bon marché". See, Discours de M. de Lamartine, prononcé dans l'Assemblée marseillaise du libre échange, le 24 août, 1847 (Association pour la liberté des échanges. Lyon: L. Boitel, 1847), p. 6.

376 Bastiat uses term "liberté de transactions" which we have translated here as "freedom to do business."

377 Bastiat is referring to Richard Cobden, the leader of the Anti-Corn Law League, who was successful in getting the Corn Laws repealed in January 1846. Bastiat's first book was on him: Cobden et la ligue, ou l'Agitation anglaise pour la liberté du commerce (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845). See the glossary on "Cobden."

378 This is his first use of the term"la mécanique social" (the social mechanism). Later he preferred to use the very similar phrase "le mécanisme social" (the social mechanism) which he first used in the article "On Competition" (JDE May 1846). See below, pp. 000.

379 This is a reference to the innovative methods used by the Anti-Corn Law League in spreading free trade ideas in Britain. They employed itinerant lecturers to address large crowds in all the major towns, sold or gave away large numbers of leaflets and pamphlets, and sold merchandise. Bastiat spoke about these new techniques very enthusiastically in the introduction to his book and hoped to emulate them in France with a Free Trade Association with which Bastiat became very active in 1846-47.

380 One of the strategies of the Anti-Corn Law League was to encourage supporters to buy land in key boroughs in order to be allowed to vote, in the hope they might tip the election in their favour.

381 See, CW3, pp. 1-110.

382 He was still expressing considerable self-doubt about his abilities as an economist in the "Draft Preface to the Harmonies " (Fall, 1847) in CW1, pp. 316-20.

383 T.19 "On the Influence of French and English Tariffs on the Future of the Two People" (De l'influence des tarifs français et anglais sur l'avenir des deux peuples), JDE , T. IX, Oct. 1844, pp. 244-71 [OC1, pp. 334-86] [CW6].

384 G. de Molinari, "Nécrologie. Frédéric Bastiat, notice sur sa vie et ses écrits," JDE, T. 28, N° 118. 15 février 1851, pp. 180-96. Molinari said they had thought he was "a simple piece of quartz" from the depths of Les Landes not realising that he was in fact "this diamond," p. 184.

385 Bastiat, Cobden et la ligue, ou l'Agitation anglaise pour la liberté du commerce (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845). Bastiat's Introduction will appear in CW6 (forthcoming). An edited version of the Introduction was published in the JDE: T.28 (1845.06.15) "The Economic Situation of Great Britain: Financial Reforms and Agitation for Commercial Freedom" (Situation économique de la Grande-Bretagne. Réformes financières. Agitation pour la liberté commerciale), JDE , June 1845, T. XI, no. 43, pp. 233-265.

386 He uses the phrase "cette tactique d'agitation" (this tactic of demonstration or protest) in a letter to Horace Say: Letter 33. Letter to Horace Say, 24 November 1844, CW1, pp. 53-55. Quote on p.54.

387 He talks about this meeting in Letter 37. Letter to Félix Coudroy, Paris May, 1845, CW1, pp. 59-61. See the glossary entry on "The Political Economy Society."

388 The next installment of Economic Sophisms appeared in July ("Equalizing the Conditions of Production" and "Our Products are weighed down with Taxes") and October ("The Balance of Trade," "Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles," "Differential Duties," "An immense Discovery!!!," "Reciprocity," and "Nominal Prices". These 10 short pieces which first appeared in the Journal des Économistes , along with 11 others, were published at the end of the 1845 as the first series of Economic Sophisms published by Guillaumin. The second series would appear in January 1848.

389 Letter 41. Letter to Félix Coudroy (n.d.), CW1, pp. 66-67. The context tells us the time it must have been written.

390 Letter 80. Letter to Richard Cobden, Paris, 5 July 1847, CW1, pp. 130-31. He stated: "Being struck by the danger in the path along which the young were rushing headlong, I took the initiative of asking young people to listen to me. I gathered together students from the schools of law and medicine, i.e., the young men who, in a few years' time, will be governing the world, or France at least. They listened to me with goodwill and friendliness but, as you will readily understand, without understanding me very well. No matter; since the experiment has been started I will continue it to the end."

391 See, "To the Youth of France," in EH (FEE edition), pp. xxi-xxxvii. LF edition CW5 (forthcoming). He was still saying the same thing to Fontenay in July 1850: "Middle-aged men (around the Journal des Économistes ) do not easily abandon well-entrenched and long-held ideas. For this reason, it is not to them but to the younger generation that I have addressed and submitted my book." See Letter 180. Letter to M. de Fontenay, Les Eaux-Bonnes, 3 July 1850, CW1, pp. 255-56.

392 Letter 37, CW1, p. 59.

393 Letter 37, CW1, p. 59.

394 Letter 37, CW1, p. 63.

395 Eugène Daire (1798-1847) was of all things a tax collector who revived interest in the heritage of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century free-market economics. He came to Paris in 1839, met Guillaumin, discovered the works of Jean-Baptiste Say, and began editing the fifteen-volume work, Collection des principaux économistes (1840-48). It included works on eighteenth-century finance, the physiocrats, Turgot, Adam Smith, Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say, and Ricardo. He was a founding member of the Political Economy Society.

396 Letter 42. Letter to Félix Coudroy, Paris, 3 July 1845, CW1, pp. 67-69. Quote on p. 68.

397 Letter 42, CW1, p. 68.

398 Letter 40. Letter to Félix Coudroy,16 June 1845, CW1, pp. 65-66.

399 He describes them as "an accidental meeting of well-meaning men" in Letter 38. Letter to Félix Coudroy, Paris, 23 May, 1845, CW1, pp. 61-62. Quote on p. 61.

400 Bastiat was already beginning to think of writing a theoretical treatise of his own since the "Economic Sophisms" were proving to be popular with ordinary readers and he had gained the esteem and recognition of many of his colleagues. He planned to call it Social Harmonies. See, Editor's Introduction to "A Note on Economic and Social Harmonies" (June 1845), below, pp. 000.

401 Letter 40, CW1, p. 65.

402 Letter 42, CW1, pp. 69, and Letter 43, p. 71. See the glossary entry on "Charles Comte."

403 Bastiat described J.B. Say as "his intellectual father" and called Charles Comte's Traité de la propriété (1834) one of the few books he might take with him if he were marooned on a desert island. See Letter 33, CW1, p. 53; and T.143 "On Mignet's Eulogy of M. Charles Comte" (July 1847), below, pp. 000.

404 The Académie des sciences morales et politiques (the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences) is a French learned society and one of the five academies which comprise the Institute of France. The Academy was founded in 1795 as part of a restructuring of the pre-revolutionary Royal Academies. It was reconstituted by King Louis-Philippe in October 1832 with five sections. Bastiat was made a "corresponding" (or junior) member of the 4th section (Political and Statistical Economics) on 24 January, 1846. See the glossary on "The Academy of Moral and Political Sciences."

405 Can't find in Archives parlementaires ??? Missing vol. 76.

406 The next installment of Economic Sophisms appeared in July ("Equalizing the Conditions of Production" and "Our Products are weighed down with Taxes") and October ("The Balance of Trade," "Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles," "Differential Duties," "An immense Discovery!!!," "Reciprocity," and "Nominal Prices". These 10 short pieces which first appeared in the Journal des Économistes ,along with 11 others, were published at the end of the 1845 as the first series of Economic Sophisms published by Guillaumin. The second series would appear in January 1848.

407 See the glossary entries on "Dunoyer" and "Comte."

408 We have evidence that Bastiat was reading Dunoyer as early as 1827 (Letter to Coudroy, 9 April 1827) where he refers to his theory of "industrialism" and that he was attempting to write to him on the eve of his coming to Paris in the second half of 1844, hoping that Horace Say might make the introduction on his behalf. He finally met Dunoyer at a dinner held in Paris to welcome Bastiat's arrival in May 1845 (Letter to Coudroy, May, 1845). This was the first of several dinners and meetings with the man whose work he so much admired.

409 Letter 34. "Letter to Charles Dunoyer (Mugron, 7 March 1845), CW1, pp.55-56.

410 There is no reference to Bastiat in the printed book but Bastiat may be referring to a hand written note Dunoyer may have included with the copy he sent Bastiat.

411 See, T.19 [1844.10.15] "On the Influence of French and English Tariffs on the Future of the Two People" (De l'influence des tarifs français et anglais sur l'avenir des deux peuples), JDE , T. IX, Oct. 1844, pp. 244-71 [OC1, pp. 334-86] [CW6]; and T.23 [1845.01.15] "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine. On the occasion of his article entitled: The Right to Work (Un économiste à M. de Lamartine. A l'occasion de son écrit intitulé: Du Droit au travail), JDE , Feb. 1845, T. 10, no. 39, pp. 209-223 [OC1, pp. 406-28]

412 Letter 37. Paris, May 1845. To Félix Coudroy (OC1, pp. 50-52)

413 Michel Chevalier, "Variétés", Journal des débats , 21 February, 1845, p. 3.

414 See below, pp. 000.

415 Comte, Charles, Traité de législation, ou exposition des lois générales suivant lesquelles les peuples prospèrent, dépérissent ou restent stationnaire , 4 vols. (Paris: A. Sautelet et Cie, 1827). A second revised edition was published in 1835 by Chamerot, Ducollet of Paris in 4 vols. to coincide with the publication of its sequel, the Traité de la propriété . Comte, Charles, Traité de la propriété , 2 vols. (Paris: Chamerot, Ducollet, 1834).

416 As is often the case in this period, the lengthy subtitles to the works reveal much about the intention of the author: Dunoyer, Charles, L'Industrie et la morale considérées dans leurs rapports avec la liberté (Industry and Morality considered in the Relationship with Liberty) (Paris: A. Sautelet et Cie, 1825); Nouveau traité d'économie sociale, ou simple exposition des causes sous l'influence desquelles les hommes parviennent à user de leurs forces avec le plus de LIBERTÉ, c'est-à-dire avec le plus FACILITÉ et de PUISSANCE (A New Treatise on Social Economy: or a simple Account of the Causes under the Influence of which Mankind comes to use their Powers with the most Liberty, that is to say with the greatest Skill and Strength) (Paris: Sautelet et Mesnier, 1830), 2 vols.; and De la liberté du travail, ou simple exposé des conditions dans lesquelles les forces humaines s'exercent avec le plus de puissance (On the Liberty of Working, or a simple Account of the Conditions under which Mankind's Powers are exercised with the greatest Strength) (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845).

417 See the glossary entry on "Social Economy."

418 Dunoyer, De la liberté du travail , vol. 1, p. 3.

419 Dunoyer, De la liberté du travail , vol. 1, p. 25.

420 Dunoyer, De la liberté du travail , vol. 1, p. 17.

421 See the Editor's Introduction to his "Letter to Lamartine" above, pp. 000. Also the glossaries on "Harmony and Disharmony" and "Service for Service."

422 Dunoyer, De la liberté du travail , vol. 1, Preface, p. xv.

423 This is the first time Bastiat uses the term "harmonique" (harmonious) which would later become the lynch pin of his theoretical work. See the glossary entry on "Harmony and Disharmony."

424 The Moravian Brethren was a Christian sect founded by the followers of Jan Hus (1370-1415) who was a Czech priest and dean of the Prague faculty of theology. He was burned at the stake for heresy. During the 18th century the Moravians established settlements where communal living and simplicity of lifestyle based upon limited personal property was practiced.

425 A Phalanstery. was a self-sustaining community of the followers of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. He envisaged that new communities of people would spring up in order to escape the injustices of free-market societies and industrialism. He called his new self-supporting communities "phalanxes," which would consist of about 1,600 people who would live in a specially designed building called a "phalanstère," or "phalanstery." See the glossary entries for "Fourier" and "Phalanstery."

426 "Fi de la liberté ! À bas la liberté !" is the refrain from a poem called "La Liberté. Première chanson faite à Sainte-Pélagie" (Janvier 1822) by the poet and political song writer Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857) when he was in prison for offending the censors. He mocks his jailers by listing their crimes against him and pretending to denounce liberty.In Béranger's Songs of the Empire, the Peace, and the Restoration , trans. Robert B. Brough (London: Addey and Co., 1854), pp. 109-11. Chansons de P.J. Béranger, précédées d'une notice sur l'auteur et d'un essai sur ses poésies par M. P. Tissot (Paris: Perrotin, 1829), Tome II. pp. 13-15. See the glossary on Béranger.

427 Marcellin Jobard (1792-1861) was a Belgian lithographer, photographer, and inventor. From 1841 to 1861 he was the director of the Royal Belgian Museum of Industry in Brussels. He was a prolific inventor (with 75 patents) and took up the cause of defending the property rights of inventors. He wrote dozens of pamphlets expressing his views in a very idiosyncratic manner.

428 See the glossary entry "Saint-Simon."

429 See the glossary entry on "Blanc."

430 George Cuvier (1769-1832) was a French naturalist who specialised in the areas of comparative anatomy and paleontology. In the field of geology he was an exponent of the theory of catastrophism in which period cataclysmic events led to the radical transformation of the earth's landscape and the mass extinction of animal species.

431 Bastiat no doubt had in mind some of the people discussed by Louis Reybaud, Études sur les réformateurs ou socialistes modernes: La société et le socialisme, les communistes, les chartistes, les utilitaires, les humanitaires (Paris: Guillaumin, 1843). 3 vols.

432 Dunoyer, De la liberté du travail , vol. 1, Livre 1. "Ce que l'auteur entend par le mot liberté," pp. 23-43.

433 Dunoyer's classification of economic activity was threefold: industries which were involved with transforming "things" (such as mining, transport, manufacturing, and agriculture), industries which were concerned with human well-being (such as medicine, culture, education, and moral development), and activities which were less "industrial" but still an integral part of what he called the "social economy" (such as voluntary associations, trade, and charity and other forms of gift giving). De la liberté du travail , vol. 1, pp. 15-16.

434 Destutt de Tracy, Traité d'économie politique (Paris: Bouguet et Lévi, 1823), Chap. II. "De la formation de nos richesses, ou de la production utile," p. 88. "Quand à la classe laborieuse et directement productive de toutes nos richesses, comme son action sur tous les êtres de la nature se réduit toujours à les changer de forme ou de lieu, elle se partage naturellement en deux: les manufacturiers (y compris les agriculteurs), qui fabriquent et façonnent; et les commerçans, qui transportent, car c'est là la véritable utilité de ces derniers: s'ils ne faisaient qu'acheter et revendre , sans transport et, sans détailler, sans rien faciliter , ils ne seraient que des parasites incommodes, des joueurs , des agioteurs. Nous parlerons bientôt des uns et des autres, et nous verrons promptement combien notre manière de considérer les choses répand de• lumières sur toute la marche de la société. Pour le moment, il est encore nécessaire d'expliquer un peu davantage en quoi consiste cette utilité, notre seule production, laquelle résulte de tout travail bien entendu, et de voir comment elle s'apprécie, et comment elle seule constitue la valeur de tout ce que nous appelons nos richesses."

435 The idea that exchange was in fact the exchange of "service pour service" (a service for a service) was one of Bastiat's key insights which he developed more fully in the Economic Harmonies . Here is his first use of this idea although expressed in a slightly different form, "La société, au point de vue économique, est un échange de services rémunérés". See the glossary entry on "Service for Service."

436 Bastiat defends the idea that people like doctors, lawyers, and teachers also do productive work creating what J.B. Say called "non-material goods" See Say's definition in Traité d'économie politique ou Simple exposition de la manière dont se forment, se distribuent et se consomment les richesses , (Paris: Rapilly, 1826), Volume 3, pp. 312-13: "Produit Immatériel. C'est toute espèce d'utilité qui n'est attachée à aucun corps matériel, et qui, par conséquent, est nécessairement consommée au même instant que produite. Les produits immatériels sont, comme les autres produits, le résultat d'une industrie, ou d'un capital, ou d'un fonds de terre, ou de tous les trois ensemble. L'utilité qu'on retire du service d'un médecin, d'un avocat, d'un fonctionnaire civil ou militaire, est un résultat de leur industrie; L'utilité qu'on retire d'une maison , ou d'un meuble durable, de l'argenterie, est un résultat du service d'un capital; L'utilité ou le plaisir qu'on retire d'une route ou d'un jardin d'agrément, sont le résultat du service d'un fonds de terre, accru du capital consacré à leur arrangement." Trans . ???

437 See below, pp. 000 and pp. 000.

438 "On the Bordeaux to Bayonne Railway Line" (19 May 1846), CW1, pp. 312-15.

439 It is not clear what he means by this but it could refer to his appointment as a local Justice of the Peace in 1831.

440 "On the Bordeaux to Bayonne Railway Line," CW1, p. 315.

441 See, M. L. Mounier, De l'agriculture en France d'après les documents officiels , 2 vols. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1846), vol. 1, Chap. X "Des divers modes de l'exploitation du sol," p. 265.

442 See Molinari, Les Soirées (1849), "The Fourth Evening" (forthcoming).

443 Charles Dunoyer, Liberté du travail (1845), vol. 2, Book VIII, chap. V "De la liberté de l'industrie agricole," p. 412-13.

444 "Proposition for the Creation of a School for Sons of Sharecroppers" CW1, pp. 334-40. This paper was presented in 1844 to the Chamber of Agriculture of Les Landes.

445 "Proposition for the Creation of a School for Sons of Sharecroppers" CW1, p. 334.

446 This was a complete reversal of his previous view in the "Third Article" of "The Canal beside the Adour" (June 1837), see below, pp. 000.

447 Adrien de Gasparin, Guide des Propriétaires de biens soumis au métayage (Paris: Dusacq, 1847), pp. iii-iv.

448 See his debate with Proudhon in "Free Credit" (Nov. 1949-March 1850) below, pp. 000.

449 Another possibility is that this is an article Bastiat had written several years before when his thinking was less developed and was only now (February 1846) getting around to publishing.

450 See, "6. Proposition for the Creation of a School for Sons of Sharecroppers" CW1, pp. 334-40. This paper was presented in 1844 to the Chamber of Agriculture of Les Landes.

451 See the glossary entry on "Social Economy."

452 The standard account for the Economists of the original and just acquisition of private property in land out of a state of communal tribal ownership is provided by Charles Comte in Traité de la Propriété (1834). Comte believes it was a near universal phenomenon that communally owned land eventually was transformed into private ownership as soon as an individual was able through the self denial of immediate consumption to save enough to survive long enough to engage in the more protracted process of cultivating a plot of land until the harvest. This resulted in dramatically higher output than hunting and gathering or other communal activities. See, Charles Comte, Traité de la Propriété (1834), vol. 1, chap. X "De la conversion du territoire national en propriétés privées," pp. 139-61.

453 In the 18th century France had several important Agricultural Societies which promoted these ideas and they were supported by the Physiocrats who believed that agriculture was the most productive productive economic activity. Similar societies also existed in the 19th century such as Société royale et centrale d'agriculture (The Royal and Central Agricultural Society) in which the politician and agronomist Adrien de Gasparin (1783-1862) was very active. See glossary on "Gasparin."

454 Bastiat gets the quote from the duc de Sully slightly wrong: it should be "que le labourage et pasturage estoient les deux mamelles dont la France estoit alimentée" (that plowing and pasturing are the two breasts from which France is fed). It comes from the Oeconomies royales, ou memoires du Sully (1598) (1837 edition), Chap. XVI, p. 195.

455 Joseph Alexandre Mathieu de Dombasle (1777-1843) was a pioneer agronomist who helped establish the French sugar-beet industry. He began a model farm in 1822, a factory to produce agricultural tools (1823), and a school of agriculture (1824). Inspired by British agriculture, he introduced the practice of triennial crop rotation (cereals, forage, vegetables), which Bastiat tried in vain to introduce in his own sharecropping farms.

456 C.-J.-A. Mathieu de Dombasle, Annales agricoles de Roville: ou, Mélanges d'agriculture, d'économie rurale, et de législation agricole (Paris: Chez Madame Huzard, 1824), pp. 2-3.

457 Bastiat would have read Charles Dunoyer's thoughts on the advantages of alternating cultivation over the older triennial rotation system in Liberté du travail (1845), vol. 2, Book VIII, chap. V "De la liberté de l'industrie agricole," p. 412-13, in which he discusses the benefits of this kind of farming for the more profit conscious "l'entrepreneur de culture" (the entrepreneur in the farming business). This was an idea taken up in more detail by Molinari in Les Soirées , no. IV where he argued that the days of the small family run farm were numbered and they would be replaced by the consolidation of land into large-scale agri-businesses run for profit.

458 It is not clear where Bastiat gets his economic data from, but it is most likely from Statistique de la France, publiée par France Ministère de l'Intérieur, de l'Agriculture et du Commerce. Tomes IIIe et IVe de la Statistique agricole du Royaume. (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1841). Other works he might have consulted include: J.-H. Schnitzler, Statistique générale méthodique et complète de la France comparée aux autres grandes puissances de l'Europe (Paris: H. Lebrun, 1846), vol. 3, pp. 82-83; Alexandre Moreau de Jonnès, Statistique de l'agriculture de la France comprenant: la statistique des céréales, de la vigne, des cultures diverses, des paturages, des bois et forêts, et des animaux domestiques, avec leur production actuelle, comparée à celle des temps anciens et des principaux pays de l'Europe (Paris: Guillaumin et cie, 1848); or from some of the other statistical volumes listed in the bibliography of H. Passy, "Agriculture," DEP , vol. 1, pp. 31-49.

459 Touraine was the name of an old province of France which had Tours as its capital. It was largely replaced by the modern Département of Inde-et-Loire.

460 "Agronomaniacs," or enthusiasts in favour of agricultural reform, were not unique to Bastiat's time. Steven Kaplan has an account of the heyday for "agromania" during the 1750s when the Physiocratic school was beginning to emerge. The solution to the problem of French agriculture was seen in the creation of agricultural societies organised by the government and by local notables who would publish and disseminate tracts, pamphlets, manuals and catechisms with useful information on how to improve agricultural output. Kaplan states that by the 1760s a government report on agricultural societies counted 18 societies in 21 generalities with 2,000 active members. These agricultural improvement societies evolved by the 1760s into what Kaplan calls "a liberty lobby" which made the leap from purely agricultural improvements to political and economic improvements which would make the latter possible. In the same tradition as the Physiocrats, Bastiat was doing his best to do likewise with the farmers and tenants of his home region. Voltaire in his typical amusing manner made fun of these efforts in the article on "Wheat" in the Philosophical Dictionary (1764): "if a labourer planted as much weight in grain as we have of volumes on this product, he would aspire to the most ample harvest." See Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics, and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 2 vols, vol. 1, pp. 119-20. Voltaire quote p. 119.

461 Again, here Bastiat seems to have a very different view about the effects competition has on the well-being of tenant farmers and wages earners than the more optimistic and positive views he would express in Economic Harmonies . See, Chap. 10 "Competition" (also below, pp. 000) and chap. 14 "Wages".

462 Interestingly, Bastiat does not admit a third possibility for an increase in wages, that of increased productivity.

463 This might be said of Bastiat himself in his last few years which were spent on the road working for the French Free Trade Association or in Paris.

464 This contradicts Bastiat's later notion of a "harmony of interests" between all consumers and producers when there is an absence of violence and political privilege.

465 The worst example of impoverishment caused by renting land which was too small to be viable was seen in Ireland. It was described vividly by Gustave de Beaumont, the travelling companion of Alexis de Tocqueville, who published an analysis of the poverty in Ireland and blamed the rapacious Irish aristocracy, calling for its abolition: Gustave de Beaumont, L'Irlande sociale, politique et religieuse (Paris: C. Gosselin, 1839). 2 vols.

466 Here Bastiat uses the phrase " Le bail à colonie" for sharecropping leases and for sharecropper " colon partiaire".

467 This is a reply to socialists like Fourier and Blanc who argued that what workers needed was a new form of "association" in their work arrangements where there would be no wages paid by owners of factories or workshops but where workers would work cooperatively and share the proceeds among themselves. Sometimes he would use the word in lowercase,"association," to distinguish his understanding of voluntary association from the socialist notion of compulsory, state enforced "Association" (beginning with a capital A) in these new kinds of workshops.

468 See the glossary entries on "Malthus" and "Malthusianism."

469 Another hostile remark about wage labour which is absent from Economic Harmonies .

470 The Great Irish Famine of 1845-1852 was caused by a disease which affected the potato crop (potato blight) and resulted in the deaths of 1 to 1.5 million people from famine and the emigration of a further million people out of a population of around 7 million. In addition to the failure of the potato crop there were other serious problems which were of concern, including the situation of tenant farmers unable to pay their rents, the continued export of food from Ireland during the famine, and restrictions on the free import of food from elsewhere in Europe. The latter issue was taken up by members of the Anti-Corn Law League in England when campaigning for the abolition of tariff restrictions on grain, which they achieved in 1846.

471 The Rebecca Riots took place in Wales between 1839 and 1843 in protest against the tolls which were charged local farmers to use public roads. Toll Trusts had been set up by the government to manage the roads and to levy tolls on users. When tolls were increased at a time of poor harvests some male farmers dressed up as women in order to hide their identity while they destroyed the toll gates. They took their name from a biblical verse about Rebecca in Genesis 24:60 "And they blessed Rebekah and said unto her, Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them." The JDE reported on the Rebecca Riots in late 1843. The editor H. Dussard commented that it was a reaction to changes made to communal property rights which infuriated the farmers. Léon Faucher also had an extended account of the riots in a chapter on Wales in Études sur l'Angleterre (Guillaumin, 1845). See, H. Dussard, Chronique, Paris 17 septembre, JDE, T. 16, août à novembre 1843, p. 214; and Léon Faucher, Études sur l'Angleterre , (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845), Tome II, II. Carmarthen, pp. 215-43.

472 This passage may well be autobiographical where Bastiat draws upon his own experience in dealing with sharecroppers on his estate.

473 Sismondi also recognised this aspect of sharecropping when the same family is supported on the estate. But he is also aware of the excessive growth of population which can result from the good intentions of the land owner who is always inclined to offer his land to the second son who, wanting to marry, will be happy to accept a cut in the terms of the sharecropping arrangements as has happened to the farmers in the river regions of Genoa, in the republic of Lucca and some of the provinces of Naples, to one third of the crop instead of one half. See, Simonde de Sismondi, Nouveaux principes d'économie politique, ou De la richesse dans ses rapports avec la population (Paris: Delaunay, 1827), vol.1, Book III, Chap. V "De l'exploitation par métayers, ou à moitié fruits," pp. 189-203.

474 At this stage of his life Bastiat had travelled extensively only in Spain and Portugal where his family had business dealings. He made his first trip to England in 1845 to meet Richard Cobden and to do research for his book on Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League which was published in July 1845.

475 The Mémorial bordelais was published between March 1814 and October 1862. It was a daily newspaper published in the city of Bordeaux which covered political, commercial, maritime, and literary matters of interest to the inhabitants of the department of the Gironde. Bastiat was a frequent contributor during 1846 writing a total of 20 articles between February and October.

476 See the glossary on the "Anti-Corn Law League."

477 See the glossary entry on "Association pour la liberté des échanges (The French Free Trade Association)."

478 See the glossary entry on "Le Libre-Échange."

479 His speeches for the free trade movement will appear in CW6 (forthcoming).

480 See the glossary entry on "Association pour la défense du travail national" (Association for the Defense of National Employment).

481 Antoine Odier (1766-1853) was a Swiss-born banker and textile manufacturer. He was a deputy (1827-37) and eventually a peer of France (1837). Odier was also president of the Chamber of Commerce of Paris and a leading member of the protectionist Association for the Defense of National Employment. Since he was a member of its Central Committee the organization was sometimes referred to as "the Odier Committee" for short.

482 Auguste Pierre Mimerel de Roubaix (1786-1872) was a textile manufacturer and politician from Roubaix who was a vigorous advocate of protectionism. In 1842 he founded a pro-tariff "Comité de l'industrie" (Committee of Industry) in his home town to lobby the government for protection and subsidies against a proposed Franco-Belgian trade treaty which was under discussion; and in October 1846 he was instrumental in organizing the regional committees to form a national body based in Paris known as the "Association pour la défense du travail national" (Association for the Defense of National Employment).

483 Le Moniteur industriel (founded in 1839) became the journal of the protectionist "Association pour la défense du travail national" (Association for the Defense of National Employment) founded by Mimerel de Roubaix in 1846. It was the intellectual stronghold of the protectionists and became one of Bastiat's bêtes noires.

484 See the glossary entry on "Octroi."

485 Bastiat played with this reductio ad absurdum argument in a number of his economic sophisms such as "La protection ou les trois Échevins" (Protection, or the Three Municipal Magistrates) [late 1847] [ES2.13] [OC4.2.13, pp. 229-41] in CW3, pp. 214-26, and "Le maire d'Énios" (The Mayor of Énios]) [ LE , 6 February 1848] [OC2.63, pp. 418-29] in CW3, ES3 18 pp. 355-65.

486 T.43 (1846.01.15) "Theft by Subsidy" (Le vol à la prime), JDE , Jan. 1846, T. XIII, no. 50, pp. 115-120; also ES2.9 [OC4, pp. 189-98] CW3, ES2 9, pp. 170-79.

487 The quote that follows comes from Bastiat's first public speech for the Free Trade Association . given in Bordeaux on 23 February, 1846:"Premier discours, à Bordeaux" (First Speech given in Bordeaux), 23 Février 1846. [OC2.42, p. 229-38] [CW6].

488 Bastiat uses the phrase "le pillage organisé" (organised pillage).

489 The population of Bordeaux in 1846 was about 125,000.

490 See Bastiat's critique of the sophism used by protectionists that although free trade might be fine in theory, it was not in practice, ES1 13 "Theory and Practice" (late 1845), CW3, pp. 69-75.

491 Possibly the following: Projet de réforme postale, par un directeur comptable des postes. 23 février 1846 (Impr. de Robin, (s. d.)).The Report was presented to the Chamber by Adolphe Vuitry on 13 April 1846: No. 115. Chambre des Députés. Session 1846. Rapport fait Au nom de la Commission chargée d'examiner le projet relatif à la taxe des lettres, par M. Vuitry, Député de l'Yonne. Séance du 13 avril 1846 , pp. 317-67. In Procés-verbaux des séances de la chambre des députés. Session 1846. Tome V. Du 7 au 14 avril 1846. Annexes Nos. 107 à 132 . (Paris: A. Henry, 1846).

492 Bastiat distinguished between "fiscal tariffs" on imported goods at a low rate of 5% in order to raise revenue for the state, and "protective tariffs" higher than that which were designed to shield domestic producers from foreign competition.

493 The model for reformers like Bastiat was the English "Uniform Penny Post" which was first introduced in 1839 as a uniform 4 penny stamp for all letters and then cut to a penny stamp in 1842.

494 The central postal administration was located in the Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Paris. The book Bastiat is referring to might be A. Piron, Du service des postes et de la taxation des lettres au moyen d'un timbre (Paris: H. Fournier, 1838). Piron was Deputy Director of the Postal Service.

495 Mail to the Levant was transported on ships carrying passengers and freight between Marseilles and the ports of the Middle East.

496 Bastiat was quite consistent in his demand that the rate for letters be reduced to 5 centimes, which he continued to advocate in 1848 when the measure come up for a vote in the Chamber. Nevertheless, he was also willing to compromise and accept a cut to only 10 centimes in order to get some cut in the rates passed by the legislature and to help balance the Budget.

497 This was a subsidy for men serving in the French army and navy who were often posted far from their homes. ( pun deliberate!!)

498 At this time the size of the French Army was about 400,000 men who were able to enjoy subsidised mail service. Bastiat is saying that ordinary French workers, "les soldats de l'industrie" (the soldiers who work in all productive activities), should also enjoy lower costs for sending letters.

499 Article 7 stated that mail delivery is the monopoly of the government, Rapport fait Au nom de la Commission chargée d'examiner le projet relatif à la taxe des lettres , p. 365.

500 According to Article 8 owners of trains or carriages can be held legally liable for the private actions of their employees. See, Rapport fait Au nom de la Commission chargée d'examiner le projet relatif à la taxe des lettres , p. 365.

501 Rapport fait Au nom de la Commission chargée d'examiner le projet relatif à la taxe des lettres , p. 365.

502 ( Bastiat's note. ) If you receive 4 letters at 30 centimes, 4 letters at 20 centimes and 2 letters at 1 franc in the space of one year, is this not as though you had paid a fixed rate of 40 centimes for each letter, which is the average for the current system?

503 See, Michel-Charles Chégaray, Rapport fait au nom de la Commission chargée d'examiner la proposition de M. de Saint-Priest, relative aux tarifs de la poste aux lettres (July 1844), p. 17.

504 All the figures here come from Chégaray's Rapport , pp. 10 ff.

505 This was the "modern" idea that a letter could not be delivered without a prepaid stamp attached to the envelope.

506 Bastiat mocks this complicated system for determining the charge for sending letters in "Le sel, la poste et la douane" (Salt, the Mail, and the Customs Service), JDE , May 1846, T. XIV, pp. 142-152. This article later appeared in ES2 12, CW3, pp. 198-214.

507 In 1848 the French government received a total of 51.7 million francs in revenue from the various activities of the Post Office, including 46.5 million francs from tax on letters.

508 According to the Budget figures for 1848 the French government spent a total of 1.446 billion francs and received 1.391 billion francs in revenue, which produced a deficit of 54.9 million francs.

509 See the Editor's Introduction to T.284 "A Note on Economic and Social Harmonies" (June 1845), above pp. 000.

510 Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle: répertoire universel des sciences, des lettres et des arts avec la biographie de tous les hommes célèbres , ed. Ange de Saint-Priest (Paris: Au bureau de l'Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle, Impr. Beaulé, Lacour, Renoud et Maulde, 1846).

511 See below, pp. 000, pp. 000, and pp. 000.

512 Ronce, Frédéric Bastiat. Sa vie, son oeuvre (1905), pp. 227-28.

513 See, Letter 157 to Cobden, Paris, 31 December, 1849, CW1, p. 226.

514 See, "Natural and Artificial Organization" (Jan. 1848), below, pp. 000.

515 See the glossary on "Disturbing and Restorative Factors."

516 See above, pp. 000.

517 See the glossary entry "Ceteris paribus."

518 Alexander Reutlinger, Gerhard Schurz, and Andreas Hüttemann "Ceteris Paribus Laws," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive (Spring 2014 Edition) <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/ceteris-paribus>.

519 "Reflections on the Petitions from Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Lyons Relating to the Customs Service" (April 1834) [OC1.2, p. 231] [CW2] CW2, pp. 1-9.

520 See the Editor's Introduction to "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (below, pp.000) and the glossary on "The Social Mechanism."

521 Below, pp. 000.

522 See below, pp. 000 and pp. 000.

523 Capital and Rent , below, pp. 000.

524 Letter No. 4: F. Bastiat to P. J. Proudhon (26 November 1849) in Free Credit , below, pp. 000.

525 The original Introduction of 21 paragraphs (2,100 words) was replaced in the EH version with a new introduction of 4,000 words in which Bastiat more directly replied to the socialists' criticism that competition was "anarchic" and harmed the interests of the workers.

526 On Bastiat's plans to write a multi-volume work on "economic" as well as "social" harmonies, see the Editor's Introduction to T.284 "A Note on Economic and Social Harmonies" (June 1845) above, pp. 000.

527 Bastiat uses the term "la classe industrieuse."

528 Marvelling at the bounty of goods imported from all over the world was a common rhetorical device/argument used by free traders at this time. It was made very popular by an orator of the Anti-Corn Law League, William J. Fox (1786-1864) who gave a speech at Covent Garden Theatre on 25 January 1844 in which he highlighted how the English, even the anti-free trade landowners, were already heavily dependent on goods made by foreigners, even before free trade had become government policy in 1846. Bastiat quoted from this speech at length in his book Cobden and the League (1845) and highlighted it by italicizing the names of the countries from which all the products came from. Bastiat also had another version of this story, very similar to Leonard Read's "I, Pencil" (1958), which appeared in the article ""Natural and Artificial Organisation" JDE, January 1848 and was also part of Economic Harmonies . Bastiat's story was about a "village carpenter" so we might call it "I, Carpenter." See below, pp. 000.

529 Bastiat had several terms like "le marché général du monde" (the general market place of the world) which he used to describe the global marketplace in which trading now took place. These terms also included "le grand marché" (the great market place), "un vaste bazar" (a huge bazaar), "ce bazar d'échange" (this trading bazaar). See for example, "On Population" (October 1846) (below, pp. 000); his Second Speech in Paris for the Free Trade Association (26 Sept. 1846) in CW6 (forthcoming); and "The Mutuality of Services" (c. 1849), below, pp. 000.

530 See the glossary on "The Social Mechanism."

531 Bastiat is mocking the socialists' penchant for inventing ever more elaborate new ways of "organizing" society along socialist lines. Under the influence of Charles Fourier, Louis Blanc, and Proudhon during the 1840s the words "organization" and "association" became slogans used by the socialists to oppose the advocates of free trade and free markets. For these socialists, "L'Organisation" meant the organisation of labor and industry by the state for the benefit of the workers; and "l'Association" meant cooperative living and working arrangements as opposed to private property, exchange on the free market, and the family. See in particular Louis Blanc's influential pamphlet L'Organisation du travail (The Organization of Labor) (1839) which was reprinted many times during the 1840s. See also the glossary entry on "Association and Organization."

532 Bastiat's first publishing success, Economic Sophisms (1846), was a collection of short articles which debunked common "sophistical" arguments used to justify protective tariffs, trade restrictions, and state subsidies to favored industries. They have been republished in CW3.

533 Bastiat realized of course that a glass of water offered to a customer living in the Pyrénées Mountains had less value than a glass of water offered for sale in the Sahara desert, because of its rarity, difficulty of procuring it, and the type of service it provided. See his discussion in T.234 Capital and Rent (1849), below, pp. 000.

534 The word "génie" (genius) is used in the Encyclopedia article but was changed to "l'esprit" (spirit) in the JDE article.

535 He is referring to Malthus' law of population growth which he discusses in the companion article on "Population" which also appeared in the Encyclopedia . See below, pp. 000.

536 See the glossary on "Service for Service."

537 Here Bastiat is attacking the notion that a produced good "contained" or "embodied" a certain, quantifiable amount of the worker's labour which gave it a certain value. This "labor theory of value" was part of the classical tradition of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and was taken up by Karl Marx and other socialists in the 1830s and 1840s.

538 Bastiat uses the word "s'aliéner" (to alienate or surrender). We have not translated it as "alienate" because of its connection with the Marxist idea of "alienating one's labour", a meaning which Bastiat did not intend here.

539 Here ends the introduction to the Encyclopedia and JDE articles. The chapter as it appeared in Economic Harmonies had a very different introduction of 3,854 words. This will be included in our edition of Economic Harmonies in CW5 (forthcoming). The following two paragraphs dealing with English coal appeared in all versions.

540 In the chapter in EH the following two paragraphs were replaced with a larger section of 629 words. Here he discusses the same issue from the perspective of everyday, domestically produced goods like cloth or bread and the impact international free trade would have on them.

541 Bastiat reverses the socialist slogan "de chacun selon ses facultés, à chacun selon ses besoins" (from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs) which was popularised by Louis Blanc in the 1840s and taken up by Karl Marx in 1875, by rephrasing it as "à chacun selon sa capacité" (to each according to their ability). See Louis Blanc, Historie de la Révolution française , Tome premier (Paris: Langlois et Leclerc, 1847), p. 533; and Plus de girondins (Paris: Charles Joubert, 1851), p. 106.

542 Bastiat is referring here to legislation concerning copyright and patents. The economists were deeply divided on the question, with some being "absolutists" in defending the right of authors and inventors to a perpetual property right in their creations, such as Molinari, Laboulaye, Frédéric Passy, Modeste, and Paillottet; while others such as Wolowski, Renouard, de Lavergne, Foucher, and Dupuit, believed that it should be a limited right of short duration, that it was a "license" for first use but not an absolute and eternal property right. Bastiat was somewhere between the two groups. Hippolyte Castille began a journal devoted to the issue of intellectual property rights in August 1847, Le Travail intellectuel (Intellectual Labor). Bastiat was listed as one of the magazine's "collaborators." See the Editor's Introduction to T.151 "A Letter (to Hippolyte Castille) (on intellectual property)" (9 Sept. 1847) below, pp. 000.

543 France had a well developed system of optical telegraphy, the Chappe telegraph, which had emerged in the late 18th century for the use of the French government and military. The American Samuel Morse invented the electric telegraph in 1832 thus making all previous optical systems redundant. The first electric telegraph in France sent messages from Paris to Rouen in 1845 but was still reserved for the exclusive use of the government. In March 1851 the use of the electric telegraph was opened up to the public for the first time. Also in that year the first submarine cable was laid between England and France.

544 Bastiat uses the phrase "les moyens d'existence" (the means of existence) which FEE and Stirling translate as "the means of subsistance." The terms pose a problem for translators as Bastiat came to believe there was a significant difference between the two. He distinguished between the Malthusian notion of "les moyens de subsistance" (the means of subsistance), which is the bare minimum needed for physical survival, and "les moyens d'existence" (the means of existence), by which he meant something more like the modern idea of the "standard of living". Bastiat rejected the idea that the poor were condemned to hovering just above or just below the means of subsistance. The productivity of the free market, if it were unshackled from its protectionist chains and high levels of taxation, would dramatically raise the standard of living of all people. See the Editor's Introduction to "Population" below, pp. 000 for more details.

545 Bastiat uses here the word "lutte" (fight or struggle) to describe the behavior of the capitalists. He changes the word for some reason to "émulation" (rivalry or competition) in the JDE article and in the chapter in EH. Possibly it sounded too "socialist."

546 The following three paragraphs were extensively rewritten in EH.

547 See the pamphlet Capital (mid-1849), below, pp. 000; his long debate with Proudhon on Free Credit (October 1849 to March 1850), below, pp. 000; and Chapter VII "Capital" in EH..

548 After this paragraph Bastiat added in EH a new 4 page section (some 1,871 words) where he discusses how workers are also consumers who benefit from competition, how exchanges are the mutual exchange of services for both parties involved, that he doesn't deny the hardships faced by some workers but he argues that the operation of the market is normally harmonious unless it is upset by "des causes perturbatrices" (disturbing factors) such as economic crises and the activities of "plunderers," that members of the working class are both buyers and sellers of services and that they benefit enormously from the competition among sellers of the goods they need to survive. He concludes that one needs to assess both the benefits and hardships caused by competition to see on balance whether the workers are better off or not. He thinks they will be better off.

549 Bastiat refers here to the "sentimentalist schools of thought" which he cuts from the EH version, where he talks merely of "sentimentalist rhetoric" about the "the social question" as it was often referred to at the time. By "sentimentalist school" he probably has in mind, in addition to the strong critique of the condition of the workers by socialists such as Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), authors like Simonde de Sismondi and Christian political economists like Villeneuve-Bargemont. See, Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, Nouveaux principes d'économie politique, ou de la richesse dans ses rapports avec la population (Paris: Delaunay, 1819) and Alban Villeneuve-Bargemont, Economie politique chrétienne ou Recherches sur la nature et les causes du paupérisme en France et en Europe et sur les moyens de le soulager et de le prévenir (Paris: Paulin, 1834).

550 Bastiat is referring to the restrictions placed upon him to write articles for the popular Encyclopedia in which he published this essay on "Competition" and "Population" in the first half of 1846.

551 Bastiat uses the phrase "toutes choses égales d'ailleurs" which we have translated as "all other things being equal." The FEE translator replaces this with the Latin phrase "ceteris paribus" which Bastiat did not use here. He did use both phrases elsewhere in his writing a total of 17 times, as early as May 1846 in T.61 "First Letter to the Editor of the Journal des débats , 2 May, 1846, in CW6 (forthcoming). He seems to be an early user of this important economic phrase. See the glossary on "Ceteris paribus."

552 See the glossary entry on "Fourier."

553 Prosper Enfantin (1796-1864) was influenced by the ideas of Saint-Simon and, with Olinde Rodrigues et Bazard, founded the utopian socialist school of the Saint-Simonians, which advocated a form of socialism in which industrial society would be managed by an elite of scientists and engineers. In the Economic Harmonies version of this chapter Bastiat changes the pairing from Fourier and Enfantin to Fourier and Louis Blanc, most likely because of the prominent role Blanc had assumed in the socialist movement after the Revolution of February 1848.

554 Bastiat uses the term "couches" (bed, layer, strata) which he had only begun using in this sense in 1844 with "les dernières couches sociales" (the lowest social strata) in "The Division of the Land Tax" (above pp. 000); in Feb. 1845 with "toutes les couches de la société" (all the strata in society) in "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine" (JDE) (above, pp. 000; and with "des dernières couches sociales" ((the lowest social strata) in the Introduction to his book Cobden and the League (published July 1845). He then used in frequently in the two articles he wrote for the Encyclopédie - 5 in the "on Competition" article and 6 in the "On Population" article.

555 Bastiat did not often use the word "caste" as his preferred terminology was the pairing of "la classe spoliatrice" (the plundering class) and "la classe spoliée" (the plundered class), or sometimes "la classe électorale" (the electoral or voting class). Outside of direct references to the Indian caste system, he only used the term "caste" five times in expressions such as "des castes héréditaires" (the hereditary castes), "les castes guerrières et dominatrices" (the warrior and dominating or ruling castes), or as here, a reference to the Catholic clergy who controlled so much of French education and the widespread teaching of Latin and Greek.

556 As a youth, Bastiat attended an experimental school which taught modern languages and music instead of Latin and Greek. He was very hostile to classical education throughout his entire life, seeing in it the perpetuation of illiberal ideas of the disdain for work, a warrior ethic, and the moral values of ancient slave owners.

557 Bastiat would say more about these "disturbing factors" in the EH version of this article.

558 The following section on the standard of living of native Canadians was cut in the Economic Harmonies version and replaced with a new section of 155 words.

559 Bastiat was born in Bayonne in 1801 and lived in its vicinity for 44 years before moving to Paris..

560 ( Bastiat's note. ) "I must tell you about an article on 'Population' which will follow this one on "Competition" and which is the indispensable complement to it." Editor's Note : Bastiat wrote two articles for an Encyclopedia in 1846, one on "Competition and the other on "Population" which he later also published in JDE.

561 Cadmus was the mythical founder and first King of Thebes. Herodotus believed that Cadmus introduced knowledge of the alphabet to the Greeks.

562 According to Greek mythology Triptolemus was taught the art of agriculture by Demeter, and he in turn passed on this knowledge to the Greeks.

563 Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468) pioneered the use of movable type for printing books in 1439 in the German city of Mainz.

564 Richard Arkwright (1732–1792) was an English inventor who invented several machines which could spin and card raw cotton into thread.

565 James Watt (1736-1819) was a Scottish inventor and engineer who built the Watt steam engine in 1781.

566 This is an example of an expression Bastiat liked to use, "glisser" (to slip or slide), which he was to use in his theory of the "ricochet or flow on effect" beginning in 1847. This was a technical term Bastiat originally adopted to help explain how the negative consequences of government intervention "flowed on" to other sectors of the economy. He later extended it to explain how other changes could also have a kind of "multiplier effect" but in a positive direction, as here. He also liked to use other hydraulic terms to explain how information was transmitted throughout an economy. See the "The Sophism Bastiat never wrote: the Sophism of the Ricochet Effect" in CW3, pp. 457-61.

567 Bastiat would write an entire article on "Abundance" which would be published in the DEP after his death. See below, pp. 000.

568 Bastiat wrote several economic sophisms on how obstacles were placed in the path of consumers. See for example, ES1 2 "Obstacle and Cause" April 1845), ES1 16 "Blocked Rivers" (c. 1845), ES1 17 "A Negative Railway" (c. 1845); ES2 3 "Two Axes" (c. 1847), ES2 16 "The Right Hand and the Left Hand" (Dec. 1846).

569 See the Editor's Introduction to T.284 "A Note on Economic and Social Harmonies" (June 1845) on Bastiat's use of the term "social harmonies," above pp. 000.

570 In the EH version Bastiat changed the pairing to Owen and Cabet. See the glossary entry "Owen."

571 Pierre Leroux (1798-1871) was a prominent member of the Saint-Simonian group of socialists and founder of Le Globe , a review of the Saint-Simonists. He was a journalist during the 1840s and was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848 and to the Legislative Assembly in 1849.

572 Bastiat uses the word "lutter" (to fight) here and in the EH version.

573 Adam Smith astutely noticed that "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, edited with an Introduction, Notes, Marginal Summary and an Enlarged Index by Edwin Cannan (London: Methuen, 1904). Vol. 1. Part II.: Inequalities occasioned by the Policy of Europe, p. 130.

574 See also Bastiat's essay T.204 "Disastrous Illusions" (JDE, March 1848) in CW3, pp. 000.

575 See the glossary entry on "Social Economy."

576 Bastiat probably has in mind Pellegrino Rossi (1787-1848) who was a member of the PES and taught political economy at the Collège de France. In the Introduction to his Course d'économie politique (1840) he dismisses the study of the "consumption of wealth" as "(a branch of economics) which is contained in the other two (production and distribution of wealth). What one calls productive consumption is nothing more than the employment of capital; consumption that one might call "unproductive," namely taxation, is contained directly in the distribution of wealth. The rest belongs to one's well-being (hygiène) and moral theory (la morale)." Pellegrino Rossi, Course d'économie politique. Année 1836-1837 (Bruxelles: Société typographique belge, 1840), p. 6. See the glossary on "Rossi."

577 Bastiat uses here two key concepts popular with socialists, organization and association, and turns them on their heads for rhetorical effect.

578 See the glossary entries on "Vidal" and "The National Workshops."

579 François Vidal, De la répartition des richesses, ou De la justice distributive en économie sociale; ouvrage contenant: l'examen critique des théories exposées soit par les économistes, soit par les socialistes (On the Redistribution of Wealth, or Distributive Justice in Social Economy; a Work containing a critical Examination of Theories espoused by both Economists and Socialists) (Paris: Capelle, 1846).

580 Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail. Association universelle. Ouvriers. - Chefs d'ateliers. - Hommes de lettres. (Paris: Administration de librairie, 1841. First edition 1839).

581 Victor Considerant, Contre M. Arago: réclamation adressée à la Chambre des députés par les rédacteurs du feuilleton de la Phalange : suivi de la théorie du droit de propriété (Paris: Au bureau de la Phalange, 1840).

582 Proudhon, Qu'est-ce que la propriété? ou Recherches sur le principe du Droit et du Gouvernement. Premier mémoire (Paris: J.-F. Brocard, 1840).

583 Bastiat's thoughts on this can be found in his "Letter to Garnier on the Right to a Job" (October 1848), below, pp. 000.

584 This was reprinted in Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail (5ème édition), revue, corrigée et augmentée d'une polémique entre M. Michel Chevalier et l'auteur, ainsi que d'un appendice indiquant ce qui pourrait être tenté dès à présent (Paris: au bureau de la Société de l'industrie fraternelle, 1847). "Réponses à diverses objections." Chevalier's article, pp. 121-35; and Blanc's response from 17 Feb. 1845, pp. 135-48.

585 Charles Dunoyer, De la liberté du travail, ou simple exposé des conditions dans lesquelles les force humaines s'exercent avec le plus de puissance . 3 vols. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845). See the glossary entry on "Dunoyer."

586 See, T.23 (1845.01.15) "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine. On the occasion of his article entitled: The Right to Work" (Un économiste à M. de Lamartine. A l'occasion de son écrit intitulé: Du Droit au travail), JDE , Feb. 1845, T. 10, no. 39, pp. 209-223 [OC1.9, pp. 406-28] [CW4]; T.20 (1845.?? March) "On the Book by M. Dunoyer. On The Liberty of Working" (Sur l'ouvrage de M. Dunoyer, De la Liberté du travail). Unpublished draft, possibly written in March when Dunoyer's book was published. [OC1.10, pp. 428-33] [CW4]; T.80 (1846.10.15) "Second Letter to M. de Lamartine" (Seconde lettre à Monsieur de Lamartine), JDE , Oct. 1846, T. 15, No. 59, pp. 265-70. [OC1.13, pp. 452-60] [CW4]; T.140 (1847.06.27) "On Communism" (Du Communisme), LE , 27 June 1847, no. 31, pp. 244-45. [OC2.22, pp. 116-24] [CW6]; T.165 (1847.12.26) "A Letter from Mr. Considérant and a Reply" (Lettre de M. Considérant et réponse) [OC2.25, pp. 134-41] [CW6]

587 See the glossary entry on "Bastiat's Anti-Socialist Pamphlets."

588 An earlier version of this appeared as an article in JDE Jan. 1848 which appears in this volume, see below pp. 000.

589 Molinari, Gustave de, Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare; entretiens sur les lois économiques et défense de la propriété (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849).

590 La Démocratique pacifique (1843-1851) was the most successful of the journals which supported the socialist ideas of Charles Fourier. It was edited by Victor Considérant (1808-1893) whose wife subsidized its running costs. See the glossary entries on "Fourier," " La Démocratie pacifique ."

591 Bastiat lists the American presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; the English legal philosopher and political economist Jeremy Bentham, the French marshal of the Army under Napoléon and future King of Sweden Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, the French conservative author Chateaubriand, the French liberal political theorist Benjamin Constant and the French socialist Saint-Simon.

592 See the glossary entry on "Saint-Simon."

593 Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) was the leading French political economist in the first third of the nineteenth century. His main work was the Treatise of Political Economy (1803).

594 Bastiat in these passages is unwittingly predicting what in fact would happen to him at the hands of some of his colleagues in the SEP in 1849 and 1850. His original work on rent, value theory, and population growth challenged the orthodoxy of his colleagues who believed that a self-taught economist from the provinces had little to say which would improve upon the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus. See in particularly Molinari's obituary of Bastiat in the February issue of the JDE, T. 28 Jan-Avril, 1851, pp. 180-196.

595 Vidal is referring to the Economists' preferred policy of "laissez-faire." See, Vidal, De la répartition des richesses, p. 38.

596 Vidal, De la répartition des richesses, p. 37.

597 Vidal, De la répartition des richesses, p. 52.

598 Vidal, De la répartition des richesses, p. 52.

599 Vidal, De la répartition des richesses, p. 47.

600 Vidal, De la répartition des richesses, p. 48.

601 Bastiat was a strong opponent of conscription which was the main way the French Army got the 80,000 new men it needed each year to maintain the size of the army at 400,000 men (with 7 year enlistments). Recruiting was done by a combination of voluntary enlistment, conscription (with men selected by by drawing lots), and substitutions (where someone about to be conscripted could pay a third party to serve in his place). See the glossary on "The French Army and Conscription."

602 See the glossary entry on "Blanc" and "National Workshops."

603 An example of Fourier's efforts to elaborately plan acceptable interest rates for various transactions can be found in La fausse industrie morcelée (1835), pp. 88 ff. An example of the neologisms invented by Fourier for his social theory can be found on p. 393 where he discusses his "serial" or "stepped" method of arranging his material under the rubric of "Inter, Citer, Ulter, Anter, Poster, Avant, and Final". See, Charles Fourier, La fausse industrie morcelée, répugnante, mensongère, et l'antidote, l'industrie naturelle, combinée, attrayante, véridique, donnant quadruple produit (Paris: Bossange père, 1835).

604 Vidal, De la répartition des richesses, p. 165.

605 Vidal, De la répartition des richesses, p. 42.

606 Vidal, De la répartition des richesses, p. 43.

607 Vidal, De la répartition des richesses, Troisième partie. "De la répartition selon les socialistes. Chap. VII "Conclusion pratique," pp. 468-91.

608 Vidal, De la répartition des richesses, pp. 473-4.

609 The National Workshops were established in late February 1848 immediately after the collapse of the July Monarchy and the declaration of a Provisional Government under Lamartine. They were set by Louis Blanc in the Luxembourg Palace."

610 A "Phalanstery" was a self-sustaining community of the followers of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. He envisaged that new communities of people would spring up in order to escape the injustices of free-market societies and industrialism. See the glossary on "Phalanstery".

611 See Bastiat's essay "Thoughts on Sharecropping" (Feb. 1846) above, pp. 000.

612 Here Bastiat is mocking Fourier's jargon in Traité de l'association domestique-agricole (1823) where he used musical concepts such as scales and notes to describe how many different aspects of the world were rationally organised, such as the movement of the planets, the relationship between the different human races, and how these same principles could be used to organise a typical worker's every working day schedule. See, Oeuvres complètes de Ch. Fourier. Tome II.: Théorie de l'unité universelle. 2e éd. 4 tomes. (Paris: La Société pour la propagation et la réalisation de la théorie de Fourier, E. Duverger, printer, 1841-1843).

613 In CW3, pp. 1-110.

614 Of the 75 "economic sophisms" he wrote, 14 or 19% were in dialog form. See the Editor's Introduction to CW3, pp. xlix-lxxxii for a discussion of his writing style.

615 See the glossary entry on "Jacques Bonhomme (Person)."

616 Only the wealthiest 240,000 taxpayers in France were allowed to vote under the July Monarchy. Bastiat called them "la classe électorale" (the voting class). See the glossary on "The Chamber of Deputies and the Electoral Class."

617 Bastiat pursues this idea further early the following year in T.102 (1847.01.17) "The Utopian" (L'utopiste), LE , 17 Jan. 1847, no. 8, pp. 63-64; which becomes ES2 11. He is clearly the "utopian politician" who is given power by the king to introduce any liberal reforms he likes, which provides us with a very good idea of what Bastiat's own view of what the powers of the state should be. He begins to do so but pulls back in the end because he realizes he does not have the support of the people and does not wish to impose liberty upon them from above. See, CW3, pp. 187-98.

618 The Le Journal des débats supported the liberal-minded Doctrinaire group around Guizot during the July Monarchy. Bastiat would write several important pieces for it such as "Property and Plunder" (July 1848) and "The State" (Sept. 1848). However, it supported protectionism. Le National was an important liberal and increasingly republican newspaper during the July Monarchy. It was founded by Adolphe Thiers, François-Auguste Mignet, and Armand Carrel. It played an important role in the outbreak of the February Revolution of 1848 and many of its friends and supporters got positions in the new government.

619 Bastiat probably has in mind socialist writers such as Louis Blanc or Proudhon whose critiques of property were becoming increasingly influential during the 1840s and would play an important role during the 1848 Revolution. They wanted to replace the liberal notion of property and individual liberty with a socialist version which Bastiat thought was contradictory.

620 These were all taxes Bastiat very much opposed and spent a considerable amount of his time before and during the 1848 Revolution trying to abolish. As Vice-President of the Chamber's Finance Committee during the Second Republic he was caught in the dilemma of trying to balance the budget as these taxes were being reduced at the same time as government expenditure was increasing on things like the National Workshops unemployment relief program.

621 This is a reference to the massive public works initiated by Thiers in 1841 and which were completed in 1844 to build the "fortifications of Paris" which were a massive military wall around the city with an accompanying outer ring of forts. The political economists opposed it on the grounds of its considerable cost and the fact it was yet another barrier around the city, in addition to the octroi toll gates, which hindered the free movement of goods and people. See the glossary entries on "The Fortifications of Paris" and "Octroi."

622 See Bastiat's essay "The State" in which he describes the state as "the great fiction whereby everybody tries to live at the expence of everybody else,"CW2, pp. 93-104, quote on p. 97; and his disparaging reference to "la grande organisateur" (the great organizer) in ES3 24. "Disastrous Illusions" (March 1848), in CW3, pp. 384-99, quote, p. 384.

623 Music, art, theatre, and other forms of fine art were heavy regulated by the French state. They could be subsidized, granted a monopoly of performance, the number of venues and prices of tickets were regulated, and they were censored and often shut down for overstepping the bounds. In the 1848 budget the relatively small amount of fr. 2.6 million was spent in the category of "Beaux-Arts" (within the Ministry of the Interior) which included art, historical monuments, ticket subsidies, payments to authors and composers, subsidies to the royal theatres and the Conservatory of Music, out of total budget of fr. 1.45 billion. Bastiat argued that the state should not subsidize theatres and the arts in Chapter IV "Theatres and the Fine Arts" in WSWNS, CW3, pp. 000. See also, "Documents extraits de l'enquête sur les théâtres," JDE July 1850, T. XXVI, pp. 409-12.

624 Bastiat's theory of class was still evolving when this piece was written. By the end of 1847 when he had finished works on ES2 (published in Jan. 1848) he argued that there were two classes, "la classes spoliatrice" (the plundering class) and "la classe spoliée" (the plundered class. See the opening two chapters of ES2 in CW3, "The Physiology of Plunder" and "Two Moral Philosophies, " pp. 113-39. See the glossary on "Bastiat's Theory of Plunder."

625 Bastiat made fun of the French habit of swinging wildly between love for the English and fear of the English in "Anglomania, Anglophobia" (c. 1847) in CW3, ES3 14, pp. 327-41.

626 The Protectionist uses the English phrases "John Bull" and "God damn."

627 Richard Cobden was a Manchester manufacturer who co-founded the free trade Anti-Corn Law League with John Bright in 1838. Bastiat began corresponding with him in November 1844 and developed a close friendship with him as he help found a French Free Trade Association in early 1846.

628 See the glossary on "Lamartine."

629 One of speeches was published as a separate pamphlet by the French FreeTrade Association. See, Discours de M. de Lamartine, prononcé dans l'Assemblée marseillaise du libre échange, le 24 août, 1847 (Association pour la liberté des échanges. Lyon: L. Boitel, 1847).

630 Lamartine, "De la crise des subsistances" (1 Oct. 1846), Le Bien public ; republished in La france parlementaire (1834-1851). Oeuvres oratoires et écrits politiques par Alphonse de Lamartine. Précédés d'une étude sur la vie et les oeuvres de Lamartine par Louis Ulbach. Troisième série: 1847-1851. Tome cinquième (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1865), pp. 1-10.

631 Thomas Perronet Thompson (1783-1869) was a soldier, politician, polymath writer, and pamphleteer and agitator for the Anti-Corn Law League. He was active in urging Catholic emancipation, the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the abolition of slavery. He used the catechism format in Catechism on the Corn Laws; With a List of Fallacies and the Answers (1st ed. 1827, 18th edition 1834) and Corn-law Fallacies, with the Answers (1839).

632 Here Bastiat may have in mind another book of poems by Lamartine he probably read in his youth called Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (1830) which may have contributed to Bastiat's thinking about the harmony of the market created by Providence.

633 Bastiat may have in mind the poems "Bonaparte" and "La Liberté, ou une nuit à Rome" in Nouvelles méditations poëtiques (1823).

634 Lord George Bentinck (1802-1848) was the leader of the conservative group in Parliament where he and Benjamin Disraeli led the opposition in the House of Commons against Richard Cobden's and Sir Robert Peel's attempts to repeal the Corn Laws in 1846.

635 Richard Grenville, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos (1797-1861) was a wealthy landowner in Buckinghamshire and member of the conservative group in Parliament. The Duke was often the butt of the jokes of the Free Traders in the House because of his uncompromising opposition to free trade and unwillingness to compromise.

636 From Moliere, Les Femmes savantes (1672), Acte III, scène II, where Philaminte says to Trissotin:

"Mais quand vous avez fait ce charmant quoi qu'on die, | Avez-vous compris, vous, toute son énergie? | Songiez-vous bien vous-même à tout ce qu'il nous dit? | Et pensiez-vous alors y mettre tant d'esprit?" in Oeuvres complètes de Molière avec les variantes (Paris: L. de Bure, 1834), p. 635. Translation: "But when you wrote that charming whate'er they say, Did you yourself fully understand its power? Did you even consider all that it says to us? And did you intend then to put so much wit into it?"

637 Possibly taken from Henri Grégoire, De la littérature des nègres, ou Recherches sur leurs facultés morales et leur littérature; suivies de Notices sur la vie et les ouvrages des Nègres qui se sont distingués dans les Sciences, les Lettres et les Arts (Paris: Maradan, 1808) with the obvious reference to the problem of abolishing slavery. Bastiat may have been citing from memory and got it slightly wrong: "Un problème non résolu, jusqu'à présent, mais non pas insoluble" (a problem which up until today has not been solved, but which is not insoluble), p. 150.

638 See Bastiat's critique of the sophism used by protectionists that although free trade might be fine in theory, it was not in practice, ES1 13 "Theory and Practice" (late 1845), CW3, pp. 69-75. There he was attacking the ideas of the arch-protectionist Auguste Saint-Chamans (1777-1860) who had been a deputy (1824-27) and a Councillor of State.

639 The "lois de maximum" (Maximum price, or price controls) was decreed on 29 September 1793 in an attempt to regulate the high prices of food by setting a maximum price which could be charged by food suppliers with very severe penalties for those who broke the law. The high prices were caused by war shortages, a failed harvest, and inflation caused by the issuing of the Assignat paper currency.

640 Bastiat owned land in south west France in the département of Les Landes which he inherited from his grandfather and rented out to sharecroppers. He owned about 250 hectares (617 acres) of land and earned enough from this to pay sufficient taxes to be eligible to vote and even to stand for office, which placed him in the top 5% of income earners in France.

641 At this time Bastiat was still working out his theory of harmony and its opposite disharmony.

He used two words to describe the opposite of harmony, namely "la dissonance" (dissonance) and "la discordance" (disharmony), and we have tried to preserve Bastiat's distinction between the two. In this passage Bastiat for the time pairs the two concepts of "harmony" and its opposite "dissonance." His next pairing would be in the Introduction to EH1,"To the Youth of France," after which he used it repeatedly. The first pairing of the words "harmony" and "discordance" (disharmony) was in a speech he gave for the FFTA in Marseilles in August 1847 (Sixth Speech given in Marseilles), in CW6 (forthcoming). See the glossary on "Harmony and Disharmony."

642 Lamartine,"De la crise des subsistances," p. 3.

643 Elsewhere, Bastiat makes the distinction between "legal" or state coerced charity and "voluntary" charity. See "First Letter to Lamartine", above, pp. 000.

644 "La vie à bon marché" would in fact become one of the mottos on the Association's weekly journal Le Libre-Échange when it began publication the following month. It was edited and largely written by Bastiat between 29 November 1846 and 16 April 1848. The motto was also used on the masthead of his and Molinari's radical newspaper, Jacques Bonhomme , which they handed out on the streets of Paris in June and July 1848. It is not clear when Lamartine first used this phrase.

645 In several Economic Sophisms Bastiat compares protectionism to other obstacles which impede economic progress, such as blocking up rivers (ES1 16 and ES2 7), breaking railway journeys (ES1 17), using blunt axes (ES2 3), and forcing people to use their left hand to work (ES2 16). See CW3.

646 See the glossary entry on "Disturbing Factors."

647 See the Editor's Introduction above, pp. 000 for details. Also, T.23 (1845.01.15) "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine. On the occasion of his article entitled: The Right to Work " (Un économiste à M. de Lamartine. A l'occasion de son écrit intitulé: Du Droit au travail ), JDE , February 1845, T. 10, no. 39, pp. 209-223. [OC1.9, pp. 406-28] [CW4].

648 His sketches were included as Chapter XVIII "Disturbing factors" in EH2.

649 See the glossary entry on "Service for Service."

650 Although Bastiat says he thinks Say's terminology is the preferred one he is not consistent in his use of these terms at this early stage in his thinking about population. He is more consistent in the EH version and we have indicated in this JDE version where we think Bastiat gets muddled. Say did not have a lot to say about Malthus' theory of population in the early editions of the Traité . He said much more about it in his Cours complet which was published in 1828-29, especially in vol. 4, Part VI, Chap. II "Des moyens d'existence des hommes," pp. 320-335.

651 Say, Cours complet , vol. 2, 1840 Guillaumin edition, Part V, Chap. X "Des profits de la classe ouvrière en particulier," p. 48.

652 As early as July 1844 in the conclusion to his Report T.17 "On the Allocation of the Land Tax in the Department of Les Landes" Bastiat quotes these authors and summarizes their views along the same lines. See, J.B. Say, "Des moyens d'existence des hommes" in Cours complet d'économie politique (1840 edition), vol. 2, part VI, chap. II, p. 128; and Sismondi, "Second essai. Du revenu social," in Études sur l'économie politique (1837), vol. 1, p. 128. See above, pp. 000.

653 Malthus's terminology was "preventive check" and "positive check" which was translated by Prevot in the early French editions of his works as "l'obstacle privatif" and "l'obstacle destructif." In a note to the 1845 Guillaumin edition the economist Joseph Garnier noted his unhappiness with these translations, believing that "l'obstacle préventif" and "l'obstacle répressif" were better. In this essay, Bastiat uses the terms preferred by Garnier. We have retained Malthus' original terms "preventive check" and "positive check" here, but have translated "l'obstacle" as "obstacle" or "check" according to the context. See, Malthus, Essai (1845), p. 12.

654 Bastiat is technically correct as Malthus states "In this supposition no limits whatever are placed to the produce of the earth," but he finishes the sentence with "yet still the power of population being in every period so much superior, the increase of the human species can only be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence by the constant operation of the strong law of necessity, acting as a check upon the greater power." See, An Essay on the Principle of Population (5th edition, 1817), vol. 1, Book I, Chap. 1 "Statement of the Subject. Ratios of the Increase of Population and Food," pp. 15-16.

655 The following phrase was not in the E version but inserted into the JDE version.

656 The phrase "de la propagation" (to the reproduction) was added to the JDE version.

657 In the E version he gave the following longer progression 2 — 4 — 16 — 64 —256 —1,024— 4,096 — 16,384, etc.

658 Again, Bastiat used a longer progression in the E version: 1 — 3 —6 — 18 — 54 — 162 — 486- 1,358, etc. And in both cases he got the final figure wrong.

659 Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, and astronomer who made important contributions to the theory of calculus and number theory. Bastiat might well have used his textbook on algebra when he was a schoolboy. Léonard Euler, Elémens d'algèbre, traduits de l'allemand. Nouvelle édition, révue et augmenté de notes, par J.G. Garnier (Paris: Courcier-Maire, 1807).

660 Numbers 1:44 where the number given was 603,550.

661 The following sentences were added to the JDE version and kept in the EH version.

662 Bastiat cites the "Bureau des Longitudes" which was an astronomical institute. He must have had in mind another statistical organisation of the French government which handled census and population data.

663 Bastiat does not say where he gets this information. Moreau de Jonnès wrote a great deal about agricultural and population statistics, including data about periods of doubling but we could not find the same figures Bastiat uses here. See "Recherches statistiques sur l'accroissement de la population," Revue encyclopédique (1832), p. 4; "Population de la France comparée à celle des autres états de l'Europe", JDE , 1842; Éléments de statistique (1847), pp. 225-27, 311-12, 317, 336. Interestingly, Jonnès criticises Malthus's theory of the doubling of population as "purely hypothetical" and that it applied better to primitive societies than to more advanced ones, in a manner which is very similar to Bastiat's. See, Éléments de statistique , pp. 227-28.

664 Bastiat called it "la loi de limitation" (the law of limitation) which is the expression used in the FEE and Stirling translations of this essay which appeared in EH. We have made it more specific by translating it as "the law of population limits".

665 This is another instance where Bastiat got his terminology mixed up. According to his theory he should have used the term "means of subsistence" not "means of existence." This shows he was still trying to get his theory straight.

666 Félicité de Lamennais (1782-1854) was a Catholic priest, deputy, and journalist. These quotations were taken from Lamennais' Le Livre du peuple (1837) republished in Oeuvres complètes de F. De Lamennais: revues et mises en ordre par l'auteur (Bruxelles: Hauman & Company, 1839). Vol. 2, pp. 631, 636, 642.

667 Bastiat no doubt has in mind the infamous passage from Malthus' Principle of Population which so incensed his critics but only appeared in the 2nd revised edition of 1803. It was removed in later editions. The passage comes from Book IV, Chapter VI "Effects of the Knowledge of the Principal Cause of Poverty On Civil Liberty": "A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he does not work upon the compassion of some of her guests." Thomas Robert Malthus, An essay on the principle of population: or, a view of its past and present effects on human happiness (London: J. Johnson, 1803), p. 531.

668 Given his previous distinction between "means of subsistance" and "means of existence" to be consistent Bastiat should have used the expression "means of subsistance" here. He continues to use "moyens d'existence" in EH2 for some reason.

669 The word "second" is added in the JDE version.

670 Malthus used the expression "moral restraint" which Prevot translated as "contrainte morale". The English term implies that the "restraint" comes from an act of will within the individual. The French term is ambiguous as "contrainte" has this meaning as well but also can mean "coercion" or the use of force which comes from outside the individual by another person. On the problem of translating the English expression "moral restraint" see the Translators' note in the Guillaumin edition 1845, pp. 13-14.

671 This is not Malthus' own expression but a close paraphrase by the original French translators the Prevot brothers. Malthus used the phrase "the only line of conduct approved by nature, reason and religion, (is) abstinence from marriage till we can support our children, and chastity till that period arrives." Malthus, Essay , 6th edition (London: John Murray, 1826), vol. 2, p. 305.

672 The following sentence was not in the E version but was inserted into the JDE version.

673 By "spiritualist school" Bastiat might have in might Catholic thinkers like Lamennais who opposed "family planning."

674 The phrase "over the management of his family" was not in the E version but was inserted into the JDE version.

675 The phrase "and that this same priest rejects as such" was not in the E version but was inserted into the JDE version.

676 The following sentence was not in the E version but added to the JDE version.

677 This sentence was cut from the EH version.

678 In the EH version Bastiat inserts here an important paragraph in which he criticises Malthus: "It is because he did not take sufficient account of the full power of this principle of progress that Malthus was led to the distressing consequences which have caused general aversion. Since he saw preventive checks only as some kind of asceticism, which, it has to be said, gains little acceptance, he could not ascribe a great deal of force to it. Therefore, in his view, in general it had to be the repressive check that plays the key role, in other words, vice, poverty, war, crime, etc. In my view, this is an error. We will see that the action of the limiting force on population growth offers mankind not just the practice of chastity, an act of self-denial, but also and especially a condition of well-being, an instinctive impulse which protects them and their families from decline."

679 Again Bastiat to be consistent with his previous use of the terms should have used the expression "means of subsistance" here and not "means of existence." He corrects this in EH.

680 In EH Bastiat adds the following important sentences to the paragraph: "I will note that for this expression, the means of subsistence , that was universally accepted in the past, J. B. Say has substituted another that is much more accurate, the means of existence . At first sight, it appears that subsistence is the only thing involved in the question. That is not so, man does not live by bread alone , and a study of the facts clearly shows that the population ceases to grow or decreases when all of the means of existence, including clothing, housing, and the other things that climate or even habit have made necessary, disappear." Thus, Bastiat had decided on this usage by late 1849 but he was still grappling with it here, somewhat inconsistently at times.

681 Bastiat liked to contrast "natural" and "artificial" (mostly "artificiel" and less often "factice"), as in natural vs. artificial organisation, social orders, monopolies, utility, solidarity, interests, and so on. By "natural" he meant something that was a result of human nature, the operation of natural laws, and voluntarily undertaken. By "artificial" he meant something that went against human nature, and was created by some individuals and imposed on others by force. Here he uses the word "factice" (artificial, man-made) in the sense, not of being imposed by violence but in the sense of an additional need being created after one's basic, life-sustaining needs have been satisfied. In the FEE translation the word "man-made" is used.

682 Good quote on unlimited wants/needs of man. Use above???

683 The phrase "operating in the same way as the valves in our arteries" was not in the E version but was added to the JDE version .

684 The following footnote by Bastiat was not in E but added to JDE version: "It is fair to say that J. B. Say noted that the means of existence were a variable quantity, from which it follows that his formula, as he himself states, has no scientific rigor." In the EH version the section "from which it follows that his formula, as he himself states, has no scientific rigor." was deleted.

685 See above, pp. 000.

686 "It gathers strength as it goes" from Virgil, The Aeneid , IV, 175). Williams' translation: "In movement she grows mighty" from Vergil, Aeneid . Theodore C. Williams. trans. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Co. 1910. Dryden: "ev'ry moment brings New vigor."

687 "Vis medicatrix naturae", "the healing power of nature." Bastiat uses here the expression "la force curative" (the curative or healing force) which is very similar to his notion of "les forces réparatrices" (repairing or restorative forces) which uses elsewhere. See the glossary entry on "Disturbing and Restorative Forces."

688 The phrase "all sorry but unerring methods of teaching" was not in the E version but added to the JDE version.

689 When Bastiat wrote this in 1846 the famine in Ireland was underway and lasted until 1852. Here he may not be including Ireland as technically part of Europe. A crop failure would occur in France between 1846-47 but it did not lead to famine, although the rapidly increasing price of bread brought considerable hardship to many.

690 Malthus published responses to his critics with a pamphlet Additions to the Fourth and Former Editions of An Essay (1817) which he also included as an Appendix in the 6th edition of 1826. In it he explicitly addressed the idea put forward by Weyland and Grahame that there was a "natural tendency" for populations to exceed the means of subsistence. Malthus described this idea as an "absurdity, inconsistency, and unfounded assertion" (p. 477) but admitted that he may have mislead his critics. As he noted, "It is probable, that having found the bow bent too much one way, I was induced to bend it too much the other, in order to make it straight" (p. 497). In what might seem a too subtle distinction he continued to claim that there was a difference between a population "exceeding" its means of subsistence and a population growing faster than its means of subsistence which immediately brought into play the two different kinds of "checks" which brought the size of the population back into equilibrium with the means of subsistence.

691 "Certes c'est un subiect merveilleusement vain, divers et ondoyant, que l'homme : il est malaysé d'y fonder iugement constant et uniforme" (Without a doubt, there is (no) subject (more) marvellously useless/pointless, varied/diverse, and changeable than man; it is difficult to form a consistent/unchanging and uniform/unchanging judgement about him.) in Essais de Michel de Montaigne. Nouvelle édition. Tome premier. (Paris: Lebigre frères, 1833), Book I, Chap. 1, "Par divers moyens on arrive à pareille fin," p. 4.

692 This sentence was cut from the EH version. It referred to the companion article which appeared with this one on Population in the Encyclopédie and then in the JDE. See the article of "Competition," above, pp. 000.

693 In the FEE translation of EH the term "artificial utility" is translated as "man-made utility.". Bastiat used the pairing of "natural" versus "artificial" which he uses here as well as with his distinction between"natural needs" (besoins naturels) and "artificial needs" (besoins factices). We have preserved that pairing here as well. See footnote above, pp. 000.

694 This is what later became known as "Say's Law." In the first edition of the Traité (1803) Say spoke of "pay(er) des produits avec des produits" (paying for products with products), (vol. 1, pp. 153-54); in the 4th edition of 1819 he talks not just of products but more generally of "des services productifs" (productive services) which "nous pouvons les échanger contre d'autres produits" (which we can exchange for other products) so that "les échanges que nous faisons de deux produits, ne sont en effet que l'échange des services productifs dont ces deux produits sont le résultat" (the exchanges we make with two products are in effect only the exchange of productive services of which the two products are the result) (vol. 2, p. 7.).

695 The idea that exchange could be understood as the "mutual exchange of services" (or one service for another) became central to Bastiat's understanding of the market as this essay was being written. See the glossary entry "Service for Service."

696 A dynamometer is a tool for measuring force, torque, or power exerted by an engine, motor, or other rotating device.

697 The phrase Bastiat uses here, "l'appréciation du travail" (the evaluation of labor), is important in showing how he was moving away from the classical notion of value and towards the subjectivist notion of the Austrian school. What makes labor valuable is not something intrinsic to the act of labouring but how it is subjectively perceived or appreciated by the consumer.

698 This and the next sentence were in both E and JDE versions but were cut in the EH.

699 See the glossary entry on "Harmony and Disharmony."

700 Bastiat uses the word "couches" (bed, layer) which can mean a bed (literally for sleeping on) or a bed or layer of sediment in rock formations. We have translated it as "social strata" which was also used in the FEE translation.

701 See above, pp. 000.

702 See the glossary entry on "Social Economy."

703 Bastiat uses the phrase "le grand marché" (the great market, or the great market place of society (as FEE translated it)) only in this essay and in a letter to Paulton in July 1845. See, [CW1.45] [OC7] 45. Paris, 29 juillet 1845. A M. Paulton. Elsewhere he uses a similar expression "un vaste bazaar" (the world as a huge bazaar) in his Second Speech in Paris for the Free Trade Association (26 Sept. 1846) in CW6 (forthcoming), and "ce bazar d'échange" (this trading bazaar) in an unpublished sketch he wrote in 1849. See above, T.316 "The Mutuality of Services" (c. 1849). Used by Thiers as well??

704 This is where the E version ends. What follows was a new ending of 894 words which was added to the JDE version and was also used in the EH.

705 See glossary entry on "Harmony and Disharmony."

706 Bastiat uses the phrase "l'égalité dans le progrès" which might also be translated as "equal progress for all".

707 Here Bastiat introduces a phrase with very strong Austrian overtones, namely "la connaissance du marché" (knowledge of the market) and how it can lead to "la prévoyance", which we have before this example translated as "foresight" but which might be better translated here as "planning for the future."

708 In the EH version Bastiat inserted here the following footnote: "which requires the use of the day laborer class." See also his other writings on "sharecropping" such as T.47 (1846.02.15) "Thoughts on Sharecropping" (Considérations sur le métayage), JDE , T.13, no. 51, Feb. 1846, pp. 225-239. Above, pp. 000.

709 Good quote on Means of Existence not fixed quantity. ???

710 The following clause was added here in the EH version: "even if it has to resort to the infallible course of preventive limitation in order to maintain its position and retain the wages which are in harmony with its new habits." This sentence replaced the following two sentences which were cut from the EH version.

711 Here the text ended in the JDE version with Frédéric Bastiat's name attached beneath it suggesting that he thought it was complete. In the EH version (2nd edition of 1851) it ended with a line of dots to indicate that the editors thought it was not finished. What followed was a lengthy note by one of the editors, Roger Fontenay, which was 10.5 pages long which attempted to explain Bastiat's theory of population in more detail. In the first edition of Bastiat's Oeuvres complètes (1855), vol. 6, this was removed leaving only a page of an extract the editors had found among Bastiat's papers. We provide a translation of this extract below, pp. 000.

712 See ES2.13 "Protection, or the Three Municipal Magistrates" in CW3, pp. 000.

713 See "One Man's gain is another Man's loss" ES3 15 in CW3, pp. 341-43; and Montaigne, Essais de Montaigne , vol. 1, chap. 21, "Le Profit d'un est dommage de l'autre" (One man's gain is another man's loss), pp. 130-31.

714 Paul de Noailles (1802-1884) was a member of an old aristocratic family who sat in the Chamber of Peers (1824-1848) where he was an excellent public speaker. He wrote several books on the history of the French peerage and had business interests in two railway companies.

715 I could not find the relevant vol. to check this quote; Procès-verbal des séances de la Chambre des Pairs - couldn't find volumes for 1847; closest was Procès-verbal des séances de la chambre des pairs: sessions de 1846 . Tome quatrième, juin - juillet 1846, nos. 55-68 (Paris: Crapelet, 1846).

716 See Bastiat's discussion of the value-laden metaphors like "invasion", "flood", and "tribute" which were used by protectionists to condemn foreign trade in ES1 22 "Metaphors," in CW3, pp. 100-3.

717 The Maison Delisle was owned by Henry Delisle and sold fine fabrics and lingerie. It was located in the rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, no. 13. It seems to have gone bankrupt in 1858.

718 For a discussion of the "Laffer curve" see, James D. Gwartney, "Supply-Side Economics." The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics . 2008. Library of Economics and Liberty. < https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/SupplySideEconomics.html >.

719 CW2, pp. 282-327.

720 James Wilson (1805-1860) was born in Scotland. He became an economic journalist working for the Manchester Guardian , was a supporter of free trade, founded the magazine The Economist in 1843, and was elected to parliament in 1847.

721 Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850) was the leader of the Tories, served as Home Secretary under the Duke of Wellington (1822–27) and was prime minister twice (1834–35, 1841–46). He is best known for the Factory Act of 1844 which regulated the working hours of women and children in the factories, and the repeal of the Corn Laws in May 1846.

722 James Wilson's The Revenue; Or, What Should the Chancellor Do? (1841).

723 Lamartine's "Speech to the Marseilles Free Trade Association" on 24 August 1847. See Oeuvres de M. A. de Lamartine , vol. 5, p. 350.

724 Léon Faucher (1803-1854) was a journalist and deputy for the Marne who was twice appointed Minister of the Interior. He was active in L'Association pour la liberté des échanges and wrote many articles about economic reforms in Britain.

725 Bastiat uses the phrase "les droits acquis" (acquired or established rights) which FEE translated as "vested interests" in EH, p. 453 and "rights (that) have been acquired" in ES2 15, p. 257.

726 John, first Earl Russell (1792-1878) was the leader of the opposition in 1845 and favored the repeal of the Corn Laws and advised the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, to take a similar stance. Russell became prime minister in 1846 after the collapse of Peel's government.

727 What follows is taken from James Wilson's The Revenue; Or, What Should the Chancellor Do? (1841), pp. 5-6. See also James Wilson, The Influences of the Corn Laws as affecting all Classes of the Community, and particularly the Landed Interests (1840).

728 Bastiat uses the English words "assessed taxes" in the original text.

729 Richard Cobden (1804-65) was an English manufacturer and Member of Parliament (Stockport, 1841) who founded (with John Bright) the British Anti-Corn Law League which was successful in abolishing the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846. His writings and political activity influenced Bastiat a great deal - he wrote his first book on Cobden and the League (1845) and he co-founded the French Free Trade Association in 1846 which was modeled on the Anti-Corn Law League.

730 We have not been able to find the source of this quote.

731 In 1848 out of total government revenue of 1,370 million fr. land owners paid 380 million in land tax, and part of the 60 million of property and personal tax and 35 million of the door and window tax, which totaled 475 million fr. or 35%.

732 Bastiat began using the word "l'oligarchie" to describe the powerful group of landowners which controlled Britain in his long introduction to his book on "Cobden and the League" (July 1845). This will appear in CW6 (forthcoming).

733 Bastiat tells us below that the main "Theorist" he has in mind is the journalist James Wilson who later founded The Economist in 1843 and was an ardent supporter of free trade.

734 Bastiat gets this data from Wilson, The Revenue; Or, What Should the Chancellor Do? (1841), p. 9.

735 Bastiat uses the English phrase in the text to indicate its British origins.

736 See the glossary entry on "The Anti-Corn Law League."

737 Bastiat is possibly referring to the Irish potato famine of 1845-46.

738 Bastiat uses the English phrase "Bold experiment".

739 Bastiat is making a play on words here between selling things at "un bon prix" (a good price for the seller, i.e. a high price) and things which are for sale "au bon marché" (a good price for the buyer, i.e. at a bargain or low price). It should also be noted that the word "le marché" also means a "market" or "marketplace" in a general sense.

740 See the article "High Prices and Low Prices" ( LE , 25 July, 1847), no. 35, pp. 273-74; and Bastiat's response to letters on the article in the following issue, 1 August 1847, no. 36, p. 282. See ES2 5 in CW3 , pp. -164-54.

741 The articles in which Bastiat spoke frequently about taxes on sugar are the following: his first ever article published in the JDE in October 1844, "On the Influence of French and English Tariffs on the Future of the Two People" in CW6 (forthcoming); "Equalizing the Conditions of Production," ( JDE , July 1845), ES1 4, CW3, pp. 25-39; "Effort and Result," ( JDE , April 1845), ES1 3 in CW3, pp. 18-24; and his most extended treatment in one of the last issues of Le Libre-Échange , "Antediluvian Sugar," ( LE , 13 February 1848, ES3 19 in CW3, pp. 365-71.

742 Horace Say, "Sucre," DEP, vol. 2, pp. 687-84. Quote p. 681.

743 "Equalizing the Conditions of Production" (JDE, July 1845), ES1 4 in CW3, pp. 25-39.

744 See the article "High Prices and Low Prices" ( LE , 25 July, 1847), no. 35, pp. 273-74; and Bastiat's response to letters on the article in the following issue, 1 August 1847, no. 36, p. 282. See ES2 5 in CW3 , pp. -164-54.

745 See a previous article by Bastiat's in which he seems to have discovered the "Laffer curve." Here he argues that increasing the rate of taxes sometimes reduces the total amount of tax raised. See, "A Curious Economic Phenomenon," above, pp. 000.

746 According to the Budget Papers of 1848 the French state raised fr. 58.2 million from tariffs on imported salt and fr. 13.4 million from the salt tax on internal sales.

747 See, E. de Parieu, "Sel", DEP, vol. 2, pp. 606-09. Also, Félix Esquirou de Parieu, Traité des impôts, considérés sous le rapport historique, économique et politique en France et à l'étranger (Paris: Guillaumin, 1862-63). 3 vols. On the changes in 1848, see vol. 2, pp. 242-43.

748 "The Utopian" ( LE , 17 Jan. 1847), ES2 11, CW3, pp. 187-98.

749 See his impassioned speech in the Chamber on the need to abolish the tax on alcohol,"Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" (12 Dec. 1849), CW2, pp. 328-47.

750 "The Immediate Relief of the People" ( La République française , 12 March 1848, ES3 21, pp.377-79.

751 "Disastrous Illusions" ( JDE , 15 March 1848), ES3 24, CW3, pp. 384-99.

752 "A Hoax" ( Jacques Bonhomme , 15-18 June 1848), see below, pp. 000.

753 "Taking Five and Returning Four is not Giving" ( Jacques Bonhomme , 15-18 June 1848), below, pp. 000.

754 "Consequences of the reduction of the Salt Tax" ( Journal des Débats , 1 Jan. 1849), CW2, pp. 324-27.

755 See "The Sophism Bastiat never wrote: the Sophism of the Ricochet Effect" in CW3, pp. 457-61.

756 "Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" (12 Dec., 1849), CW2, p. 343.

757 "Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits," p. 337.

758 Philippe Auguste Demesmay (1805-1853) was a Deputy who represented the département of Doubs, in the Franche-Comté region in eastern France between 1842 and 1853. He took up the cause of fighting the tax on salt and became known as the "Deputy for Salt."

759 Charles Dupin (1784-1873) was a pioneer in mathematical economics and worked for the statistical office of France. In 1828 he was elected deputy for Tarn, was made a Peer in 1830, and served in the Constituent and then the National Assemblies during the Second Republic.

760 See his long introduction to his book Cobden and the League (1845), CW1, pp. 320-34 and the essay "Anglomania, Anglophobia" (1847), in; CW3, ES3 14, pp. 327-41.

761 William Ewart, Speech in Hansard on "DIRECT TAXATION." HC Deb 28 May 1847 vol 92 cc1249-66. #1249 <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1847/may/28/direct-taxation#column_1249>.

762 On Bastiat's writings on taxation, see the Editor's Introduction to "On the Allocation of the Land Tax in the Department of Les Landes" (July 1844), above, pp. 000 and the glossary entry on "Bastiat on Taxation."

763 See for example,"Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" (12 Dec. 1849), CW2, pp. 328-47.

764 "The Utopian" ( LE , 17 Jan. 1847), ES2 11, CW3, pp. 187-98.

765 Le Moniteur industriel (founded in 1839) became the journal of the protectionist "Association pour la défense du travail national" (Association for the Defense of National Employment) founded by Mimerel de Roubaix in 1846. It was the intellectual stronghold of the protectionists and became one of Bastiat's bêtes noires.

766 The Navigation Acts were a lynch pin of the British policy of mercantilism from its introduction in 1651 to its abolition in 1849. The Navigation Act Bill was passed by Oliver Cromwell's government to prevent merchandise from being imported into Britain if it was not transported by British ships or ships from the producer countries. The repeal of the Navigations Acts in 1849 was part of a concerted effect to introduce a policy of free trade in Britain and its empire during the 1840s. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was the other major platform of this effort.

767 The Corn Laws were introduced by Parliament in the seventeenth century to maintain a high price for corn (in the British context this meant grain, especially wheat) by preventing the importation of cheaper foreign grain altogether or by imposing a duty on it in order to protect domestic producers from competition. The high price caused by protection led to the formation of opposition groups, such as the Anti-Corn Law League in 1838. The Conservative prime minister Sir Robert Peel announced the repeal of the Corn Laws on 27 January 1846.

768 A common criticism Bastiat faced when arguing for free trade was that "there are no absolute principles" and that those who argued for radical reforms were misguided ideologues. The defenders of protectionism argued that one had to be "pragmatic" and not change too much too quickly. See Bastiat's response in ES1 18 "There are no Absolute Principles" and ES2 15 "The Free Trader's Little Arsensal" (April 1847), in CW3, pp. 83-85 and pp. 234-40.

769 The Reform Party was the name given to the group of utilitarians and Philosophic Radicals around James and John Stuart Mill in the 1830s who opposed the "aristocratic party" of Tories and Whigs in the British Parliament. They agitated for electoral reform (which they achieved with the First Reform Act of 1832), free trade (the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846), among many other political and economic reforms. They founded the Reform Club in 1836 in order to influence other Members of Parliament and wrote for journals such as The Westminster Review . See, Joseph Hamburger, Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965) and Joseph Hamburger, "Introduction" to The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume VI - Essays on England, Ireland, and the Empire, ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by Joseph Hamburger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982). </titles/245>.

770 William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson organised a movement to abolish first of all the salve trade in 1807-8 and then slavery in the British colonies in 1833.

771 The uniform Penny Post was introduced in 1842. See, Bastiat's articles on Postal Reform from 1844 and 1846 above, pp. 000.

772 The First Reform Act of 1832 opened up the very corrupt and restrictive British electoral system by abolishing many small "rotten boroughs" which were monopolised by local elites, the creation of new seats to give better representation to the new industrial towns and cities which had emerged, and the granting of the right to vote to the middle class by lowering the property qualifications. It is estimated that the Act increased the number of voters from about 400,000 to over 650,000. A Second Reform Act was passed in 1867 which further opened up the franchise by doubling the number of those who were allowed to vote, namely all householders.

773 Catholics and Non-conformists (protestants who did not subscribe to the doctrines of the established Anglican Church) were discriminated against by being banned from holding public office, sitting in Parliament, or attending universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. They also had to pay compulsory Church rates to pay for the upkeep of their local parish Anglican church. The Test and Corporation Acts were repealed in 1828, thus allowing Non-conformists to hold public office. The Roman Catholic relief Act 1829 allowed Roman Catholics to sit in Parliament. The Church Rate Abolition Society was founded in London in 1836 but rates remained compulsory until 1868.

774 Admission to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge was restricted to members of the established Anglican Church. A group of secular Radicals and Non-Conformists who were inspired by the ideas of Jeremy Bentham founded London University in 1826. It was secular (admitting people of all faiths), allowed women to enroll, and established a Chair of Political Economy in 1827 to which the free market economist John Ramsay McCulloch was appointed. Concerning education for children, the liberal movement in England was split into two camps. Richard Cobden supported state funded schools, while Edward Baines strenuously opposed it.

775 It is not clear what Bastiat means by this claim. Before 1844 parts of Britain, such as Scotland, enjoyed a system of relatively free banking. This came to an end with the Bank Charter Act of 1844 introduced by Robert Peel which gave a monopoly on issuing notes to the Bank of England. Bastiat was a supporter of free competition between banks as he makes clear in Free Credit, below, pp. 000.

776 See the glossary entry on "Physiocrats."

777 This was very similar to Bastiat's idea of an ideal tax system. He wanted to replace indirect taxes which fell most heavily on the poor, such as the taxes on salt and alcohol, with low direct taxes and a 5% "fiscal" tariff rate.

778 William Ewart gave a Speech in the House of Commons on 28 May, 1847 on "Direct Taxation." It was responded to byCharles Wood (1800-1885) who was Chancellor of the Exchequer 1846-1852. See, Hansard on "DIRECT TAXATION." HC Deb 28 May 1847 vol 92 cc1249-66; #1249 <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1847/may/28/direct-taxation#column_1249> and Wood's reply <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1847/may/28/direct-taxation#S3V0092P0_18470528_HOC_18>.

779 Bastiat uses the English phrase "income tax."

780 When Sir Robert Peel was Prime Minister in 1841 the economy was in severe recession and to solve his budgetary problems he introduced an income tax in 1842 (not used since the Napoleonic Wars) which also permitted him to cut the level of tariffs on many goods such as sugar. It was levied at 7 pence in the pound (3%) on incomes above 150 pounds. See the glossary entry on "Peel."

781 Bastiat would return to this matter in a discussion held by the Political Economy Society in October 1848, below, pp. 000.

782 The French government raised 1.45 billion fr. in revenue in 1848. See the Appendix on "French Government Finances, 1848-1849."

783 Bastiat uses the word "la ruse" (deception, fraud, trickery) which was an important part of his theory of plunder. It was to expose such "trickery" that wrote Bastiat wrote his Economic Sophisms .

784 Bastiat would return to this question in "England's New Colonial Policy. Lord John Russell's Plan" ( JDE , 15 April 1850), below, pp. 000.

785 See the Glossary entry on "Dunoyer."

786 A revised 3rd edition of Say's Traité was published in 1817.

787 François-Auguste-Alexis Mignet, Notices et portraits historiques et littéraires. Troisième édition. (Paris: Charpentier, 1854), Tome II. "Charles Comte" (30 mai, 1846), pp. 83-114.

788 Letter 80. Paris, 5 July 1847. To Richard Cobden, CW1, p. 129.

789 Economisti classici italiani. Scrittori classici italiani di economia politica. 50 vols. Edited by Pietro Custodi. (Milan: G. G. Destefanis, 1803-16). Among the volumes were works by Cesare Beccaria (1738-94), Gaetano Filangieri (1752-88), Ferdinando Galiani (1728-87), and Pietro Verri (1728-97).

790 On Bastiat's interest in appealing to the next generation and countering the spread of socialist ideas among them, see his introduction "To the Youth of France" in Economic Harmonies and his "Draft Preface" also probably written in mid-1847. "To the Youth of France" in Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Harmonies (FEE edition); and "Draft Preface to Economic Harmonies" in CW1, p. 317.

791 "Draft Preface," CW1, pp. 316-20.

792 Charles Comte, Traité de législation, ou exposition des lois générales suivant lesquelles les peuples prospèrent, dépérissent ou restent stationnaire, 4 vols. (Paris: A. Sautelet et Cie, 1826-27); Traité de la propriété , 2 vols. (Paris: Chamerot, Ducollet, 1834).

793 Mignet, p. 278.

794 Letter 33 to Horace Say (Mugron, 24 Nov. 1844), CW1, pp. 53-54; Letter 41 to Félix Coudroy (Paris, 18 June 1845), CW1, p. 67;. Letter 42 to Félix Coudroy (Paris, 3 July 1845), CW1, p. 69; Letter 43 to Félix Coudroy (London, July 1845), CW1, p. 71.

795 Mignet, p. 279.

796 Bastiat relates in a letter that Comte's son Hippolyte, approached him about looking after his father's papers perhaps in the hope Bastiat might edit them for publication. See, Letter 42, CW1, pp. 69, and Letter 43, p. 71.

797 Mignet, p. 278.

798 Mignet, p. 280.

799 A good example of this is the opening passages of Traité de legislation , Book V, CHAPITRE XV. "De l'influence de l'esclavage domestique sur l'esprit et la nature du gouvernement" (On the Influence of Domestic Slavery of the Spirit and Nature of Government) where Comte points out the moral and legal double standards and hypocrisy of slave owners.

800 Bastiat uses the word "harmonious" twice in this passage which suggest the idea was something he learnt from reading Comte: "l'harmonieuse simplicité des lois" (the harmonious simplicity of the laws) and "l'harmonie qui préside aux mouvements des corps célestes" (the harmony that governs the movement of the heavenly bodies).

801 Hippolyte Castille (1820-1886) was a prolific French author who wrote popular works on the History of the Second French Republic (4 vols. 1854-56) and a multi-volume series of Portraits politiques au dix-neuvième siècle (1857-1862) which included several small volumes on classical liberal figures. He founded in August 1847 a short-lived journal devoted to the importance of intellectual property, Le travail intellectuel, journal des intérêts scientifiques, littéraires et artistiques . Molinari is mentioned as a "collaborator" and other leading economists were listed as "supporters" (Frédéric Bastiat, Charles Dunoyer, Horace Say, Michel Chevalier, Joseph Garnier). The journal was monthly and lasted 7 months before closing in February 1848. Castille was also one of the founders of Bastiat's revolutionary journal La République française in February 1848, along with Gustave de Molinari.

802 Le Courrier français (1820-1846) was a liberal and anti-clerical newspaper founded by the constitutional monarchist Auguste-Hilarion, comte de Kératry (1769-1859). It was suspended and threatened with legal action several times during the 1820s for its stand against the French intervention in Spain and for criticizing the established church. It was more popular during the July Monarchy but still remained a small circulation paper and was forced to close in 1846. Hippolyte Castille was a regular contributor. Both Bastiat and Molinari also wrote for it on occasion.

803 Molinari, Gustave de, Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare; entretiens sur les lois économiques et défense de la propriété (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849). A Liberty Fund edition of this work is forthcoming.

804 Le Travail intellectuel. Journal des intérêts scientifiques, littéraires et artistiques (Paris: 1847-48). The journal appeared between 15 Aug. 1847 and 15 Feb. 1848.

805 For a discussion on this see, Molinari, "Propriété littéraire," DEP, vol. 2 pp. 473-78; and Louis Wolowski and Émile Levasseur, "Propriété" in Dictionnaire générale de la politique par Maurice Block avec la collaboration d'hommes d'état, de publicistes et d'écrivains de tous les pays (Paris: O. Lorenz. 1st ed. 1863-64), vol. 2, pp. 682-93; especially the section "Propriété littéraire et artistique" pp. 691 ff.

806 See the glossary entry on "Service for Service."

807 Under the old regime copyright (droit de copie) existed in perpetuity but it was enjoyed at the pleasure of the sovereign and not by legal right. This right was lost if an author granted the copyright to a publisher. The author then only had copyright until his death, after which the book entered the public domain. During the Revolution copyright was protected under the law and it could be transferred without restriction but it was limited in duration. According to the law of 19 July 1793 copyright was granted to the author for life and to his/her heirs for 10 years after their death; the Decree of 5 February 1810 extended the right of heirs to 20 years. These laws remained in effect up until the mid-19th century, with only a slight modification with the law of 3 August 1844. See, Édouard Romberg, Compte rendu des travaux du Congrès de la propriété littéraire et artistique (1859), 2 vols. "France. - Notice historique sur la propriété littéraire," pp. 161-67; Législation, pp. 168 ff.

808 Probably Louis Blanc's attack on literary property, in Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail. IVe édition. Considérablement augmentée, précédée d'une Introduction, et suivie d'un compte-rendu de la maison Leclaire. La première édition a parus en 1839. (Paris: Cauville frères, 1845). Part II "De la propriété littéraire," pp. 187-240.

809 Bastiat uses here the analogy of a clock, or the social mechanism, which would become very important in his book Economic Harmonies , where self-interest is "un mobile individuel indestructible et un ressort social nécessaire" (an indestructible individual driving force and a socially necessary spring). See the glossary entry on "The Social Mechanism."

810 Bastiat, "Justice et fraternité," JDE , 15 June 1848, T. 20, no. 82, pp. 310-27; also published as a pamphlet, Propriété et Loi. Justice et Fraternité (Property and Law. Justice and Fraternity) (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848). See, CW2, pp.60-81. See also the glossary entry on "Bastiat's Anti-Socialist Pamphlets."

811 Bastiat, Oeuvres complètes , vol. 4 (1854), p. 70.

812 "Justice and Fraternity," CW2, pp. 60-61.

813 The town of Mugron where Bastiat lived in Les Landes.

814 Piquet is a trick-taking card game for two players which was introduced into France in the early 16th-century.

815 Le Marais ("The Marsh") is an historic district in Paris which stretches across the 3rd and 4th arrondissements on the right bank of the Seine. It was once the residence of aristocrats but after the Revolution it became an important commercial district which became home to a thriving Jewish community.

816 The "Association pour la défense du travail national" (Association for the Defense of National Employment) was a protectionist group founded in October 1846 to defend the interests of industrialists and manufacturers. It was led by Antoine Odier (1766-1853) and Pierre Mimerel de Roubaix (1786-1872) who merged several regional protectionist associations together in order to better organise against the newly formed national French Free Trade Association which had been founded in July 1846 in Paris. Their journal was Le Moniteur industrial . See the glossary entry on "Association pour la défense du travail national".

817 "Always Smuggling" (Toujours contrebande), LE 21 Nov. 1847, 1st year no 52, pp. 415-16.

818 ES2.9 "Theft by Subsidy" (Jan. 1846, JDE)," CW3, p. 171.

819 He used the pair of terms "la spoliation extra-légale" (extra-legal plunder) and "la spoliation légale" (legal plunder) for the first time in "Justice and Fraternity" (15 June 1848, JDE) and CW2, p. 76.

820 His one and only use of the term "la Spoliation gouvernementale" was in ES2 1 "The Physiology of Plunder" (c. Nov. 1847), CW3, p. 128.

821 It was attended by a large contingent from France, including Horace Say, Charles Dunoyer, Guillaumin, Joseph Garnier, Alcide Fonteyraud, the Duke d'Harcourt, Adolphe Blanqui, Louis Wolowski, and Gustave de Molinari. The Congress was also attended by Karl Marx but it is not known if he met any of the French political economists.

822 Jérôme Adolph Blanqui (1798-1854) was a liberal political economist; brother of the revolutionary socialist Auguste Blanqui. He succeeded Jean-Baptiste Say to the chair of political economy at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, and was the editor of the JDE between 1842 and 1843.

823 Congrès des Économistes réunis à Bruxelles, par les soins de l'Association belge pour la liberté commercial. Session de 1847. Séances des 16, 17 et 18 septembre . (Bruxelles: Imprimerie de Deltombe, 1847), pp. 44-45.

824 Joseph Garnier (1813-81) was a professor, journalist, politician, and activist for free trade and peace. He was appointed the first professor of political economy at the École des ponts et chaussées in 1846 and was one of the leading exponents of Malthusian population theory. Garnier was one of the founders of L'Association pour la liberté des échanges and (with Bastiat) of the 1848 liberal broadsheet Jacques Bonhomme .

825 Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780-1857) was a liberal poet and songwriter who rose to prominence during the Restoration period with his funny and clever criticisms of the monarchy and the church. He mixed in liberal circles in the 1840s in Paris, when he joined Bastiat's Free Trade Society and the Political Economy Society. He was invited to attend the welcome dinner held by the latter to honor Bastiat's arrival in Paris in May 1845 but was unable to attend. Bastiat knew him and was known to have sung his drinking songs on occasion.

826 Congrès des Économistes réunis à Bruxelles , pp. 89-90. An old 19th century translation of "The Smugglers" can be found in French Liberalism in the 19th Century: An Anthology , ed. Robert Leroux and David M. Hart (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp.147-49. A version in French with sheet music can be found in Béranger lyrique. Oeuvres complète de P.J. de Béranger. Nouvelle édition revue par l'auteur avec tous les airs notés. Cette édition est augmentée de dix chansons nouvelles et d'une lettre de Béranger (Bruxelles: Librairie Encyclopédique de Perichon, 1850), pp. 415-16.

827 See Molinari's "Lettres adressées à M. Frédéric Bastiat" published in Le Courrier français , 21 and 27 September 1846, republished in Molinari, Questions d'économie politique , vol. 2 (Paris: Guillaumin, 1861), pp. 159-72, especially pp. 166-67.

828 Paillottet begins his extract from this article with the following paragraph.

829 The importation of cloth from Belgium was prohibited under French tariff laws.

830 Bastiat says something similar about protectionists not being honest about what they want to achieve by getting the State to use force on their behalf and not using force personally. See his discussion of "Mr. Prohibant" (Mr. Prohibitionist) in WSWNS 7 "Trade Restrictions" in CW3, pp. 427-32 where Mr. Prohibant first considers using his own weapons to kill the Belgian workers who bring their products over the French border (but he might get killed), then sending some of his own servants (it would cost to much), or lobby the "great law factory" in Paris to pass laws and employ an army of Customs Officials to keep out the Belgian traders at French tax-payers' expence.

831 Paillottet's extract of this piece ends here and the following two sentences of this paragraph and the entire following paragraph were cut.

832 "Balance of Trade"(JDE Oct. 1845), CW3, pp. 44-49.

833 Spoliation et loi, par M. F. Bastiat. Membre correspondant de l'Institut. Représentant du peuple à l'Assemblée nationale (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850), IV. Balance du Commerce, pp. 54-61.

834 ES3 15 "One man's gain is another man's loss," in CW3, pp. 341-43.

835 "England and Free Trade," Libre-Échange , 6 Feb. 1847 [OC2.32, p. 177] [CW6]

836 Jesús Huerta de Soto, Money, Banking, and Economic Cycles. Third Edition. Translated by Melinda A. Stroup (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012), p. 484.

837 Le National (1830-1851) was an important liberal and increasingly republican newspaper during the July Monarchy. It was founded by Adolphe Thiers, François-Auguste Mignet, and Armand Carrel.

838 Bastiat uses phrase "laissez faire."

839 In late 1847 when this article was written Bastiat was developing his idea that trade was "the mutual exchange of services" rather than the exchange of "goods for goods" or "goods for money." He is still deciding upon his preferred terminology, using the phrase "services effectifs" (real or actual services) here 5 times, but soon afterwards using the phrase "services réels" (real services) in "The Physiology of Plunder" ES2 (Jan. 1848) and in later writings such as Economic Harmonies . The opposite to " real services" were "services dérisoires" (derisory or paltry services) or "des services fictifs, et souvent pis" (imaginary services, or even worse). See the glossary entry on "Service for Service."

840 Bastiat explains his theory of money at greater length in "Damn Money!" (April 1849), below pp. 000.

841 La Presse (1836-) was a widely distributed daily newspaper, created in 1836 by the journalist, businessman, and politician Émile de Girardin (1806-81).

842 Bastiat is referring to the potato blight which caused crop failures and starvation in Ireland beginning in 1845. Poor harvests in France in 1846-47 caused the price to bread to rise dramatically. Wheat and other grains had to be imported from places like Odessa in Russia.

843 See the Editor's Introduction to the first, his "Letter to Hippolyte Castille" (15 Sept. 1847) for details, above, pp. 000.

844 See, "Lettres à M. de Girardin sur la Propriété littéraire (février 1841), pp. 62-71"; "Rapport sur la Propriété littéraire. Chambre des Députés. Séance du 13 mars 1841", pp. 72-94"; "Sur la Propriété littéraire. Chambre des Députés. Séance du 23 mars 1841," pp. 95-109; "Réplique à M. Dubois (même séance," pp. 110-12; and "Sur la Propriété littéraire. Chambre des Députés. Séance du 30 mars 1841," pp. 113-25; in Alphonse de Lamartine, La France parlementaire (1834-1851). Oeuvres oratoires et écrits politiques. Deuxième série: 1840 - 1847, vol. 3, ed. Louis Ulbach (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1865).

845 Molinari, "Discours de M. de Molinari à l'Athénée royal. Analyse du travail du journaliste", Le Travail intellectuel , no. 6, 15 Jan. 1848, pp. 6-7. See also Molinari's discussion of literary and artistic property in Les Soirées , "The Second Evening" (Liberty Fund, forthcoming).

846 See for example, Molinari, "Propriété littéraire" DEP, vol. 2 pp. 473-78; Augustin Charles Renouard, "Marques de fabrique," DEP, vol. 2, pp. 135-43; Charles Coquelin, "Brevets d'invention," DEP, vol. 1, pp. 209-23. As well as Louis Wolowski and Émile Levasseur, "Propriété" in Dictionnaire générale de la politique par Maurice Block avec la collaboration d'hommes d'état, de publicistes et d'écrivains de tous les pays (Paris: O. Lorenz. 1st ed. 1863-64), vol. 2, pp. 682-93. See especially the section "Propriété littéraire et artistique" pp. 691 ff.

847 Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail. IVe édition. Considérablement augmentée, précédée d'une Introduction, et suivie d'un compte-rendu de la maison Leclaire. La première édition a parus en 1839. (Paris: Cauville frères, 1845). Part II "De la propriété littéraire," pp. 187-240.

848 See, Blanc, Organisation du travail , Part II, section III. "Quel est, selon nous, le moyen de remédier au mal" especially pp. 225-28.

849 His lectures later were published as Cours d'économie politique, professé au Musée royal de l'industrie belge, 2 vols. (Bruxelles: Librairie polytechnique d'Aug. Decq, 1855). 2nd revised and enlarged edition (Bruxelles et Leipzig: A Lacroix, Ver Broeckoven; Paris: Guillaumin, 1863).

850 Collection des principaux économistes, Avec Commentaires, Notes, et Notices; par MM. Blanqui et Rossi (de l'Institut), Eugène Daire, H. Dussard, J. Garnier, M. Monjean, H. Say. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1840-48), 15 vols. T. XIII. [Ricardo] Oeuvres complètes de David Ricardo, traduites en français, par MM. Constancio et Alcide Fonteyraud, augmentées de notes de Jean-Baptiste Say, de nouvelles notes et de commentaires par Malthus, Sismondi, MM. Rossi, Blanqui, etc., et précédées d'une notice sur la vie et les travaux de l'auteur par M. Alcide Fonteyraud (Paris: Guillaumin, 1847).

851 Castille lists the attendees and their positions in Le Travail intellectuel , no. 6, samedi 15 janvier 1848, pp. 4, 6. He also adds that some of the attendees responded to Bastiat's speech with comments of their own, including Pagnerre, the President of the Booksellers' Circle, and Joseph Garnier, the editor of the Journal des Économistes .

852 The other extended discussion of property rights is in the pamphlet The Law (June 1850), CW2, pp. 107-46.

853 Charles Comte, Traité de la propriété (Treatise on Property) (1834).

854 Several economists known to Bastiat were full members of the Academy and he himself had been voted a "corresponding member" in January 1846. The Academy of Moral and Political Sciences is a French learned society and one of the 5 academies of the Institute of France. It was reconstituted in 1832 by King Louis-Philippe and several political economists who were well known to Bastiat were elected members, such as Charles Dunoyer (1832), Joseph Droz (1832), Charles Comte (1832), Hippolyte Passy (1838), Adolphe Blanqui (1838), Léon Faucher (1849), Michel Chevalier (1851), Louis Wolowski (1855) and Horace Say (1857). See the glossary on "The Academy of Moral and Political Sciences."

855 The socialist critique of property would come to a head in February 1848 when Louis Blanc and his colleagues set up the National Workshops during the chaos of the early days of the Provisional Government. Socialists within the Constituent Assembly also attempted, unsuccessfully, to have a "right to a job" clause inserted into the new Constitution of the Second Republic. The economists and their liberal allies confronted the socialist challenge both within the Chamber (e.g. Léon Faucher, Louis Wolowski, and Alexis de Tocqueville) and with a series of pamphlets and books with Bastiat's dozen of so anti-socialist pamphlets written between June 1848 and July 1850 being particularly noteworthy. See the glossary entries on "The Socialist Critique of Property" and "Bastiat's Anti-Socialist Pamphlets."

856 I have not been able to trace the source of this phrase. Joseph Garnier in Éléments de l'économie politique (2nd ed. 1848) says that it was used by the jurist Charles Giraud in a discussion at the Académie des sciences morales et politiques on 13 November 1847. Giraud did not present a paper which would have been reproduced in the Academy's proceedings but he is listed as having made numerous comments on other presentations. It is noted that he did present some remarks on the Roman law jurist and historian Étienne Pasquier (1529-1615) whose edition of The Institutes of Justinian Giraud had edited and republished in 1847 and presented to the Academy. He also published a short monograph on Pasquier in January 1848. Giraud's comments about "man is born a property owner" would have fitted in nicely with his work on the Roman theory of property law. See, Joseph Garnier, Éléments de l'économie politique: exposé des notions fondamentales de cette science (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848). 2nd ed., p. 379; Séances et travaux de l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques. Compte rendu par MM. Ch. Vergé et Loiseau, sous la direction de M. Mignet . Deuxième série. Tome deuxième (XIIe de la collection). Second Semestre de 1847 (Paris: À l'Administration du Compte rendu de l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques, 1847); L'interprétation des Institutes de Justinian: avec la conférence de chasque paragraphe aux ordonnances royaux, arrestz de parlement et coustumes générales de la France. Ouvrage inédit d'Étienne Pasquier, publié par M. le duc Pasquier, avec une introduction et des notes de M. Ch. Giraud (Paris: Videcoq aîné, 1847); and Charles Giraud, Notice sur Étienne Pasquier (Paris: P. Dupont, 1848).

857 The idea that property could be owned as a "natural right" was well established among many but not all of the French economists going back to the the Physiocrats. The influence of the English utilitarians via Bentham, Ricardo, and James Mill was also very strong and was beginning to overtake the natural law advocates. Both Bastiat and Molinari believed that the socialist critique of property had exposed theoretical weaknesses within the classical school of political economy which needed to be addressed, which they attempted to do in Economic Harmonies (1850), and Les Soirées (1849) and Cours d'économie politique (1855) respectively. The Lockean idea of "self-ownership" was less well established in French thought but could be traced back to the work of Pierre-Louis Roederer, Victor Cousin, and Louis Leclerc. Victor Cousin's idea of "le Moi" (the Self) was particularly appealing to this way of looking at property rights: "Le moi, voilà la propriété primordiale et originelle" (Me (the self), there is the primordial and original property).

858 These remarks show the influence of the work of Charles Comte. Bastiat came to Paris too late to have met Charles Comte (1782-1837) who was one of the giants of French liberal thought in the first third of the 19th century. He states in his letters that Comte and Dunoyer had exerted a profound influence on his thinking in his early years. Comte's last work was the Traité de la propriété (Treatise on Property) (1834) which was a combination of a defense of property based upon natural law and its legal and sociological evolution through history. Comte also defended the just acquisition of property through a Lockean process of mixing one's labor.

859 Bastiat uses the phrase "le droit commun" (common right) which when used by a socialist might mean a "communally held right" but here must mean something like a "natural right" or "commonly held right" or perhaps even "under common law".

860 The historian Augustin Thierry (1795-1856) worked with Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer on their journal Le Censeur européen (1817-1819) where he developed a "conquest theory" of history in which he analysed the ruling elites which governed nations, how they came to power (often through conquest as the Normans did of Saxon England), and the gradual emergence of free institutions such as the medieval communes and the Third Estate. See in particular Histoire de la conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands (1825) and Essai sur l'histoire de la formation et des progrès du Tiers état (1850).

861 "Privilegium est quasi privata lex" (A privilege is, as it were, a private law) in Bouvier's Law Dictionary and Concise Encyclopedia. Third Revision by Francis Rawle (Kansas City, MO., Vernon Law Book Company, 1914). Vol. II. "Maxim", p. 2155.

862 The edict of 26 August 1686 permitted an author to copyright his own literary works or to grant them to another person so long as that person was not a publisher. After the author's death the copyright reverted to the pubic domain. For the history of French copyright laws see Molinari, "Propriété littéraire" DEP, vol. 2 pp. 473-78; Édouard Romberg, Compte rendu des travaux du Congrès de la propriété littéraire et artistique (1859), Vol. 2: "France. - Notice historique sur la propriété littéraire," pp. 161-67; and Augustin-Charles Renouard, Traité des droits d'auteurs (1838), vol. 1, pp. 142-48. Also see the discussion about intellectual property in Molinari, Les Soirées , "Second Evening" (LF forthcoming).

863 According to Bouvier "jus utendi" means "the right to use property without destroying its substance. It is employed in contradistinction to the jus abutendi"; "jus abutendi" means "the right to abuse. By this phrase is understood the right to abuse property, or having full dominion over property". See, Bouvier's Law Dictionary , vol. 2, pp. 1794, 1787.

864 Bastiat uses the phrase "le droit de travailler" (the right of working) which is not the usual form he used, which was "le droit du travail"

865 Bastiat reverts to the socialist form of this expression "le droit au travail" (the right to a job). The distinction Bastiat is making here is less clear in English than in French. The socialists demanded "le doit au travail" which might be translated as "the right to work" but with the implication that the worker had "a right to a job" provided at taxpayer expence if necessary. The economists countered this with their demand for "le droit du travail" or "la liberté du travail", which could be translated as a demand for the "right" or the "freedom of working" or seeking work without government or other regulation. Charles Dunoyer wrote a very influential book on just this distinction, De la Liberté du travail (1845).

866 The decree was adopted on 13 July 1790. See, Joseph Lakanal, Exposé sommaire des travaux de Joseph Lakanal. Ex-membre de la Convention nationale et du Conseil des Cinq-cents (Paris: Typographie de Firmin Didot frères, 1838). "Rapport fait au nom du comité d'instruction publique d'écrits en tous genres, des compositeurs de musique, des peintres, des dessinateurs; ce projet est transformé en loi dans la séance du 19 juillet 1793, an II." pp. 9-12.

867 In the original these passages ere left out. We have restored them here. These two impassioned paragraphs can be found in Lakanal, pp. 9-10.

868 A " usufruitier" is some one who has the right to use the property of another person.

869 After the fall of the monarchy in August 1792 the Legislative Assembly called for an election based upon universal manhood suffrage to create a Constituent Assembly (also known as the National Convention) which would draw up a new constitution for the first French republic. It remained in power between September 1792 and October 1795. After the fall of Robespierre in July 1795 the Convention was replaced by a new constitutions and a new government called the Directory.

870 This break in the text occurs in the original in Le Travail intellectuel .

871 Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail. IVe édition. Considérablement augmentée, précédée d'une Introduction, et suivie d'un compte-rendu de la maison Leclaire. La première édition a parus en 1839. (Paris: Cauville frères, 1845). Part II "De la propriété littéraire," pp. 187-240.

872 See Blanc's attack on Lamartine in Organisation du travail , pp. 237-38.

873 Bastiat uses the phrase "recevoir des services contre des services." See the glossary entry on "Service for Service."

874 Bastiat might also have seen something of himself in this as he was appointed to the position of magistrate or Justice of the Peace in Mugron on May 28, 1831 in spite of not having any formal legal training. He developed a reputation for delivering prompt and effective rulings in spite of this lack of training.

875 The Complete Works of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra in Twelve Volumes , ed. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly (Gowans & Gray, 1901). Vol. 6. Second Part of the Ingenious gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. Quote comes from p. 92.

876 See,"Bastiat's Invention of Crusoe Economics" in the Introduction to CW3, pp. lxiv-lxvii.

877 CW3, pp. 187-98.

878 In The Complete Works of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra in Twelve Volumes, ed. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly (Gowans & Gray, 1901). Vol. 6. Second Part of the Ingenious gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, p. 92.

879 See the glossary entry on "The Social Mechanism."

880 The first version appeared in Jacques Bonhomme (June 1848) after which it was expanded into a longer essay which appeared in the Journal des débats (Sept. 1848). See, CW2, pp. 105-6 and pp. 93-104.

881 "Taking Five and Returning Four is not Giving" (June 1848), below, pp. 000.

882 ES3 12 "The Man who asked Embarrassing Questions," (12 December 1847), CW3, p. 310.

883 Les Eaux-Bonnes was a spa town in the Pyrenees near where Bastiat lived in Mugron. He went there periodically as his health deteriorated.

884 It is difficult to know when Bastiat realised he had a terminal illness. This passage suggests he must have known when he wrote these lines sometime in 1848. His doctor recommended he attend the warm springs in Eaux-Bonnes near his home town in June and July1850 and then spend the fall and winter of 1850 in Rome, which is where he died on Christmas Eve.

885 These were all much admired historical or mythical rulers and legislators of the ancient world: Minos was the son of Zeus and Europa and the king of Crete in Greek mythology. After his death he became a judge of the dead in Hades and is sometimes depicted serving this function in later literary works, such as those by Virgil and Dante. Lycurgus of Sparta (8th century B.C.) was a mythical Greek legislator to whom were attributed the severe laws of Sparta. These laws enshrined the virtues of martial order, simplicity of family and personal life, and shared communal living. His counterpart in Athens was Solon. In the eighteenth century it was common among social theorists to regard Athens and Sparta as polar opposites, with Athens representing commerce and the rule of law, and Sparta representing war and authoritarianism. Solon (ca. 640-558 B.C.) was an Athenian political leader and legislator who contributed to the birth of Athenian democracy with his legendary constitutional and economic reforms. Numa Pompilius (ca. 715-672 B.C.) was a legendary king of Rome. Inspired by the Nymph Egeria, he organized Roman religious institutions. Plato(428-348 B.C. was a Greek philosopher. In his work on The Republic Plato argued for the rule of a philosopher king who would rule wisely.

886 ( Bastiat's note. ) We had some trouble in understanding how Don Quixote was able to quote Rousseau and we naturally thought that it might well have been Rousseau who borrowed passages from Don Quixote. However, considering that antiquity is the sole subject of study and admiration by those in modern times, we prefer to think that it was a mere coincidence that is not in the slightest surprising.

887 We have used the translation of Maurice Cranston for these quotations: Rousseau, The Social Contract , trans. Maurice Cranston, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 84-5.

888 Bastiat describes how theocratic governments function in ES2 1 "The Physiology of Plunder". He states that "It is easy to see how impostors behave. You have to only ask yourself what you would do in their place. If I came, with ideas like this in mind, amongst an ignorant clan and succeeded by dint of some extraordinary act and an amazing appearance to be taken for a supernatural being, I would pass for an emissary of God with absolute discretion over the future destiny of men." CW3, pp. 121-22.

889 Rousseau, The Social Contract , trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 87. For the original French see: "Voilà ce qui força de tout temps les pères des nations de recourir à l'intervention céleste et d'honorer les Dieux de leur propre sagesse, afin que les peuples, soumis aux lois de l'État comme à celles de la nature, et reconnaissant le même pouvoir dans la formation du corps physique et dans celle du corps moral, obéissent avec liberté et portassent docilement le joug de la félicité publique." Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau , ed. from the original manuscripts and authentic editions, with introductions and notes by C. E. Vaughan. (Cambridge University Press, 1915). In 2 vols. Vol. 1. Contrat Social, First Draft, CHAPITRE II.: Du législateur.

890 Rousseau, The Social Contract , trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 87.

891 This is another example of Bastiat's hostility to the ancient Greeks and Romans. See also this early but typical statement from 1834: "For what is there in common between ancient Rome and modern France? The Romans lived from plunder and we live from production, they scorned and we honor work, they left to slaves the task of producing and this is exactly the task for which we are responsible, they were organized for war and we aim for peace, they were for theft and we are for trade, they aimed to dominate and we tend to bring peoples together." On a New Secondary School to Be Founded in Bayonne (1834), CW1, p. 417.

892 Rousseau, The Social Contract , trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 142-43.

893 Bachelor Sansón Carrasco was a friend of Don Quixote's who jousted with him disguised as a rival knight, in an effort to get him to return home. Teresa (also named Juana or Joana) was the wife Sancho Panza; Sanchica was his daughter.

894 In the essay "The State" (Sept. 1848) Bastiat warns against the folly of thinking that a society can function where there is "le pillage réciproque" (mutual pillaging). It is here that he also offers his famous definition of the state as "L'État, c'est la grande fiction à travers laquelle tout le monde s'efforce de vivre aux dépens de tout le monde" (The state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.) CW2, p. 97.

895 See above, pp. 000 and pp. 000.

896 EH1 would open with a dedication "To the Youth of France", followed by this chapter on "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (unnumbered in EH1 but numbered chap. 1 in EH2), and then three chapters on "Economic Harmonies," "Needs, Efforts, Satisfactions," and "The Needs of Mankind." In EH2 these four chapters would be rearranged into three chapters.

897 See the Editor's Introduction to T.284 (1845.06.) Undated note by Bastiat on the "Economic and Social Harmonies" found among his papers (c. June 1845), above pp. 000.

898 In the FEE version the phrase is translated as "its moving parts, its springs, and its motive forces"; in the Stirling translation as "its machinery, its springs, and its motive powers." Since the word "movement" refers specifically to clocks, we translate "les mobiles" as driving forces, motivating forces, or motives depending upon the context.

899 Bastiat's references to Rousseau are too numerous to list but his references to Robespierre really begin in his series of anti-socialist pamphlets he wrote after the February Revolution. There are 6 in "Property and Law" (JDE May 1848) in CW2, pp. 47-49; 3 in "Individualism and Fraternity" (June 1848) in CW2, pp. 82-92; 6 in "The Law" (July 1850) in CW2, pp. 107-46; and the most references with 17 in "Baccalaureate and Socialism" (early 1850) in CW2, pp. 185-234.

900 See below, pp. 000.

901 See below, pp. 000.

902 Leonard E. Read, I Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Reed (Irvington-on-Hudson, New York: Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1999). </titles/112>.

903 This was a very prescient sentence as it was published in the JDE on 15 Jan. 1848 six weeks before the collapse of the July Monarchy and the Revolution of February which introduced the Second Republic and all the social experiments it introduced to France.

904 Bastiat uses the slightly longer phrase used by the the merchant and Physiocrat Vincent de Gournay (1712-59),"laissez faire, laissez passer" (let us do as we wish, let us pass unrestricted), to describe his preferred government economic policy. See the glossary entry on "Laissez-faire."

905 Bastiat uses the phrase "laissez faire."

906 In the EH2 version of this chapter Bastiat changed this sentence to read: "an artificial, abstract, and contrived organization, which takes no account of these laws, denies them or despises them , one in short that several modern schools of thought appear to wish to impose (on us)."

907 Rousseau believed the Legislator had "to change, so to speak, human nature; to transform each individual, who by himself is an entirely complete and solitary (individual), into a much greater whole, from which this individual will receive, as it were, his (very) life and his being."

See the third paragraph in Social Contract , Book II, Chap. VII "On the Legislator". Our translation, but see also Cranston, p. 84-85.

908 The quote comes fromRousseau's Discourse on Inequality but Bastiat is quoting from memory here and it is not exactly correct. The French states: "…ce n'est pas chez lui (l'homme sauvage) qu'il faut chercher la philosophie dont l'homme a besoin, pour savoir observer une fois ce qu'il a vu tous les jours" (… and we should look in vain to him for that philosophy which a man needs if he is to know how to notice once what he has seen everyday.) See, Rousseau, Du contrat social et autres oeuvres politiques , ed. J. Ehrard, p. 49; Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality , Part I, p. 90 (Cranston trans.). Bastiat was so impressed with this statement that he refers to it several times in the Economic Harmonies . See the glossary entry on "Rousseau."

909 This story of the village carpenter is Bastiat's version of Leonard Read's story of "I, Pencil" (1958). Other advocates of free trade also used variations of it to make the point that world trade had already become very interconnected even before free trade had been adopted by many nations. A very popular version was by the English Anti-Corn Law campaigner William J. Fox in 1844, whose speech was reprinted many times. See, W.J. Fox, speech given at the Covent Garden Theatre on January 25, 1844, Collected Works, vol. IV: Anti-Corn Law Speeches , pp. 62-63; and Leonard E. Read, I Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Reed (Irvington-on-Hudson, New York: Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1999).

910 Bastiat uses the phrase "moyens d'existence" (means of existence" which we have translated as "standard of living". See above for a discussion of this term, pp. 000.

911 In the EH version Bastiat adds a third occupation, that of "négociant" (trader).

912 In the EH version Bastiat changes "Antipodes" to "China."

913 Here the FEE edition translates "organisation" as "order". We have kept "organization" because Bastiat is contrasting his idea of "natural and voluntary organizations" with the "artificial and coercive organisations" favoured by the socialists like Louis Blanc and Victor Considerant.

914 Bastiat uses terminology drawn from a mechanical clock to describe the "social mechanism." He refers to "les rouages, les ressorts et les mobiles" which we have translated as "cogs or wheels, springs, and movements". Here he uses the terms "les rouages, les résultats et les mobiles" but we believe "les résultats" is an error as elsewhere in the article he uses the more suitable word "les ressorts" (springs). He corrects this error in the EH1 version.

915 Here Bastiat uses the word "agir" (to act). Several times he talks about "acting man" in a way which would become central to the Austrian school, especially Ludwig von Mises. See below, pp. 000 where he uses this intriguing wording: "society is an organization whose components are intelligent and moral actors (agents) endowed with free will, and are capable of being perfectible," and another place where he talks about "the principle of action ("le principe d'activité") (which) resides in them (men)." Below, pp. 000.

916 Bastiat completely rewrote this paragraph for EH. The new sentence is in bold: "Its wheels are men, that is to say, beings capable of learning, reflecting, reasoning, making mistakes, rectifying them, and consequently acting to improve or worsen the (operation) of the mechanism itself. They are capable of feeling satisfaction and pain, and this makes them not only cogs and wheels (rouages) but also the springs (ressorts) of the mechanism. They are also its driving force (mobiles) because the principle of action ("le principe d'activité") resides in them. They are still more than that, they are the object of the mechanism (en) itself, and its purpose (but), since it is in individual satisfactions and pain that everything is finally resolved."

917 In EH Bastiat changes "the sum of pain, even unmerited pain" to just "the sum of unmerited pain". He does not refer here in the JDE version to his notion of "les causes perturbatrices" (disturbing factors) which prevented the proper operation of the free market. He would add a discussion of this to the versions of his articles "On Population" and "Competition" which appeared as chapters in EH. See the Introduction above, pp. 000, and the glossary on "Disturbing and Restorative Factors."

918 In EH Bastiat added the phrase "and possibly exaggerated" human perfectibility.

919 In EH Bastiat changed "under the régime of slavery" to "under the yoke of slavery."

920 Here is an example of one of Bastiat's"public choice" like insights about the self-interested behaviour of bureaucrats and politicians.

921 FEE translates "les organisateurs" as "our social planners." Stirling as "these system-makers." We have kept the "Organizers" for the reasons stated above, pp. 000.

922 See the glossary entry on "Fourier."

923 Alphonso the Wise (Alfonso X) (1221-1284) was king of Leon and Castile from 1252-1284 and was reputed to have said that if he had been present at the creation of the world he would have had a few words of advice for the Creator on how better to order the universe. During his reign he attempted to reorganize the Castillian sheep industry, raised money by debasing the currency, and imposed high tariffs in order to prevent the inevitable price rises which resulted.

924 In about 1628 René Descartes began work on an unfinished treatise "Regulae ad directionem ingenii" (Rules for the Direction of the Mind). Bastiat is mocking what he wrote in Rule XIII concerning the use of bits of string and toy magnets to explain the rotation of the earth and perpetual motion. See, René Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes. Edited by Victor Cousin (Paris: F.-G. Levrault, 1824-1826). "Regulae ad directionem ingenii" in Volume 11, pp. 284-293.

925 Bastiat is referring to Xerxes' order, mentioned by Herodotus vii:34-35, for his soldiers to flog the Hellespont (Dardanelles) for allowing a storm to destroy the bridge he was building so his troops could cross on their way to Greece. "So when Xerxes heard of it he was full of wrath, and straightway gave orders that the Hellespont should receive three hundred lashes, and that a pair of fetters should be cast into it. Nay, I have even heard it said that he bade the branders take their irons and therewith brand the Hellespont. It is certain that he commanded those who scourged the waters to utter, as they lashed them, these barbarian and wicked words: 'Thou bitter water, thy lord lays on thee this punishment because thou has wronged him without a cause, having suffered no evil at this hands. Verily King Xerxes will cross thee, whether thou wilt or no. Well dost thou deserve that no man should honor thee with sacrifice; for thou art of a truth a treacherous and unsavory river.' While the sea was thus punished by his orders, he likewise commanded that the overseers of the work should lose their heads." The History of Herodotus. Translated by George Rawlinson . Online: <http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.7.vii.html>.

926 Bastiat is making fun of the complex definitions and categories used by Fourier in his social theory. For example, he wanted to create a new society in which even the lazy and "young girls" would become "passionate" about industrial work. To achieve this for his imagined "le mécanisme sociétaire" he wanted to create "des Séries passionnées" (committed work groups). See Le Nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire ou invention du procédé d'industrie attrayante et naturelle, distribuée en séries passionnées (Paris: Bossange père, 1829), p. 4.

927 Bastiat mentions the most influential French socialists of his day as well as the Englishman Robert Owen (1771-1858): François Marie Charles Fourier (1792-1837), Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Étienne Cabet (1788-1856), and Louis Blanc (1811-1882). See the glossary entries for details.

928 Social Contract , Book II, Chap. VII "On the Legislator". Our translation, but see also Cranston, p. 87.

929 Social Contract , Book II, Chap. VII "On the Legislator". Our translation, but see also Cranston, p. 87.

930 "Never was there a promulgator of extraordinary laws in a nation who did not invoke God's authority." (FEE) Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, vol. terzo (Milano: Giovann Silvestri, 1820). De' discorsi, Libro primo, cap. undecimo, "Della Religione de' Romani," p. 68.

931 In ES2 1 "The Physiology of Plunder" Bastiat develops a sketch of his planned History of Plunder in which he deals with "theocratic plunder" and "theocratic fraud" at some length, CW3, pp. 121-24.

932 "To devote one's life to the truth." Juvenal, Satire IV , line 91.

933 Presumably, he means Fourier created his "new world" before laying down the laws which would govern it.

934 In the EH version Bastiat changes this to "have gone much further in their apostolic tendencies."

935 Bastiat might have in mind Fourier's Le Nouveau monde industriel (Bruxelles: Société belge de librairie, 1841), T. II, Section VII,. Synthèse générale du mouvement, XIV Notice. "Partis transcendante du mouvement", pp. 343-65.

936 See Louis Reybaud, Études sur les Réformateurs ou socialistes modernes . (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848. 2e édition). 2 vols. for a fuller discussion from the Economists' perspective. Also, Reybaud, "Socialistes, socialisme," DEP, vol. 2, pp. 629-41.

937 To get some idea of the popularity of Rousseau's work even in the 19th century, there were multi-volume collections of Rousseau's Oeuvres published in 1819-20, 1821-22, 1824-25, 1830-33, 1856-58.

938 Social Contract , Book I, Chap. I "The Subject of Book I." Our translation, but see also Cranston, p. 50.

939 Social Contract , Book II, Chap. VI "On the Law." Our translation, but see also Cranston, p. 83.

940 The idea of deception and trickery was central to Bastiat's understanding of economic sophisms. According to him, individuals were deprived of their property directly by means of "la force" (coercion or force) or indirectly by means of "la ruse" (fraud or trickery) or "la duperie" (deception). The beneficiaries of this force and fraud used "les sophismes" (misleading and deceptive arguments) to deceive ordinary people whom he referred to as "les dupes" (dupes). Here he is accusing Rousseau of engaging in a kind of "political sophism."

941 Social Contract , Book II, Chap. VII "On the Legislator". Our translation, but see also Cranston, p. 84.

942 In EH Bastiat changed this sentence to read: "The philosopher controls the legislator by placing himself at an unmeasurably great distance (above/away from) the common people, the prince, and the legislator himself."

943 Social Contract , Book II, Chap. XI "On Different Systems of Legislation." Our translation, but see also Cranston, pp. 97-98.

944 Social Contract , Book II, Chap. XI "On Different Systems of Legislation." Our translation, but see also Cranston, p. 96.

945 Social Contract , Book II, Chap. VII "On the Legislator". Our translation, but see also Cranston, p. 87.

946 Social Contract , Book III, Chap. XV "On Deputies or Representatives." Our translation, but see also Cranston, p. 142.

947 Social Contract , Book III, Chap. XV "On Deputies or Representatives." Our translation, but see also Cranston, p. 141.

948 Social Contract , Book III, Chap. XV "On Deputies or Representatives." Our translation, but see also Cranston, p. 142.

949 Social Contract , Book III, Chap. XV "On Deputies or Representatives." Our translation, but see also Cranston, pp. 142-43.

950 The National Convention (Convention nationale, also known simply as "the Convention") was a legislative body and constitutional convention during the early French Revolution (21 September 1792 to 26 October 1795). Under the Convention the Monarchy was done away with and replaced by a Republic. A year into its existence the Committee of Public Safety came to dominate the Convention under the control of Maximilien Robespierre, whose political ideas had been much influenced by Rousseau.

951 Both words have their origin in the Latin word "socius" (companion) and its related words "societas" (association, union, community) and "sociare" (to unite with).

952 As a landowner with several dozen sharecroppers Bastiat had a special interest in this institution and wrote an article on it in February 1846 for the JDE, "Thoughts on Sharecropping," in which he makes a similar argument. See, above pp. 000.

953 info??

954 Bastiat uses the word "un agent" (agent, or actor). FEE translated it as "elements." Stirling as "agent."

955 Bastiat began talking about the "perfectibility of mankind" early in 1845 in his articles "On the Book by M. Dunoyer. On The Liberty of Working" and "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine" (JDE Feb. 1845), and then in earnest in 1846 in his articles "On Competition" (JDE May 1846) and "On Population" (JDE, October 1846), after which it became a central part of his social theory. See above, pp. 000.

956 Bastiat added this footnote in the EH version in which he quotes the socialist Victor Considerant: "It has been shown that our regime of free competition, demanded by an ignorant form of Political Economy and decreed in order to abolish monopolies, merely ends in the general organization of great monopolies of all types." Considérant, Victor Prosper. Principes du socialisme. Manifeste de la démocratie au XIXe siècle. 2d ed. Paris: Librairie Phalanstérienne, 1847. Première Partie. État de la Société. Chap. I Des intérêts et des besoins de la société. Sect. XI "L'Enfer social. Nécessité absolue d'une solution," p. 15.

957 Bastiat is referring to the classic problem of "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" (who watches the watchmen?) from Juvenal, The Satires 6: 346-48.

958 From Virgil's Aeneid , VI, 727). In Dryden's translation - "one common soul / Inspires and feeds, and animates the whole / This active mind, infus'd thro' all the space, / Unites and mingles with the mighty mass."

959 The idea of the government ordering its citizens to work harder and less productively in order to increase the number of jobs or the amount of labour which workers had to do was one Bastiat used several times in his Economic Sophisms . The best known examples are ES1 7 "Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles, etc." (JDE, October 1845), CW3, pp. 49-53; ES1 16 "Blocked Rivers pleading in favor of the Prohibitionists", CW3, pp. 80-81; ; ES1 17 "A Negative Railway," CW3, pp. 81-83; ES2 3 "The Two Axes," CW3, pp. 138-42; ES2 16 "The Right Hand and the Left Hand" ( LE , 13 December 1846), CW3, pp. 240-48.

960 See the glossary entry on "Bastiat's Theory of Plunder."

961 See chap. V "On Value" and chap. XI "Producers and Consumers" in Economic Harmonies and several letters he wrote in late 1848. Also, Letter 117 to Arrivabene (Paris 21 December, 1848), CW1, pp. 171-72, and Letter 118 to Mme Scwabe (Paris, 28 December 1848), CW1, p173. In the letter to Arrivabene he states that "she is the only one in the world who could render me this service, she could ask whatever price she wants. Her work would be better remunerated than that of another; it would have greater value, but this value lies in the service. "

962 This is another example of Bastiat's use of the idea of "opportunity cost" which he pioneered. He gave it a name, "the unseen", in his pamphlet What is Seen and What is not Seen (July 1850).

963 See, "Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles, etc. ([JDE, October 1845, ES1 7, CW3, pp. 49-53.

964 On Bastiat's idea of "the perversion of the law" see his pamphlet "The Law" (June 1850) and EH2 chapters XVII and XX on "Private and Public Services" and "Responsibility". Especially in "The Law": "The law corrupt? The law—and in its train all the collective forces of the nation—the law, I repeat, not only turned aside from its purpose but used to pursue a purpose diametrically opposed to it! The law turned into an instrument of all forms of cupidity instead of being a brake on them! The law itself accomplishing the iniquity it was intended to punish! This is certainly a serious occurrence if it is true, and one to which I must be allowed to draw the attention of my fellow citizens." See, CW2, p. 107.

965 Bastiat is referring to the various schools of socialism which had appeared during the 1840s around thinkers like Louis Blanc, Fourier, Considerant, Proudhon. See the glossary entries on them.

966 Bastiat is not specific but probably has in mind quotes from The Social Contract like the following: "We have given life and existence to the body politic by the social pact; now it is a matter of giving it movement and and will by legislation." (Book II, Chap. 6 "On Law", p. 80); "The principle of political life dwells in the sovereign authority. The legislative power is the heart of the state, the executive power is the brain, which sets all the parts in motion." (Book III, chap. 11 "The Death of the Body Politic", p. 135). Rousseau, The Social Contract (Penguin, Cranston trans.).

967 See the Editor's Introduction to the first, his "Letter to Hippolyte Castille" (15 Sept. 1847) for details, above, pp. 000.

968 Jobard wrote Nouvelle économie sociale, ou monautopole industriel, artistique, commercial et littéraire, fondé sur la pérénité des brevets d'invention, dessins, modèles et marques de fabrique (Paris: Mathias, 1844) and Organon de la propriété intellectuelle (Paris: Mathias, 1851). Joseph Garnier described his ideas as a mixture of "a bit of plausibility, a bit of nonsense, a bit of science, and a bit of ignorance." There is a lengthy, critical, though respectful discussion of Jobard's ideas by Charles Coquelin, "Brevets d'invention' (Patents) in JDE , vol. 1, pp. 209-23.

969 See Le Travail intellectuel, no. 2, 15 Sept. 1847; and no. 5, 15 Dec. 1847.

970 Ioway is the old name for the Indian tribes who once inhabited what is today known as the state of Iowa. In 1837 they were moved to reservations in Kansas and Nebraska.

971 Les Landes was Bastiat's home department in Gascony in the south west of France which he represented in the National Assembly after the election of April 1848.

972 See, Bastiat, "De la concurrence" (On Competition), JDE , T. XIV, No. 54, Mai 1846, p. 106-22. This was substantially rewritten as Chap. X in Economic Harmonies (1850). See above, pp. 000.

973 Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi (1773-1842) was a Swiss historian and economist. He wrote De la richesse commerciale (1803) which was quite Smithian in its support for the free market but after a trip to England when it was in the midst of an economic depression following the Napoleonic Wars he wrote a more critical work Nouveaux principes d'économie politique (1819) where he expressed his concern for the welfare of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Sismondi first used the colourful story of an island King singlehandedly, but with the help of automatons, turning a crank handle and producing as much industrial output as the entire British Isles, to the great detriment of British workers, in the chapter on "Population" in Nouveaux principes d'économie politique (1819). He returned to the problem of the mismatch between production and consumption caused by technological innovation in an article in La Revue encyclopédique (May 1824) which was quickly pounced on by J.-B. Say in the following issue. See, Sismondi "De la population," Nouveau principes , T. 2, (Paris, 1819), p. 331-32; Sismondi, "Balance des consommations avec les productions," La Revue encyclopédique , May 1824, T. XXII, pp. 264-98; and Say, "Sur la Balance des consommations et productions", La Revue encyclopédique , July 1824, 67e Cah. T. XXIII, pp. 18-31. Sismondi's article was reprinted with additional footnotes in Études sur l'Économie politique, T. I, (1837), Premier essai, "Balance des consommations avec les productions", pp. 33-77; Say's was reprinted in CPE , Say, Oeuvres diverses , T. 12, pp. 250-60.

974 Triptolemus (Threefold Warrior) was a Greek god who was taught by Demeter the science of agriculture, and he in turn passed on this knowledge to the Greek people.

975 Clogs (sabots) are hand made wooden shoes which poor peasants and artisans traditionally wore.

976 In his edition of Bastiat's Complete Works , Paillottet inserted this note by Jobard with no explanation: "Expropriation for the public good will remedy this." See, OC7.41, pp. 207-10.

977 In CW2, 107-46; footnote on p. 133.

978 IN CW2, pp. 93-104.

979 In CW2, pp. 282-327; footnote on pp. 311-12,

980 CW6 (forthcoming).

981 ES3 24 "Disastrous Illusions" (JDE, March 1848), CW3, pp. 384-99.

982 ES2 1 "The Physiology of Plunder," CW3, p. 125.

983 In his essay "The State" (Sept. 1848) Bastiat defines the State as "The state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else." See CW2, p. 97.

984 Eugène Hatin, Bibliographie historique et critique de la presse périodique française, ou Catalogue systématique et raisonné de tous les écrits périodiques de quelque valeur publiées ou ayant circulé en France depuis l'origine du journal jusqu'à nos jours, avec extraits, notes historiques, critiques et morales, indication des prix que les principaux journaux ont atteints dans les ventes publiques, etc. Précédé d'un essai historique et statistique sur la naissance et les progrès de la presse périodique dans les deux mondes (Paris: Didot frères, fils, 1866), pp. 491-92.

985 In CW3, pp. 261-68; quote p. 267.

986 Protests and riots forced King Louis Philippe to resign and on the evening of 24 February a Provisional Government was proclaimed, followed the next day by the formation of the Second Republic.

987 See also the glossary entries for "La République française" and "Jacques Bonhomme (journal)."

988 In CW1, p. 387.

989 See also "Bastiat the Revolutionary Journalist and Politician" in the Editor's Introduction to CW3, pp. lxviii; and "The Law-Abiding Revolutionary" in "Bastiat's Political Writings: Anecdotes and Reflections," pp. 401-3.

990 ES3 21, "The Immediate Relief of the People," 12 March, 1848, La République française . In CW3, pp. 377-79.

991 Molinari, "Frédéric Bastiat: Lettres d'un habitant des Landes." JDE 4e Série, no. 7 (July 1878): 60-70. Review of Lettres d'un habitant des Landes, Frédéric Bastiat. Edited by Mme Cheuvreux. Paris: A. Quantin, 1877.

992 Bastiat called the rich minority of tax-payers who were allowed to vote during the July Monarchy (some 240,000 out of a total population of 36 million) as"la classe électorale" (the electoral or voting class). See the glossary on "The Chamber of Deputies and the Electoral Class," and 1847.05.22 "Peuple et Bourgeoisie" (The People and the Bourgeoisie) Libre-Échange , 22 May 1847] [OC2.51, pp. 348-55] [CW3] [ES3.6]. Quote on p. 286.

993 In 1845 Molinari covered for the magazine Le Courrier française the court case against a group of Parisian carpenters for trying to start a union which was forbidden under the law. He also tried to raise money to help pay their legal expences. Bastiat gave an important speech in favour of abolishing these laws in the National Assembly on 17 Nov. 1849. He stated that those who supported the ban on forming unions as "none other than slavery. For what is a slave if not a man obliged by law to work under conditions he rejects?" See CW2, pp. 348-61; quote p. 351.

Turgot (1727-1781) was an economist of the physiocratic school, a politician, and reformist bureaucrat. Louis XVI made him minister of finance between 1774 and 1776 at which time Turgot issued his "six edicts" to reduce regulations and taxation. Those relating to labour were forced labour obligations or "corvées" which required local farmers to work a certain number of days every year (8) for their local lord or on various local and national road works.

995 The February Revolution of 1848 introduced universal manhood suffrage (21 years or older) and the Constituent Assembly (April 1848) had 900 members (minimum age of 25). Some 7.8 million men voted in this election.

996 Although the Catholic Church was the established church, other denominations also received government subsidies from taxpayers' money. In the 1848 Budget a total of fr. 39.6 million was set aside for expenditure by the state on religion. Of this 38 million went to the Catholic Church, 1.3 million went to Protestant churches, and 122,883 went to Jewish groups.

997 Bastiat made a distinction between protective tariffs , which he wanted to see abolished, and fiscal tariffs to raise money for necessary state functions. he thought the latter should be at a rate of 5% on both imports and exports.

998 The phrase used is "la vie à bon marché" (life at low prices) This was an expression often used by Lamartine in his speeches on behalf of free trade and was used by Bastiat as one of the three mottoes underneath the title banner of his free trade magazine Le Libre-Échange which appeared between November 1846 and April 1848. Bastiat and Molinari used it again in their revolutionary magazine, Jacques Bonhomme , which they published in June 1848, JB. Au bon marché was also the name of one of the earliest department stores in Paris which would revolutionise shopping for ordinary people.

999 In 1849 the size of the French army and navy was approximately 460,000 men which cost the French state fr. 465,526,415 per annum to maintain. In order to maintain an army that size with 7 year enlistments the French government had to recruit about 80,000 new men each year by a combination of voluntary enlistment, conscription (by drawing lots), and substitutions. See the glossary entry on "The French Army and Conscription."

1000 The idea of "labour exchanges" was a pet idea of Gustave de Molinari, one of Bastiat's collaborators in writing La République française .

1001 Two speeches on free trade (9 June 1848 against a proposal by Randoing to increase subsidies to the textile industry, and 11 January 1849 on the importation of salt), a speech on 10 March, 1849 on a constitutional amendment to reorganize the structure of the Chamber preventing public servants also being elected to the Chamber (the so-called "parliamentary incompatibility"), a speech on the freedom to form unions (17 November, 1849), and a speech on the taxation of alcohol (12 December 1849), in Dean Russell, Frédéric Bastiat: Ideas and Influence (Irvington-on-Hudson, New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1965,1969), p. 106.

1002 "The Banning of Trade Unions" (17 Nov. 1849), CW2 17, pp. 348-61; and "Speech on the Tax on Alcohol" (12 December, 1849), CW2 16, pp. 328-47.

1003 Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée Nationale Constituante (4 May 1848 - 27 May 1849) . 10 vols. Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée Nationale. Exposés des motifs et projets de lois présentés par le gouvernement; rapports de Mm. les Représentants (Paris: Imprimerie de l'Assemblée national, 1848-1850). Henceforth CRANC.

1004 Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée Nationale Législative (28 May 1849 - 2 December 1852) . 17 vols. (28 Mai 1849 - 1 Déc. 1851). Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée Nationale Législative. Exposés des motifs et projets de lois présentés par le gouvernement; rapports de Mm. les Représentants (Paris: Imprimerie de l'Assemblée national, 1849-1852). Henceforth CRANL.

1005 For information about Bastiat's activities in the National Assembly see, Dean Russell, Frédéric Bastiat: Ideas and Influence (Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1969), Chap. 9 "Bastiat as Legislator," 106-24; Bibliography, p. 155; Dictionnaire des parlementaires français comprenant tous les Membres des Assemblées françaises et tous les Ministres français, depuis le 1er mai 1789 jusqu'au 1er mai 1889. Vol. I. A-Cay, publié sous la direction de MM. Adolphe Robert et Gaston Cougny (Paris: Bourloton, 1889-1891). "Bastiat", pp. 192-93.

1006 On Bastiat's activities in the Legislative Assembly see Table analytique par ordre alphabétique de matières et de noms de personnes du Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée nationale législative (28 mai 1849 - 2 décembre 1851) et des documents imprimés par son ordre. Rédigée aux Archives du Corps législatifs (Paris: Henri et Charles Noblet, Imprimeurs de l'Assemblée nationale, 1852). Bastiat, p. 56.

1007 CRANC, vol. 1, p. 161.

1008 The Commission for the Workers was headed by the socialist Louis Blanc and it used the Luxembourg Palace as its headquarters from which it ran the National Workshops. It was opposed strongly by Bastiat from within the Finance Committee as its expenditure on finding work for unemployed workers paid for at taxpayer expence was getting out of control. The Chamber agree to close it at the end of May 1848 which led to public protests and the rioting of the June Days.

1009 CRANC, vol. 1, p. 172.

1010 Langres is a Commune in the French Department of Haute-Marne in the east of the country. A citadelle was built by the Romans which was modernised between 1842-50, along with the wall which encircled it (1844-56). The fort was designed in the classic star shape pioneered by Vauban in the 17th century and which was also used in the ring of forts built by Thiers around Paris between 1841-44. See the glossary on "The Fortifications of Paris."

1011 This is an early version of his argument about "the seen and the unseen" which he will take up in earnest in a book of that name in July 1850.

1012 In 1848-49 the French government collected 1.37 billion fr. in revenue, of which 510 million fr. (or 37%) came from customs duties on things like sugar and salt, and indirect taxes on things like alcohol, salt, sugar, and tobacco. See the Appendix on French Government Budgets." ???

1013 See the economic sophism "Disastrous Illusions" (March 1848), CW3 24, pp. 384-99, on this same topic.

1014 See the glossary entries on " Le Courrier français, " the " Journal des Économistes ," " Le Libre-Échange ."

1015 La République française appeared daily and was edited by Frédéric Bastiat, Hippolyte Castille, and Gustave de Molinari. It appeared in 30 issues between 26 February and 28 March 1848. The format of the magazine was only one or two pages which could be handed out on street corners or pasted to walls so that passers by could read them.

1016 Jacques Bonhomme was a short-lived biweekly paper four issues of which appeared between 11 June to 13 July. It was written and distributed by Bastiat, Gustave de Molinari, Charles Coquelin, Alcide Fonteyraud, and Joseph Garnier. The first issue appeared just before the June Days uprising (23-26 June) took place and it was forced to close soon after as a result of the violence on the streets.

1017 Bastiat talks about his experience on the barricades in February and June of 1848 in 93. Letter to Marie-Julienne Badbedat (Mme Marsan), 27 February 1848, CW1, pp. 142-43;

104. Letter to Julie Marsan (Mme Affre), Paris, 29 June 1848, CW1, pp. 156-57; and "Statement of Electoral Principles in April 1849", CW1, pp. 390-95.

1018 "A Hoax," Jacques Bonhomme , no. 2, 15-18 June 1848, below, pp. 000; "Taking Five and Returning Four is not Giving," Jacques Bonhomme , no. 2, 15-18 June 1848, below, pp. 000; "A Dreadful Escalation," Jacques Bonhomme , no. 3, 20-23 June 1848, below, pp. 000.

1019 Articles written by Bastiat are listed in the glossary entries on " La République française " and " Jacques Bonhomme (Journal)."

1020 "Jacques Bonhomme" (literally Jack Goodfellow) is the name used by the French to refer to "everyman," sometimes with the connotation that he is the archetype of the wise French peasant. Bastiat uses the character of Jacques Bonhomme frequently in his constructed dialogues in the Economic Sophisms as a foil to criticise protectionists and advocates of government regulation. See the glossary entry on "Jacques Bonhomme (person)".

1021 ES2 12 "Salt, the Mail, and the Customs Service," (JDE, May 1846), CW3, pp. 198-214.

1022 The history of how Jacques Bonhomme came to publish a journal is explained in the first issue: "Histoire de Jacques Bonhomme. Comment est venue à Jacques Bonhomme l'idée d'écrire un journal." Jacques Bonhomme , no. 1, 11-15 June 1848, p. 1. Unsigned but probably by Bastiat.

1023 See the glossary entry on "Jacques Bonhomme (person)" for a history of Bastiat's use of the character of "Jacques Bonhomme."

1024 See the glossary entry on "Blanc" and "The National Workshops."

1025 "The State (draft)," Jacques Bonhomme , no. 1, 11-15 June 1848, CW2, pp. 105-6. In the essay Jacques Bonhomme offers a prize for the best definition of the State.

1026 See the Budget Papers for 1848.??

1027 See his speeches in Chamber:"Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" (12 Dec. 1849), CW2, pp. 328-47; and"Peace and Freedom or the Republican Budget," also published as a pamphlet, CW2, pp. 282-324. See also his article on the salt tax "Consequences of the reduction of the Salt Tax" ( Journal des Débats , 1 Jan. 18490, CW2, pp. 324-27.

1028 Bastiat wrote a provocative article calling for the immediate abolition of the National Workshops the week during which the rioting opposing this took place. They closed their journal soon afterwards:"To Citizens Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin", Jacques Bonhomme , no. 3, 20-23 June 1848, CW1, pp. 444-45.

1029 ES2 9 "Theft by Subsidy" ( JDE , Jan. 18460), CW3, pp. 170-79.

1030 See the glossary entry on "Bastiat's Theory of Plunder." Also, ES2 1 "The Physiology of Plunder," CW3, pp. 113-30, and ES2 2 "Two Moral Philosophies," CW3, pp. 131-38.

1031 This is Bastiat speaking through the persona of "Jacques Bonhomme." Bastiat had travelled in Spain and Portugal on family business in the 1820s and 1830s, and had been to England several times in the mid- and late 1840s. He had not travelled elsewhere that we know about.

1032 Bastiat uses the English word "Budget" here.

1033 1 sou = 5 centimes.

1034 2 sous is 10 centimes which works out at about 1/30 (3.33%) of the daily pay of an unskilled labourer. A few years after the revolution Horace Say provided data on the average daily wages of 13 groups of workers in the Paris area, including unskilled labourers who earned 2.50 to 3 fr per day; stone masons 5 fr.; tailors 4 fr.; textile factory workers 4.30 fr.; metal workers 4.25 fr.; and printers 3.50 fr. Horace Say, "Du taux des salaires à Paris," JDE, 2nd. série, T. VII, no. 7, 15 Juillet 1855, pp. 17-27.

1035 Here Bastiat uses the phrase "grandes dupes" (great dupes or fools) which is an important part of the vocabulary of his theory of plunder. See ES2.1 "The Physiology of Plunder" and the glossary entry on "Bastiat's Theory of Plunder."

1036 Bastiat changes the title of Minister Budget throughout this story, from "Great Minister," to "Minister Budget", to "Lord Budget" (Seigneur Budget), then the comradely "Citizen Budget", and finally "Grand Statesman".

1037 The tax on salt (la gabelle) raised 37 million fr. in 1847; the state monopoly of tobacco sales raised 115 m. p.a. between 1846-49; and the tax on wine raised 104 m. in 1848. Without taking into account municipal taxes on meat and bread this raised a total of about 256 million fr. for the government. See the French Budget papers for 1849.

1038 The workers go from using the deferential "Seigneur" to the comradely "citoyen" Budget.

1039 "The State" (draft), Jacques Bonhomme , no. 1, 11-15 June 1848, CW2, pp. 105-6. This was expanded and later published in the more upmarket journal the Journal des Débats, (25 Sept. 1848), CW2, pp. 93-104.

1040 See Bastiat's "Letter to Garnier on the right to a job," (October, 1848), below, pp. 000.

1041 See "Bastiat's Rhetoric of Liberty: Satire and the 'Sting of Ridicule'"" in the Editor's Introduction to CW3, pp. lviii-lxiv.

1042 Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (or Molière) (1622- 1673) was a playwright in the late 17th century during the classical period of French drama. Bastiat quotes Molière many times in the Sophisms as he finds his comedy of manners very useful in pointing out political and economic confusions. See especially, The Misanthrope (1666); L'Avare (The Miser) (1668); Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman) (1670); Le malade imaginaire (The Hypocondriac) (1673).

1043 See, Théatre complet de J.-B. Poquelin de Molière, publié par D. Jouast en huit volumes avec la preface de 1682, annotée par G. Monval, vol. 8 (Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, 1883), Third Interlude, p. 286.

1044 ES2 9 "Theft by Subsidy" ( JDE , Jan. 1846), CW3, p. 176.

1045 See, Edmund Burke, Select Works of Edmund Burke. A New Imprint of the Payne Edition. Foreword and Biographical Note by Francis Canavan (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999). Vol. 2. Reflections on the Revolution in France .

1046 See the glossary entries on "Jacques Bonhomme (person)" and " Jacques Bonhomme (journal)."

1047 In 1848 the French state raised about 1.4 billion fr. in income of which 930 million came from direct taxes such as land and window and door taxes (420.1 m.), customs duties on imported goods (iron and steel) and the state salt monopoly (202 m.), and indirect taxes on alcohol, sugar, and tobacco (308 m.). See App. on French Finances ???

1048 The words "Organisation" and "Association" (usually capitalised by Bastiat) were slogans used by the socialist movement, inspired by the work of Louis Blanc and Victor Considerant. They had the special meaning of cooperative, state funded or state organised institutions set up for the benefit of workers. See the glossary entry on "Organisation."

1049 See Charles Coquelin, "Budget," DEP (1852), vol. 1, pp. 224-35; Alphonse Courtois, "Le budget de 1849" in Annuaire de l'économie politique et de la statistique pour 1850 par MM. Joseph Garnier. 7e année (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850), pp. 18-28; and Alphonse Courtois, "Le budget de 1848" in the Annuaire de l'économie politique et de la statistique pour 1848. 5e Année (Guillaumin, 1848), pp. 29-51.

1050 See the glossary entries on "Louis Blanc", "The Luxembourg Palace", and "The National Workshops."

1051 Louis-Antoine Pagès (Garnier-Pagès) (1803-1878) was a stock broker, republican politician, Mayor of Paris (February-March, 1848), and then Minister of Finance in the Provisional Government (March-May, 1848). As Minister of Finance he introduced the unpopular "45 centime" tax in order to balance the budget which was collapsing in the aftermath of the Revolution.

1052 See, Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès, Un épisode de la Révolution de 1848. L'impot de 45 centimes (Paris: Pagnerre, 1850), pp. 116-18 and 119 ff. and Garnier-Pagès, Histoire de la Révolution de 1848. Deuxième édition. (Paris: Pagnerre, 1861-1872).10 vols. Vol. IV. Gouvernement provisoire I. (1866), chap. I on the government's financial problems.

1053 See Louis Blanc's speech from 26 April in La Révolution de février au Luxembourg (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1849), Exposé général (26 avril 1848), Deuxième partie, pp. 91-92; and his summary in Pages d'histoire de la révolution de février 1848 (Paris: Bureau du Nouveau Monde, 1850), p. 82.

1054 "To Citizens Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin", Jacques Bonhomme , no. 3, 20-23 June 1848, CW1, pp. 444-45.

1055 See the glossary entry on "Jacques Bonhomme (person)."

1056 An "obole" was a coin of very low value. Traditionally, the relative value of coinage before the introduction of the France was 240 denier = 20 sol = 1 livre. An obole was a small fraction of a denier (sometimes 1/2).

1057 Bastiat uses the expression "quelque juif charitable" (some charitable Jew). This is one of the very few instances in Bastiat's writings of the casual anti-semitism which was quite common in 19th century France.

1058 Charles Coquelin (1802-1852) was one of the leading figures in the Political Economy movement in Paris before his untimely death. He was selected by the publisher Guillaumin to edit the prestigious and voluminous Dictionnaire de l'économie politique (1852) because of his erudition and near photographic memory. He was an early advocate of the idea of the competitive issue of currencies by banks competing for business in the market, or free banking in his book, Du Crédit et des Banques (1848).

1059 A description is provided in "Chronique," JDE,T. 20, no. 77, 1 avril 1848, pp. 55-56.

1060 Alcide Fonteyraud (1822-1849) was born in Mauritius and became professor of history, geography, and political economy at the École supérieure de commerce de Paris and was one of the founding members of the Free Trade Association and his knowledge of English led him to England to study the Anti-Corn Law League first hand. Fonteyraud also wrote several articles for the JDE and edited a French edition of the works of David Ricardo. He died in the cholera epidemic which swept through Paris in August 1849.

1061 CRANC, vol. 2, p. 677.

1062 CRANC, vol. 2, p. 724.

1063 See the glossary entry on "Victor Considerant."

1064 See the glossary entry on "The Right to Work."

1065 See the glossary entries on "Louis Blanc" and "The Luxembourg Palace."

1066 Considérant, Victor Prosper. Théorie du droit de propriété et du droit au travail. Paris: Librairie phalanstérienne, 1848.

1067 Property and Plunder , 1st Letter, CW2, p. 148.

1068 Considerant's original essay "De la propriété" (On Property) was published in a magazine La Phalange , 1er juin 1839, and then as pamphlet. It was expanded and republished many times during the 1840s in various versions as Théorie du droit de propriété et du droit au travail .

1069 Property and Plunder , 1st Letter, CW2, p. 150.

1070 Considérant, Théorie du droit de propriété et du droit au travail . 3rd edition (1848), pp. 11-14.

1071 Considérant, Théorie du droit de propriété et du droit au travail . 3rd edition (1848), p. 17.

1072 Considérant, Théorie du droit de propriété et du droit au travail . 3rd edition (1848), pp. 19-20.

1073 Considérant, Théorie du droit de propriété et du droit au travail . 3rd edition (1848), pp. 20-21.

1074 David Buchanan (1779-1848) edited an edition of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1814 with extensive notes and a companion volume with an analysis of Smith's work, Observations on the subjects treated of in Dr. Smith's Inquiry (1814). What might have caught Bastiat's eye was Buchanan's note in the latter volume, on p. 80 where he states that "Dr Smith here states, that the landlords, like other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of their land. They do so. But the question is, why this apparently Unreasonable demand is so generally complied with. Other men love also to reap where they never sowed; but the landlords alone, it would appear, succeed in so desirable an object."

1075 John Ramsay McCulloch (1789-1864) was the leader of the Ricardian school following the death of Ricardo. He was a pioneer in the collection of economic statistics, editing classical works in the history of economic thought, and was the first professor of political economy at the University of London in 1828. He wrote The Principles of Political Economy (1825). Bastiat discusses these three economists in more depth in EH Chap. IX "Landed Property".

1076 Nassau Senior (1790-1864) was a British economist who became a professor of political economy at Oxford University in 1826. His books include Lectures on Political Economy (1826) and Outline of the Science of Political Economy (1834).

1077 Considérant, Théorie du droit de propriété et du droit au travail . 3rd edition (1848), pp. 23-25.

1078 Considérant, Théorie du droit de propriété et du droit au travail . 3rd edition (1848), p. 11.

1079 The tax on salt, or "gabelle" as it was known under the old regime was a much hated tax on an item essential for preserving and flavouring food. It was abolished during the 1789 Revolution but revived during the Restoration. In 1816 it was set at 30 centimes per kilogramme and in 1847 it raised fr. 70.4 million. During the Revolution of 1848 it was reduced to 10 centimes per kilogramme, which was the level Bastiat had been advocating since January 1847 in ES2 11 "The Utopian."

1080 The wine and spirits tax was eliminated by the revolutionary parliament of 1789 but progressively reinstated during the empire. It comprised four components: (1) a consumption tax (10 percent of the sale price); (2) a license fee paid by the vendor, depending on the number of inhabitants; (3) a tax on circulation, which depended on the département; and (4) an entry duty for the towns of more than four hundred inhabitants, depending on the sale price and the number of inhabitants. This tax raised fr. 104 million in 1848. One of Bastiat's most important speeches in the Chamber was on abolishing the tax on alcohol on 12 December, 1849, see CW2, pp. 328-47.

1081 See the Editor's Introduction to "Two Articles on Postal Reform I" (3-6 Aug. 1844), above, pp. 000.

1082 According to the budget passed on 15 May 1849 the size of the French Army was 389,967 men and 95,687 horses. This figure rises to 459,457 men and 97,738 horses for the entire French military (including foreign and colonial forces). The expenditure on the Army in 1849 was fr. 346,319,558 and for the Navy and colonies the expenditure was fr. 119,206,857 , for a combined total of fr. 465,526,415. Total government expenditure in 1849 was fr. 1.573 billion with expenditure on the armed forces making up 29.6 percent of the total budget.

1083 The function of the Welfare Offices (Bureaux de beinfaisance) was to distribute assistance to the poor, orphaned children, and the sick. Money from a tax on the sale of tickets to various forms of entertainment was used to fund the Offices. In 1847 there were 9,336 Welfare Offices in communes across France, about 15 million francs was spent on average each year, and 1,185,632 individuals were given assistance. The bulk of the money was used to buy food. Smaller amounts were used to buy cloths and fuel for heating. See, Maurice Block, Statistique de la France, comparée avec les autres états de l'Europe . 2 vols. (Paris: D'Amyot, 1860). Vol. 1, Chap. VII Bienfaisance, section on "Bureaux de bienfaisance", pp. 291-95.

1084 Armand Marrast (1801-1852) was the President of the National Assembly between 19 July 1848 and 26 May 1849. He was a moderate republican and Secretary of the Commission which drew up the new Constitution which was approved in November 1848. He served as president until the Constituent Assembly was replaced by the Legislative Assembly in June 1849. Under the July Monarchy he was a journalist for the National and an active opponent of the regime. He was one of the organisers of the banned political banquet of 22 February 1848 which was the trigger for the overthrow of the July Monarchy. In March 1848 Marrast became mayor of Paris.

1085 Michel Goudchaux (1797-1862) was the Minister of Finance 28 June to 25 October 1848. He supported a progressive tax on inheritance, a tax on capital invested in land, and the unpopular 45% increase in direct taxes in order to balance the budget. On the other hand he supported one of Bastiat's favourite reforms, the uniform stamp for sending letters. He lost his position in a ministerial reshuffle on the eve of the Presidential election in November 1848 (which was won by Louis Napoléon).

1086 The government decided to close the National Workshops program on June 21, 1848 which provoked the bloody June Days uprising of June 23-26 June. See the glossary on "National Workshops."

1087 The Minister of the Interior was Antoine Sénard who served between 28 June 1848 and 13 October 1848. Antoine Sénard (1800-1885) was a lawyer from Rouen who participated in the political banquets of 1847 which led to the overthrow of Louis Philippe in February 1848. He was elected to the Chamber in April 1848, and served as President of the Chamber 5-29 June 1848 and after the June Days uprising he was appointed Minister of the Interior by General Cavaignac. He was a staunch anti-bonapartist and did not have another high position after Louis Napoléon was elected President in December 1848.

1088 ES2 12 "Salt, the Mail, and the Customs Service" (May 1846), in CW3, pp. 198-214.

1089 ES2 12, CW3, p. 210.

1090 See the Appendix on "French Government Finances."???

1091 Armand Marrast was President of the Constituent Assembly between 19 July 1848 and 26 May 1849 when the new Legislative Assembly was elected.

1092 The United States Postal Service introduced its first stamp in July 1847. A 5 cent stamp was required to send a letter weighing less than 1 oz (28 g) and being carried less than 300 miles. It cost a 10-cent stamp to deliver mail to locations greater than 300 miles, or twice the weight. A less positive view of the U.S. government postal monopoly was provided by the American individualist Lysander Spooner in The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress, prohibiting Private Mails (New York: Tribune Printing Establishment, 1844). He attempted to start his own mail company to compete with it but his effort was declared to be illegal and it was quickly shut down. This kind of action by the government is what he wanted to prevent with his Article 4 of the amendment.

1093 To get some idea of relative costs, in the city of Paris at this time a worker in the printing industry earned on average 4 fr. 18 c. per day which was quite high compared to the lowest rates which were earned in the textile industry of 3 fr. 34 c. per day. The price of a 2 kg (4.4 lb) loaf of bread fluctuated between 50 c. and 87.50 c. A copy of Bastiat's Economic Sophisms sold for 1 fr (100 c.) in a special popular edition.

1094 The government spent 34.5 million fr. (1848) in administering and collecting the taxes on carrying letters.

1095 In 1847 the number of letters sent through the French post was 125 million which generated fr. 53 million in revenue for the state. The letter tax was reduced in 1849 to 20 centimes which raised the number of letters sent to 157 million in that year (a 25.6% increase) and reduced the tax revenue to fr. 42 million (a 20.7% decrease). In England it took 12 years after the Postal reform of 1839 for revenues to return to what they had been before the reform. During this time however, the number of letters sent had increased nearly 500% from 76 million in 1839 to 360 million letters in 1851. See C.S. "Postes, DEP, vol. 2, pp. 421-24, and the Appendix on "French Government Finances in 1848-49."

1096 He means the prepayment of a stamp before delivery.

1097 See the very amusing satire of how this worked in practice in ES2 12 "Salt, the Mail, and the Customs Service" (May 1846), in CW3, pp. 198-214.

1098 See previous Intros on his plans for this book, e.g. T.284 (1845.06.) Undated note by Bastiat on the "Economic and Social Harmonies" found among his papers (c. June 1845), above, pp. 000; and T.176 (1848.01.15) "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (Organisation naturelle Organisation artificielle), JDE , T. XIX, No. 74, Jan 1848, above, pp. 000.

1099 Bastiat, CW1, pp. 316-20.

1100 See above, pp. 000 and pp. 000.

1101 See above, pp. 000.

1102 "Capital", in Almanach Républicain pour 1849 above, pp. 000; Capital and Rent (Feb. 1849), above pp. 000; "Damn Money!" (April, 1849), below, pp. 000;

1103 On the "Tariff on Imported Salt" (11 Jan. 1849), "On Amending the Electoral Law" (26 Feb. 1849 and 10 March 1849), below, pp. 000, pp. 000, pp. 000.

1104 See, "Letter 140 to Domenger (Summer 1849)", CW1, pp. 205-6.

1105 "Speech on Disarmament, Taxes, and the Influence of Political Economy on the Peace Movement" (22 Aug. 1849), below, pp. 000.

1106 "Letter 151 to Richard Cobden (17 Oct. 1849)", CW1, pp. 220-21; "Letter 152 to Richard Cobden (24 Oct. 1849), CW1, pp. 221-22; "Letter 154 to Bernard Domenger (13 Nov. 1849)", CW1, pp. 222-23

1107 The Law (June 1850), CW2, pp. 107-46; WSWNS (July 1850), CW3, pp. 401-52.

1108 Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, in 4 vols. , ed. Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), especially vol. 1, Part 1 "Human Action", Chap. 1 "Acting Man"; and Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles, with Power and Market: Government and the Economy. Second Edition. Scholar's Edition (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009). Especially Chap. 1 "Fundamentals of Human Action" where Rothbard frequently cites Bastiat in the footnotes. See the glossary entry on "Human Action."

1109 See the glossary entry on "Service for Service."

1110 See below, pp. 000.

1111 See especially Mises, Human Action , vol. 1, Part 1 "Human Action," Chap. 2, section "2: The Formal and Aprioristic Character of Praxeology".

1112 EH1 (1850), pp. 53-59.

1113 EH2 (1851), pp. 34-39.

1114 See the glossary entry on "Disturbing and Restorative Factors."

1115 Bastiat often used the example of the non-material "services" provided by opera singers to make his point. Here he refers to the Spanish singer Maria Malibran. Elsewhere he mentions the Swedish singer Jenny Lind.

1116 Bastiat says "s'aime lui-même" (loves himself). FEE translates this as "Man is possessed of self-love".

1117 On his theory of "natural" vs. "artificial forms of organisation see Bastiat's article on "Natural and Artificial Organsations" (JDE, Jan. 1848) above.

1118 The word "le mal" can be translated as either "evil" or "harm." If religion is part of the context and there is the clear pairing of "good and evil" then we translated it as "evil." In a more general economic sense, when he is talking about economic "goods" and "harms" we translated it as "harm" or "harms."

1119 James Harrington (1611-77) was an English republican political theorist who wrote an account of an ideal republican society in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656). His views on voting by ballot and the rotation of office were considered radical in his day.

1120 Atlantis was a fictional island mentioned by Plato in Timaeus and Critias . It influenced the thought of Francis Bacon who wrote a utopian novel New Atlantis (1627) where a state-sponsored scientific elite form a college which is "the very eye of the kingdom."

1121 In François Fénelon's fictional work Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), the city of Salente was founded by King Idomeneus the King of Crete who ruled it like a dictatorial absolute monarch, thus satirizing the reign of Louis XIV and making a thinly veiled criticism of the notion of the divine right of kings.

1122 Spensonia was a fictional utopia created by the English radcial Thomas Spence (1750-1814). In a series of novels written between 1782 and 1805 he extolled the virtues of a commonwealth of collective ownership of land. His first discussion of Spensonia (or as here "Crusonia") occurred in the novel A Supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe (1782) which makes an interesting contrast to Bastiat's own use of the Robinson Crusoe story to develop his own ideas about methodological individualism and the nature of human action.

1123 The socialist Étienne Cabet (1788-1856) advocated a society in which the elected representatives controlled all property that was owned in common by the community. He named his fictitious communist community Icarie and in 1848 he left France in order to create such a community in Texas and then at Nauvoo, Illinois, but these efforts ended in failure. See the glossary entry on "Cabet."

1124 The English lawyer and social theorist Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) wrote the classic book on utopia which he called Utopia (meaning "no-place" or "good-place") in 1516. Among many other things, on the island there was no private property, widespread use of slaves, and an internal passport required for travel.

1125 Phalansteries were the self-sustaining communities of the followers of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. See the glossaries entries on "Fourier" and "Phalansteries."

1126 Here, in the EH1 version Bastiat added the following quote from Victor Considerant: "Our industrial regime, based on competition that is not guaranteed nor organized, is therefore just a social hell, a huge achievement of all the torments and sufferings of ancient Tenare. There is one difference, however: the victims." In Victor Considerant, Principes du socialisme manifest de la démocratie au XIX siècle, suivi du Procès de la Démocratique pacifique . (Paris: Librairie Phalanstérienne, 1847). No. XI "L'Enfer social. Nécessité absolue d'une solution," pp. 15-17, quote on p. 16.

1127 The FEE translation uses the very Jefferson expression "Pursue his own happiness" here.

1128 This is the only time Bastiat used the term "les forces harmoniques" (these harmonious forces). In the EH version he changed it to "ces lois harmoniques" (these harmonious laws) and used it again several times there. See the glossary entry on "Harmony and Disharmony."

1129 "The Heavens declare the glory of God." Psalm XIX:1.

1130 Social Contract , Book I, Introduction; Cranston trans. p. 49. See the glossary entry on "The Social Mechanism."

1131 Bastiat was elected to the Constituent Assembly in the election of 23 April 1848 representing the Department of Les Landes.

1132 Bastiat knew his health was poor. He would die of his throat condition (possibly cancer) on 24 December 1850 leaving his book Economic Harmonies unfinished.

1133 In EH Bastiat changes this to "signalerai" (highlight) the relationships.

1134 Bastiat has a different list in EH1. He adds "Community" and changes the order slightly: Self-Interest, Property, Community, Liberty, Equality, Responsibility, Solidarity,, Fraternity, and Unity. He then adds two additional sentences to the paragraph: "Finally, I will draw the reader's attention to the artificial obstacles that the peaceful, regular, and progressive development of human societies encounter. From these two concepts, harmonious natural Laws and artificial disturbing Factors (causes artificielles perturbatrices), the resolution of the Social Problem will be deduced." This was a very important addition to the text between the JDE article and the first edition of EH as it suggests that he was thinking more about what caused the natural harmony of the market to malfunction. To answer this question he developed the two related ideas of "les forces/causes perturbatrices" (disturbing forces/factors) and "les forces/causes réparatrices (restorative forces/factors). FEE translated the former as "artificial, disruptive elements"; and Stirling as "artificial disturbing Causes."

1135 In the EH version Bastiat inserted two new paragraphs here, in which he replies to objections that political economy is solely concerned with self-interest and lacks any concern for "sentiments" and "poetry."

1136 Bastiat uses the pair of words "la sensibilité et de l'activité humaines" which is tricky to translate. "La sensibilité" might be translated as "sensation" or "sense perception" (both used by FEE); "l'activité" as "activity" or "action". We have chosen the pairing of "sensation" (sometimes "sense perception" according to the context) and "action" with the understanding that "human action" has a modern, Austrian sound to it. Also to continue the alliteration as in the French.

1137 Bastiat uses the phrase "être actif" which could be translated as "active being" (as FEE does) or "acting being" which we have chosen. He uses this phrase on two other occasions in his writing - once in ES2 2 "Two Moral Philosophies" CW2, p. 000 and EH2 Chap. 22 "The Social Motive Force" CW5, p. 000.

1138 In EH Bastiat inserts here "qui l'affecte encore comme être passif " (which affects him now in his passive aspect).

1139 In EH Bastiat changes this list to "peines, besoins, désirs, goûts, appétits" (pain/trouble, needs, desires, tastes, appetites" and extensively rewrites and expands the rest of the section.

1140 In EH changes this list to "peine, effort, fatigue, travail, production" (pain/trouble, effort, fatigue, labor, production.

1141 In EH adds "bien-être" (well-being) to this list. In the EH version Bastiat inserted about 800 words of new material on self-interest, gratuitous and "paid for" utility, progress, perfectibility, free will, the ability "to compare, judge, choose, and to act as a result of this", and most importantly a new section on "harmony" and "disharmony". This suggests his thinking about social and economic harmony and its opposite, disharmony, was developing rapidly between when this was written before August 1848 and when EH was published in January1850: "Therefore, when we speak of harmony, we do not mean to say that the natural organization of the social world is such that error and vice are excluded from it; to support this thesis in the face of the facts would be to extend a mania for theory to insane levels. For harmony to exist with no disharmony it would be necessary either for man to have no free will or for him to be infallible. We will just say this: the major social tendencies are harmonious, in that since all error leads to disappointment and all vice to punishment, disharmony tends to disappear quickly."

1142 Bastiat again uses the metaphor of a clock to describe the functioning of "the social mechanism," with its wheels, springs, movement (or driving force) (rouage, ressort, mobile). See the glossary on "The Social Mechanism."

1143 In EH Bastiat changes this to "An initial and vague notion of property".

1144 In EH Bastiat adds "the desire or the need."

1145 Bastiat cut "and mothers" from EH.

1146 Bastiat cut "from father to son" from EH.

1147 In EH Bastiat added the phrase "not only would it in itself violate property but it would also prevent its formation by inflicting inertia on at least one half of human Effort."

1148 These two paragraphs were slightly rearranged in the EH version. But it is interesting to note that Bastiat begins with the word "Today" (which was cut from the EH version, which suggests that this essay began as one of the lectures he gave students at the School of Law which began in the fall of 1847.

1149 This trilogy of words "besoins, efforts, satisfactions" (needs, efforts, and satisfactions) would become the title of the chapter in EH1.

1150 Here begins a 1,200 section which was cut in the EH version.

1151 Bastiat might have in mind Smith's notion of "some particular subject or vendible commodity" which he discusses in Wealth of Nations , Book II, Chap. III Of the Accumulation of Capital, or of Productive and Unproductive Labour, paragraph I, Glasgow edition, p.330.

1152 Smith states that "The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value, and does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject, or vendible commodity, which endures after that labour is past." Glasgow ed. pp. 330-31.

1153 See Chapter V "On Value" in EH.

1154 Nine years after the 4th revised edition of Say's Treatise on Political Economy appeared in 1819 he wrote another lengthy work called Cours complet d'économie politique pratique (1828-9), 6 vols. Unfortunately, it has never been translated into English.

1155 In the Treatise Say states: "By the exclusive restriction of the term wealth to values fixed and realized in material substances, Dr. Smith has narrowed the boundary of this science. He should, also, have included under its values which, although immaterial, are not less real, such as natural or acquired talents. Of two individuals equally destitute of fortune, the one in possession of a particular talent is by no means so poor as the other. Whoever has acquired a particular talent at the expense of an annual sacrifice, enjoys an accumulated capital; a description of wealth, notwithstanding its immateriality, so little imaginary, that, in the shape of professional services, it is daily exchanged for gold and silver." In the "Introduction" to Jean Baptiste Say, A Treatise on Political Economy; or the Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Wealth, ed. Clement C. Biddle, trans. C. R. Prinsep from the 4th ed. of the French , (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1855. 4th-5th ed. ). < /titles/274#Say_0518_86 >.

1156 "A man who gets a shave at a barber's buys the service of the barber and consumes it at the same place and moment when he buys it. You will see that as we progress there is no profession among the men who make up society which will not find a place at the grand table of social economy." Say, Cours , vol 1, Part I, Chap IX De l'échange des frais de production contre des produits, et de ce qui constitue les progrès industriels. (Guillaumin, 1852), p. 114.

1157 "What! all our revenues immaterial!!! Yes, Sir, All: otherwise the mass of matter which composes the globe would increase every year; it must happen so, for we should every year have new material revenues. We neither create nor destroy a single atom. All that we do is to change the combinations of things; and all that we add is immaterial. It is value; and it is this value which is immaterial also, that we daily, annually consume, and upon which we live; for consumption is a change of form given to matter, or, if you [18] prefer the expression, a derangement, as production is an arrangement of form." Jean Baptiste Say, Letters to Mr. Malthus, on Several Subjects of Political Economy, and on the Cause of the Stagnation of Commerce. To Which is added, A Catechism of Political Economy, or Familiar Conversations on the Manner in which Wealth is Produced, Distributed, and Consumed in Society , trans. John Richter (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1821). < /titles/1795#Say_0883_47 >, Letter 1, pp. 17-18.

1158 Said by Damis in Alexis Piron's (1689-1773), La Métromanie Act III, sc. VII, in Oeuvres choisies d'Alexis Piron: précédées d'une notice historique sur sa vie, et des jugemens de nos plus célèbres critiques (Paris: Chez Haut-Coeur et Gayet, 1823), vol. 1, 126.

1159 Maria-Felicia Garcia Malibran (1808-1836) was born in Paris to a Spanish musical family. Her father Manuel García was a tenor for whom Rossini created the role of Count Almaviva in The Barber of Seville (1816). At the age of 17 when her father had taken The Barber of Seville to London she stepped into the role of Rosina when another singer fell ill and this began her operatic career. She was extremely popular singing contralto and soprano roles throughout Europe for the next 10 years until she died from injuries received after falling from a horse. Bastiat refers to her singing several times in his writings. he also refers to the Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind.

1160 Here ends the 1,200 section which was cut from the EH version. What follows was included in the EH version.

1161 This phrase was cut from the EH version.

1162 In the EH version Bastiat adds here: "c'est qu'il s'agit ici d'un ensemble de faits dans lequel non-seulement les deux extrêmes : besoin et satisfaction, sont intransmissibles (ils le sont toujours), mais où le terme moyen, l' Effort, est intransmissible aussi." (the question here concerns a collection of facts in which not only the two extremes, need and satisfaction, cannot be transmitted (this is always so), but where the middle term, Effort , is also not transferable.)

1163 In the EH version Bastiat inserts here 4 paragraphs (396 words) about what he calls "L'utilité gratuite" (utility which is gratuitous or free of charge). He states that "if this book is intended to enable political economy to move forward by one step it is above all by keeping the reader's attention constantly focused on that portion of value which is successively eliminated and made use of as a utility free of charge , by the entire human race."

1164 Richard Whately agreed that "Man might be defined, 'An animal that makes Exchanges.'" and that is was "more convenient to describe Political-Economy as the science of Exchanges, rather than as the science of national Wealth (as Smith did)" and thus concluded that "A man, for instance, in a desert island, like Alex. Selkirke, or the personage his adventures are supposed to have suggested, Robinson Crusoe, is in a situation of which Political-Economy takes no cognizance." One of Bastiat's innovations was to argue in several economic sophisms in which he used the story of Robinson Crusoe in thought experiments that economics does in fact deal with an individual like Crusoe who economizes on hs use of scarce resources even though he did not engage in exchanges until Friday appeared on the scene. See, Whately, Introductory Lectures on Political Economy , Chapter: Lecture I. </titles/1377#Whately_0208_28>. See "Bastiat's Invention of Crusoe Economics" in the Introduction to CW3, pp. lxiv-lxvii.

1165 This section became the first part of chapter 3 in EH with the same title "On the Needs of Man." The second part of that chapter consisted of Part IV which was published in JDE in December 1848. See below, pp. 000.

1166 In the EH version Bastiat adds to this list "Sensation du beau" (sense of the beautiful or aesthetics ).

1167 See his essay on "Natural and Artificial Organizations" (Jan. 1848), below pp. 000

1168 In the EH version Bastiat adds the following to end the sentence: "and finally, assuring the final predominance of Goodness and Beauty by making us both earn and deserve it."

1169 From Molière's play Les Femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies) (1672). See Théâtre complet de J.-B. Poquelin de Molière, publié par D. Jouaust en huit volumes avec la préface de 1682, annotée par G. Monval , vol. 8 (Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, 1882), "Les Femmes savantes," Act II, scene VII, p. 67.

1170 Fénelon ((1651-1715)) was the Archbishop of Cambrai and tutor to the young duke of Burgundy, the grandson of Louis XIV. See,"De l'éducation des filles" in François de Salignac de La Mothe (Fénelon), De l'éducation des filles. Directions pour la conscience d'un roi (Paris: Delestre-Boulage, 1821), p. 123.

1171 In the EH version Bastiat replaces the word "tout" (everything) with the phrase "toute mesure législative" (any legislative measure).

1172 In the EH version Bastiat concludes the paragraph with this addition: " harmonie que je signale en passant à l'attention du lecteur" (a harmony which I draw in passing to the reader's attention).

1173 Here in the EH version Bastiat adds a large new section of 669 words in which he discusses the relationship between wealth and virtue and vice, and the appearance of "l'inégalité factice" (artificial inequality) caused by legislation which results in "désaccord" (discord or disharmony). See the glossary entry on "Harmony and Disharmony."

1174 Bastiat also discussed going up and down the social ladder in "On Population" in JDE, Oct. 1846, below pp. 000.

1175 Bastiat uses the word "s'accorder" which can be translated as compatible or in harmony with.

1176 Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality , "Part Two." Our translation but see also A Discourse on Inequality. Translated with an Introduction by Maurice Cranston (Penguin, 1984), p. 113.

1177 Bastiat would return to the topics of "machines" and "luxury" in WSWNS, chapters 8 and 11, below, pp. 000 and pp. 000.

1178 Bastiat continued this discussion in "Economic Harmonies IV" in Dec. JDE which he later merged with Section III to form chapter 3 in EH.

1179 See the glossary entry "The Right to Work."

1180 Charles Dunoyer, De la liberté du travail, ou simple exposé des conditions dans lesquelles les force humaines s'exercent avec le plus de puissance. 3 vols. Paris: Guillaumin, 1845.

1181 Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail. Paris: Prévot, 1840; Le Socialisme; droit au travail, réponse à M. Thiers. Paris: M. Levy, 1848.

1182 Victor Considerant, Théorie du droit de propriété et du droit au travail. Paris: Librairie phalanstérienne, 1848.

1183 See Le droit au travail à l'Assemblée nationale. See also Faucher, "Droit au travail" in the Dictionnaire de l'Économie politique, vol. 1. pp. 605-19.

1184 His throat condition was becoming worse thus making it hard for him to heard on the floor.

1185 See Bastiat's essay on "The State" which first appeared in his revolutionary street magazine Jacques Bonhomme in June 1848 (CW2, pp. 105-6) and then in a revised and longer form in the Journal des débats in 25 Sept. 1848, CW2, pp. 93-104.

1186 This is another version of "the seen" and the "unseen" story which Bastiat would develop in more detail in his booklet WSWNS in July 1850. See, CW3, pp. 401-52.

1187 Bastiat had developed this idea of "la spoliation réciproque" (reciprocal or mutual plunder) in some of his free trade speeches as early as 1846 and would develop it further in ES2 1 "The Physiology of Plunder" probably written in November 1847, and then in the essay "The State" (Sept. 1848).

1188 See the glossary entry on "The Political Economy Society."

1189 See CW6 (forthcoming).

1190 A history of the Society can be found in Breton, Yves. "The Société d'économie politique of Paris (1842–1914)" in The Spread of Political Economy and the Professionalisation of Economists: Economic Societies in Europe, America and Japan in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Massimo M. Augello and Marco E. L. Guidi. London: Routledge, 2001. Further information is provided by the Society's Secretary Joseph Garnier in "Société des Économistes," Annuaire de l'économie politique (1847), pp. 233-39; and "Économie politique, (Société d')," DEP , vol. 1 pp. 670-71.

1191 Wherever possible we have tried to identify the members and provide information in the footnotes.

1192 See his letter to his friend Félix Coudroy recounting this experience, "Letter 37 to Coudroy (May 1845)," CW1, pp. 59-61.

1193 ASEP (1889), pp.49-50.

1194 Joseph Garnier, "Société des Économistes," Annuaire de l'économie politique (1847), pp. 233-39; quote on p. 238.

1195 Bastiat first made contact with Cobden in November 1844 when he was writing his book on Cobden and the League in Mugron before he had made contact with the Parisian economists . See "Letter 32 to Cobden (24 November 1844)", in CW1, pp. 50-53. This was the beginning of a close and warm friendship between the two men.

1196 See the Editor's Introduction to "On the Allocation of the Land Tax in the Department of Les Landes" (July 1844), above, pp. 000 for a list of Bastiat's writings on tax matters, and the glossary entry on "Bastiat on Taxation."

1197 See above, pp. 000.

1198 CW2 16, pp. 328-47; quote on p. 337.

1199 ES2 11 "The Utopian" (January 1847), CW3 pp. 187-98.

1200 Horace Say (1794-1860) was the son of Jean-Baptiste Say. He married Anne Cheuvreux, sister of Casimir Cheuvreux, whose family were friends of Bastiat. Say was a businessman and Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce of Paris. He was very active in liberal circles, participating in the foundation of the PES (of which he was a vice-president), the Guillaumin publishing firm, the Journal des Économistes , and was an important collaborator in the creation of the Dictionnaire de l'économe politique (1852-53) and the Dictionnaire du commerce et des marchandises (1837, 1852).

1201 One of the first acts of the Provisional Government was to pass a law on 2 March 1848 which lowered the maximum number of hours worked per day in Paris from 11 to 10 hours and in the provinces from 12 to 11 hours. This law was rescinded on 9 September, 1848.

1202 Antoine Sénard (1800-1885) was a lawyer from Rouen who participated in the political banquets of 1847 which led to the overthrow of Louis Philippe in February 1848. He was elected to the Chamber in April 1848, and served as President of the Chamber 5-29 June 1848 and after the June Days uprising he was appointed Minister of the Interior by General Cavaignac. He was a staunch anti-bonapartist and did not have another high position after Louis Napoléon was elected President in December 1848.

1203 Hippolyte Dussard (1798-1879) was a journalist, a businessman involved in the Paris-Rouen railway, and an economist. He was the editor of the JDE from 1843 to 1845 , a contributor to the Revue encyclopédique, and a co-editor with Eugène Daire of the Works of Turgot for the Collection des Principaux Économistes published by Guillaumin. During the Second republic he was appointed the prefect of la Seine-Inférieure and was elected to the Council of State.

1204 La Seine-Inférieure is in Normandy and the main city is Rouen.

1205 Léon Faucher (1803-54) was a journalist, writer, and deputy for the Marne who was twice appointed Minister of the Interior. He became an active journalist during the July Monarchy writing for Le Constituionnel , and Le Courrier français, for which Bastiat wrote, and was one of the editors of the Revue des deux mondes and the JDE . Faucher was appointed to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1849 and was active in L'Association pour la liberté des échanges. He wrote on prison reform, gold and silver currency, socialism, and taxation. One of his better-known works was Études sur l'Angleterre (1856).

1206 Jules-Auguste Hovyn de Tranchère (1816-1898) was a politician and businessman from Bordeaux. He was elected in April 1848 to the Constituent Assembly, voted with the conservatives, and was Secretary of the Agriculture Committee. He opposed Louis Napoléon's coup d'état of November 1851 and later resigned from the Chamber. He was mayor of Guîtres in the Gironde 1848-1852 and a Member of the General Council 1848-51.

1207 Louis Wolowski (1810-76) was a lawyer, politician, and economist of Polish origin. His interests lay in industrial and labor economics, free trade, and bimetallism. He was a professor of industrial law at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques from 1855, serving as its president in 1866-67, and a member and president of the PES. In 1848 he was elected to represent La Seine in the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies and during the 1848 Revolution he was an ardent opponent of the socialist Louis Blanc and his plans for labor organization.

1208 Émile Pereire (1800-1875) and Isaac Pereire (Isaac Rodrigue) (1806-1880) were businessmen who founded the bank Crédit Mobilier in 1852. They came from Bordeaux and had business interests in banking, land holdings, railways, maritime trade, and insurance. Émile was sent to Paris to learn the banking business in 1822 and mixed in Saint-Simonian circles where he imbibed ideas about the need for a ruling elite of bankers and industrialists. The brothers had many business interests in Les Landes, such as the construction of the Bordeaux to Bayonne railway; the reforesting of Les Landes, and the Château Palmer vineyard.

1209 Saint-Julle de Colmont (1792-??) had been Secretary of Finance under the July Monarchy. He was a member of the Political Economy Society and wrote articles for the JDE and the Annuaire de l'économie politique on tax, trade marks, and gold and silver currency.

1210 Irénée François David (1791-1862) was a lawyer in Auch, Gascony. During the Restoration he was mayor of Auch and opposed the July Monarchy. He was elected in 1848 and 1849 to represent the Department of Gers, allying himself with the moderate Republicans. He was a member of the Finance Committee of the National Assembly of which Bastiat was Vice-President.

1211 Félix Esquirou de Parieu (1815-1893), was a lawyer and Deputy who represented the Department of Cantal during the Second Republic (1848-1851). Between October 1849 and January 1851 he was the Minister of Eduction and during the Second Empire was Vice-President of the Council of State. He was Secretary of the Finance Committee of which Bastiat was Vice-President and delivered several reports to the Chamber on taxes on gifts and inheritance, income tax, the laws governing apprentices.

1212 In ES3 6 "The People and the Bourgeoisie", CW3, pp. 281-87, especially p. 286. See the glossary on "The Chamber of Deputies and the Electoral Class."

1213 Bastiat campaigned to ban civil servants from also sitting in the Chamber. See "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" (March 1843) in CW1, pp. 452-57.

1214 Armand Marrast was President of the Constituent Assembly between 19 July 1848 and 26 May 1849 when the new Legislative Assembly was elected.

1215 Louis Leclerc (1799-1854) was a founding member of the Free Trade Association, a member of the Société d'Économie Politique, an editor of the JDE and the Journal d'agriculture , the director of a independent private school called "l'école néopédique" between 1836 and 1848, secretary of the Chamber of Commerce of Paris, and a member of the jury at the London Trade Exhibition in 1851. Leclerc had a special interest in agricultural economics (wine and silk production) on which he wrote many articles for the JDE .

1216 Pellegrino Rossi (1787-1848) was born in Italy and lived in Geneva, Paris, and Rome. He was a professor of law and political economy, wrote poetry, and ended his days as a diplomat for the French government. After the death of Jean-Baptiste Say, Rossi was appointed professor of political economy at the Collège de France in 1833, and in 1836 he became a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. In 1847 he was appointed ambassador of France to the Vatican but was assassinated on 15 November 1848 in Rome.

1217 Michel Chevalier (1806-87) was a liberal economist and alumnus of the École polytechnique and a Minister under Napoleon III. Initially a Saint-Simonist, he was appointed to the chair of political economy at the Collège de France in 1840 and became a senator in 1860. After a trip to the United States, he published Lettres sur l'Amérique du Nord (1836), Histoire et description des voies de communications aux Etats-Unis et des travaux d'art qui en dependent (1840-41), and Cours d'économie politique (1845–55). He was an admirer of Bastiat and Cobden and played a decisive role in the free trade treaty signed between France and England in 1860 (Chevalier was the signatory for France, while Cobden was the signatory for England). His dismissal from his teaching post during the 1848 Revolution was strongly resisted by the Political Economy Society which was able to eventually get him reinstated.

1218 Richard Whately (1787-1863) was Archbishop of Dublin and professor of political economy at the University of Oxford, where he was an important member of Nassau Senior's group. Whately wrote many works of theology before turning to political economy. He was an opponent of the Ricardian school and is considered to be an early adherent to the subjective theory of value. He published his Oxford lectures delivered in Easter Term 1831 as Introductory Lectures on Political Economy ( 1832). He also wrote a popular work designed to introduce young readers to ideas about money: Easy Lessons on Monetary Matters (1849).

1219 Richard Whately, "Enseignement de l'économie politique en Irlande. Discours de M. Whateley, archevêque de Dublin, dans la séance de la Société statistique de Dublin (19 juin)," JDE, T. 22, N° 93, 15 December 1848, pp. 60-67.

1220 Possibly, Dionysius Lardner (1793-1859) who was an Irish physician and professor of astronomy and physics at the University of London 1827-1840. In addition to his scientific work on geometry and calculus he wrote profusely in order to popularise science to a mass audience. He toured the United States 1840-45 giving a series of popular lectures on science.

1221 See the glossary entry on "Léon Faucher."

1222 Jules Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire (1805-95) was a philosopher, journalist and politician. He joined the Ministry of Finance in 1825 and then became a journalist during the Restoration, opposing the reaction of Charles X. His scholarly work on ancient Greek philosophy and his translation of Aristotle led to a Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France in 1838. During the Second Republic he was elected Deputy of the Department of Seine-et-Oise but resigned after Louis Napoléon's coup d'état of December 1851. During the 1850s he was a member of an international committee to study Ferdinand de Lesseps's plans to build the Suez Canal, which he strongly supported and popularized in France.

1223 See the glossary entry on "Louis Wolowski."

1224 A discussion on the sacking of the 5 Collège de France professors began on 13 November 1848 at which Léon Faucher and Saint-Hilaire spoke (CRANC, T.5, pp. 522 ff.). It continued the next day when Wolowski and Faucher spoke (pp. 536ff. and p. 453). The matter was resolved with the restoration of funding for the 5 professors at an annual salary of 5,000 fr. each and a total budget for the College of 112,200 fr. (CRANC, T. 6, p. 364).

1225 From Cicero, "The Speech of M. T. Cicero for his House. Addressed to the Priests," in The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero , trans. C.D. Yonge (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1913-21). Vol. 3. </titles/587#lf0043-03_head_002>.

1226 Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776 and The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759. Destutt de Tracy's four-volume Éléments d'idéologie was first published in 1801-15. Volume four titled Traité de la volunté , was translated by Thomas Jefferson and appeared in English under the title Treatise of Political Economy in 1817.

1227 He is referring to an Act signed by Lord Dalhousie, President of the Board of Trade (1845-46) and then Governor-General of India (1847-56). The report in The Economist magazine was translated by Alcide Fonteyraud and published in the JDE in June 1848, A.F. (Alcide Fonteyraud), "Des lois de navigation et du mouvement maritime dans l'Inde," JDE, T. 20, no. 81, 1 June 1848, pp. 266-71.

1228 Denis Louis Rodet (1781-1852) was born in Bourg-en-Bresse and became a merchant in Bordeaux, Lyons, and London specialising in colonial goods and maritime insurance. He was a member of the Paris Chamber of Commerce, the Political Economy Society, and served on a Government Commission from 1848 examining tariff reform. He also wrote a Report for the Paris Chamber of Commerce, Acte de Navigation de l'Angleterre. Rapport fait à la Chambre de commerce de Paris (1850) on the impact and history of Britain's new Navigation Act which was enacted 29 June 1849. Joseph Garnier said he had one of the largest private libraries of books on political economy in Paris which he made available for the use of the economists, and that he was luke-warm on the question of complete free trade. See, Joseph Garnier, "Rodet (Denis-Louis)," DEP, vol. 2, p. 544.

1229 See the glossary entry on "Saint-Julle de Colmont (1792-??)."

1230 See the glossary entry on "Alcide Fonteyraud (1822-1849)."

1231 Mises, Human Action , vol. 1, Part 1 "Human Action," Chap. 2, section "2: The Formal and Aprioristic Character of Praxeology".

1232 Bastiat used this expression "le principe actif" (the principle of action) here and again 3 times in EH1 in the chapters IV "Exchange" and V "On Value." In the former he says "échange implique activité, et que l'effort seul manifeste notre principe actif" (exchange implies action and effort alone reveals our principle of action) and in the latter where he says "cette manifestation de notre principe actif que nous avons appelée Effort" (this manifestation of our principle of action which we have called Effort). See CW5, forthcoming.

1233 Again, Bastiat seems to be close to Mises' and Rothbard's abstract theory of praxeology, namely that "men use means to attain various chosen ends." See, Rothand MES, p. 64; and the Preface to the Revised Edition (1993), "The present work deduces the entire corpus of economics from a few simple and apodictically true axioms: the Fundamental Axiom of action—that men employ means to achieve ends, and two subsidiary postulates: that there is a variety of human and natural resources, and that leisure is a consumers' good,"p. lvi.

1234 An Anchorite is someone who has withdrawn from the world for religious purposes. During the middle ages anchorites often lived in a small cell-sized room built against the wall of a church and would offer advice to others through a small window. In the EH version Bastiat changes this to "the black broth of Sparta or the pittance of an anchorite."

1235 About 30 miles per hour.

1236 ( Bastiat's note. ) (This is) a mathematical law that occurs frequently and is little understood in political economy. Note by Editor: Bastiat means by this the idea of an asymptote.

1237 ( Bastiat's note. ) One of the indirect aims of these articles is to combat the modern sentimental schools which, in spite of the facts, do not accept that suffering, to a certain extent, has a providential goal. As these schools claim descent from Rousseau, I am obliged to quote them this passage from their master: "The evil we see is not an absolute evil, and, far from being in direct conflict with good, it, like good, contributes to universal harmony." In "Lettre à M. Beaumont" in Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Tome troisième. 1er Partie. Contenant Lettre à M. de Beaumont. Lettres écrites de la Montagne. Inégalité des conditions. (Paris: A. Belin, 1817), p. 24.

1238 where??

1239 Utility: from Latin utilitatem (nominative utilitas) "usefulness, serviceableness, profit," from utilis "usable," from uti "make use of, profit by, take advantage of." Online Etymology Dictionary <https://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=utility>.

1240 This article did not appear in the JDE but was Chap. IV "Exchange" in EH.

1241 Elsewhere Bastiat wrote about the economic choices faced by "l'homme isolé" (man in isolation), namely Robinson Crusoe cast ashore on the Island of Despair. See, the following ES3 16 "Making a Mountain out of a Mole Hill" (c. 1847), pp. 343-50, and ES2 14 "Something Else" (March 21, 1847), pp. 226-34. In addition, there is a discussion of how a negotiation might have taken place between Robinson and Friday about exchanging game and fish in "Property and Plunder" (July 1848), CW2, p. 155; and there are 16 references to "Robinson" in the Economic Harmonies, especially in Chapter 4 "Exchange." See "Bastiat's Invention of Crusoe Economics" in the Introduction to CW3, pp. lxiv-lxvii.

1242 This is the first instance of Bastiat's use of the phrase "l'action humaine" (human action). There are 8 in total all of which occur in the articles and chapters which make up EH. See the glossary entry on "Human Action."

1243 See pp. 000 above.

1244 See EH Chap. IV "On Value."

1245 Among several places, see Say, Traité (6th ed. 1841, Guillaumin), Book I, chap. I "What is understood by Production", pp. 57-58.

1246 Bastiat uses another expression here "l'action de l'homme" (the action of human beings, or human action). This version of saying the same thing occurs 6 times in EH.

1247 See also Chap. 6 "The Middlemen" in WSWNS, pp. 422-27.

1248 See glossary on "Service for Service."

1249 See Chap. IV "Exchange" in EH.

1250 Bastiat uses the phrase "l'action de l'homme" (the action of human beings) which we have translated as "human action." Elsewhere he uses terms such as "être actif" (active or acting being), and "l'action humaine" (human action). See the glossary entry on "Human Action."

1251 See Bastiat's review of Dunoyer's book when it first appeared in March 1845 but it was never published, above, pp. 000.

1252 He does this in Chap VII "Capital" of EH.

1253 Here Bastiat uses the terse French abstract nouns - "l'ordre, la prévoyance, l'empire sur soi-même, l'économie" (order, foresight, self-control, and thrift) - which in modern economic language could be expressed as "the ability to organize one's affairs, to plan for the future, to exercise control over oneself, and to economise or save for the future."

1254 This is a clear statement of the Austrian idea of "time preference." As Böhm-Bawerk expressed this concept in 1890, "in the economic world the law holds that the present value of future goods is less than that of present goods, — a law that owes its existence to no social or political institution, but directly to the nature of men and the nature of things." See, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest: A Critical History of Economic Theory, trans. William A. Smart (London: Macmillan, 1890). </titles/284#Boehm-Bawerk_0188_1058>.

1255 See the glossary entry on "Service for Service."

1256 See the glossary entry on "Service for Service."

1257 1846.09.26 "Deuxième discours, à Paris" (Second Speech given in the Montesquieu Hall in Paris). Salle Montesquieu, 29 septembre 1846. JDE , octobre 1846] [OC2.43, p. 238] [CW6]

1258 Proudhon discussed his plans to create a separate and artificial company (une société) to achieve what Bastiat thought the market already did very well. Proudhon likened it to an "Exposition," no doubt inspired by the Great Exposition held in London in 1851, with the important change that it be made permanent. In this "bazaar," the products of industry would be permanently on display for all to see. Bastiat argues here and elsewhere that the free market is such a "permanent bazaar." See "Appendice: Société de l'Exposition perpétuelle: projet," in Théorie de la propriété. Deuxième édition (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1866), pp. 249-308. The discussion of the permanent bazaar is on p. 297.

1259 See the list of rhetorical devices he used in the Introduction to CW3, pp. lx-lxi.

1260 There is a possibility that this particular letter was a real one as Bastiat went to school in Sorèze with Étienne Arago, the younger brother of Francois Arago to whom this letter was addressed.

1261 "Three Pieces of Advice" in CW1, pp. 471-76.

1262 The quotations have been selected from CW1, pp. 474-75.

1263 See also his comments in the National Assembly on "A Proposal to change the tariff on imported salt" (11 Jan. 1849), below, pp. 000.

1264 Like the disastrous 45 centimes tax introduced by Louis-Antoine Pagès on March 16, 1848 which increased direct taxes on things such as land, moveable goods, doors and windows, and trading license, by 45%. It was known as the "taxe de quarante-cinq centimes" (the 45 centimes tax) and was deeply unpopular, prompting revolts and protests in the south west of France.

1265 This may have been the deliberate strategy adopted by Bastiat and the other liberals in the Finance Committee.

1266 Reform of the Postal system was a favorite topic of Bastiat as his earlier writings reveal (see above, pp. 000). His old school friend Etienne Arago became the Director-General of the Post Office during 1848 and oversaw the introduction of the fixed price, pre-stamped envelope on 30 August 1848 at a rate of 20c. (to take effect on 1 January 1849). Bastiat gave a speech in the Chamber on this topic, "Speech in the Assembly on Postal Reform" (24 August 1848) (above, pp. 000). Barely a year after its introduction, the Minister of Finance, Achille Fould, began lobbying the Chamber to increase the rate to 25c. (14 November, 1849) and was successful in getting a law passed to this effect in 15 May 1850. See, Belloc, Les postes françaises , pp.508-18.

1267 The tax on alcohol was abolished in May 1849 (when Hippolyte Passy (1793-1880) was the Minister of Finance) but the new Minister of Finance, Achille Fould, was able to have it reinstated in December 1849. On 12 December 1849 Bastiat gave an impassioned speech in the Chamber on the need to abolish the tax on alcohol. See, "Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" CW2, pp. 328-47.

1268 "La fausse philanthropie" (false philanthropy) was a term Bastiat used to describe socialism. It was one of the kinds of plunder he proposed to cover in his History of Plunder . He first used it in the Conclusion to ES1 (Nov. 1845). See, CW3, p. 104.

1269 "Peace and Freedom" was the title of one his pamphlets, Peace and Freedom, or the Republican Budget (Feb. 1849), in CW2, pp. 282-27.

1270 Bastiat uses the term "la philanthropie officielle" (official or state-run philanthropy) but elsewhere he talks about "la charité légale ou forcée" (state-run or coerced charity). , which he contrasts with "la charité volontaire" (voluntary charity) or "la charité privée" (private charity). See, "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine" (JDE Feb. 1845), above pp. 000.

1271 See his plans to do this in ES2 11 "The Utopian" (LE, 17 Jan. 1847), CW3, pp. 187-98, where he plans to halve the military budget and abolish the army and replace it with local militias; also his "Speech on the Tax on Wine and Spirits" (12, Dec. 1849) in which he talks about total government expenditure of only 200 million fr. (down from about 1,400 million fr.), CW2, 337; and his plans for European-wide disarmament in his speech to the Friends of Peace Congress (22 August, 1849, below, pp. 000.

1272 Sicily erupted in revolt on 12 January 1848 (before it occurred in France) and spread to Naples and Milan. They were defeated by the Austrian General Radetsky. On 25 April 1849 the French government (then under the control of President Louis Napoléon) sent an armed force to the Papal States in Rome to assist Pope Pius IX defeat the new Roman Republic which they were successful in doing by July when French forces entered the city. Revolution spread to Hungary in 15 March 1848 and soon turned into a war of independence from the Austrian Empire. It was brutally put down by the Russian Army in July and August 1849. A Polish uprising against Prussia began on 20 March 1848 but it had been largely repressed by Prussian forces by May.

1273 Henry John Temple, third viscount Palmerston (1784-1860) was a British politician and leader of the Whig party. He was Minister of Foreign Affairs (1830-41 and 1846-50) and then Prime Minister during the Crimean War (1854-56). He was a liberal interventionist who worked to limit French influence in world affairs.

1274 The projected deficit for 1849 was 160 million fr with government revenue of 1,400 million fr. If the following taxes were abolished - alcohol tax (90 million fr.), salt tax (26 million fr.), and postal tax (45 million fr.) - the deficit would rise to 321 million fr. Perhaps Bastiat expected a further fall in tax revenue which would bring the total up to 500 million. See App. on "French Government Budget" ???

1275 CRANC, vol. 7, pp. 169.

1276 "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" (March 1850), CW2, pp. 366-400.

1277 "Baccalaureate and Socialism" (early 1850), CW2, pp. 185-232.

1278 "Letter 191 to Louise Cheuvreux, Lyons 14 Sept. 1850," CW1, p. 272.

1279 "Letter 203 to Félix Coudroy, Rome 11 Nov. 1850," CW1, p. 288.

1280 Hippolyte Passy (1793-1880) was a cavalry officer in Napoleon's army, a journalist during the Restoration, and a politician during the July Monarchy. He was elected as a deputy from 1830, serving as minister of finance in 1834, 1839-40, and 1848-49. In 1838 he became a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, in which he served for some forty years and was particularly active in developing political economy. He was cofounder of the PES (1842) and wrote numerous articles in the JDE .

1281 Bastiat uses an interesting expression here - "se traduire en un capital fictif, en une valeur factice" (manifests itself in imaginary (or false) capital and artificially (high) prices) - to describe the distorting effects which trade restrictions have on investment in an industry like salt production. Foreign competition is excluded, leading to higher prices for salt within France and over-investment of capital in the salt industry. This in turn leads to the formation of "coalitions" of vested interests which enjoy a near monopoly within France to lobby government for the continuation of the trade restriction.

1282 Armand Marrast was President of the Constituent Assembly between 19 July 1848 and 26 May 1849 when the new Legislative Assembly was elected.

1283 Hippolyte Passy.

1284 See the glossary entry on "Bastiat's Anti-Socialist Pamphlets".

1285 Molinari, Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare; entretiens sur les lois économiques et défense de la propriété (Evenings on Saint Lazarus Street: Conversations about Economic Laws and the Right to Property) (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849). Liberty Fund translation forthcoming.

1286 Molinari, Cours d'économie politique (Bruxelles, 1855). 2nd revised and enlarged edition 1863.

1287 See EH, chapters IV Exchange, VII Capital, XIII Rent.

1288 "Damn Money!" (April 1849), below, pp. 000;"Capital" (mid 1849), below, pp. 000; and"Free Credit" (October 1849 - March 1850), below, pp. 000.

1289 See the glossary entries for "Coquelin," "Fonteyraud," "Garnier," and "Molinari."

1290 Some of his articles on Malthusian population and rent were debated in the monthly meetings of the Political Economy Society and there was not much support for is new ideas. ??

1291 See the glossary entry on "Service for Service." Also the draft sketch on "The Mutual Exchange of Services", below, pp. 000.

1292 See below, pp. 000.

1293 Molinari, Obituary of Bastiat, JDE 1851, p. 193.

1294 Proudhon uses the phrase "mutualité des services" in Lettre à M. Blanqui sur la propriété. Deuxième mémoire (Paris: Prévot, 1841), p. 27; and Système des Contradictions économiques (Guillaumin, 1846), Tome II, "Chap. XI. La Propriété," p. 262-63.

1295 The Abbé de Condillac (1714-80) was a priest, philosopher, economist, and member of the Académie française. Condillac was an advocate of the ideas of John Locke and his book Le Commerce et le gouvernement, considérés relativement l'un a l'autre (1776) appeared in the same year as Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

1296 Henri Storch (1766-1835) was a Russian economist of German origin who was influenced by the writings of Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say. He was noted for his work on the economics of unfree labor (particularly that of serfdom), the importance of moral (human) capital to national wealth, comparative banking, and the greater wealth-producing capacity of industry and commerce compared with agriculture.

1297 See the discussion of Condillac and Storch in Economic Harmonies (FEE edition): Condillac in chap 4 'Exchange," pp. 66 ff.; Storch in chap. 5 "On Value", p. 142 ff.

1298 "Justice and Fraternity" ( JDE, 15 June 1848), CW2, pp. 60-81.

1299 "Justice and Fraternity", CW2, p. 64.

1300 Like the Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, Bastiat thought that economics was based upon a small number of self evident truths, or widely known truths, or as here "truisms." See the Editor's Introduction to "Economic Harmonies IV (Dec. 1848), above, pp. 000.

1301 This is an apocryphal story about the originality of Columbus' "discovery" of the Americas. After his voyages the significance and originality of his feat was challenged by a group of Spanish nobles one night at dinner. One of them pointed out that the Spanish Empire was full of smart people, one of whom would have inevitably done what Columbus had done. Columbus replied to this challenge by asking for an egg to be brought to the table and he challenged his dinner companions to stand the egg on its tip on the dinner table. None could, so Columbus tapped the egg on one end breaking the shell slightly and stood it on its end on the table. The point of the story is that something becomes easy and obvious once somebody has done it for the first time, such as the first voyage to the Americas.

1302 In his "economic tales and stories" Bastiat uses dialogue between characters to make his political and economic points. Sometimes he uses ordinary French names like Jacques or Guillaume; sometimes he uses the names of stock characters like Jacque Bonhomme, the archetypal smart French peasant; and at other times he uses the names of well known figures from French history or popular culture, such as here with Mondor. "Mondor" was the performance name of Philippe Girard who was a 17th century street actor and charlatan.

1303 Here Bastiat is referring to the realisation that he and Molinari had come to during the 1848 Revolution that the classical economists had opened themselves up to socialist criticism because of their hitherto poor defence of private property, interest, and rent.

1304 Proudhon was a leading figure in the French socialist movement in the 1840s. He challenged the legal and moral basis of private property and the justice of interest and rent. He and Bastiat debated these matters in a series of articles in late 1849 and early 1850 in Proudhon's magazine La Voix du Peuple (The Voice of the People), which was later published as a book. See"Free Credit", below, pp. 000.

1305 La Voix du Peuple is the newspaper published by Proudhon after Le Représentant du Peuple was banned in August 1848. See the "Manifeste électorale du Peuple " (No. 4, 8-15 novembre (1848)), pp. 181-93. The passage Bastiat quotes comes from p. 184. Œuvres complètes de P.-J. Proudhon, Tome XVII. Mélanges: articles de journaux, 1848-1852, Volume 1. Articles du Répresentant du peuple. - Articles du Peuple . (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1868). In "The Electoral Manifesto" Proudhon espoused his ideas on the social revolution and the means of achieving it, in particular free credit.

1306 Proudhon uses the expression "Productivité du capital" (the productivity of capital) instead of "the profits of capital" which one might have expected in this context.

1307 Molinari wrote the article on Usury for the DEP . Gustave de Molinari, "Usure," DEP (1853), T. 2, pp. 790-95. See also the following articles written by Bastiat's colleagues which give the standard classical view on these matters and their critique of Proudhon and the other socialists: Charles Coquelin, "Capital," DEP T.1, pp. 273-88; Léon Faucher, "Intérêt," DEP T. 1, pp. 953-70; Hippolyte Passy, "Rente du sol" DEP, T.2, pp. 509-20; and Courcelle Seneuil, "Profit," DEP, T. 2, pp. 454-56.

1308 La Ruche populaire (The Popular Hive]. Première Tribune et Revue Mensuelle rédigée et publiée par des ouvriers sous la direction de François Duquenne. Ouvrier imprimeur. La Ruche populaire was a monthly magazine published between 1839 and 1849 which took a saint-simonian and socialist perspective. It prided itself on being written, edited, and printed by workers, in particular François Duquenne and Jules Vinçard (1796-1879). It also published political songs and poems.

1309 The author of the article Bastiat quotes uses the 18th century word "argentier" which we have translated as banker. However, it must be noted that argentiers were state officials attached to the royal court whose duty it was to provide the court with banking and other money related services. They might also be called "state" or "court bankers".

1310 Théophile Thoré (also known as Thoré-Bürger) (1807-1869) was a French art critic who pioneered the study of Vermeer. He was involved in democratic politics throughout the 1840s. When the 1848 revolution broke out he founded a daily paper called La Vraie République (The True Republic) (it should be noted that the short-lived journal that Bastiat and his friends started in February 1848 was called La République française (The French Republic)) which was soon shut down by the government, and then in March 1849 he began another called Le Journal de la vraie République (the paper of the true republic) which was looted in June 1849 during the riots.

1311 1 écu = 5 francs = 100 sous

1312 Thoré is making the following point about interest. Since 1 écu = 5 francs = 100 sous, at an interest rate of 5% p.a. a bag of 100 francs will contain 5 additional francs after one year. At 5% p.a. compound interest the value of a bag of écus will have doubled in 14.4 years.

1313 We were not able to find the source of this quotation.

1314 An early use of the phrase "tyrannie du capital" can be found in Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail: Association universelle: Ouvriers, Chefs-d'ateliers, Homme de lettres (Administration de librairie, 1841), p. 108: "Il y a mieux : à mesure que notre système se développe, le capital collectif s'accroît; la généralité des travailleurs devient de plus en plus indépendante; les occasions de placement individuel de jour en jour diminuent; la tyrannie du capital est frappée au cœur." (Even better: as our (socialist) system develops, the capital of the collective is increased, the workers become more and more independent, the occasions when workers are employed on a day to day basis are reduced, the tyranny of capital is struck at its very heart."

1315 There may have been personal contact between Proudhon and Bastiat in late 1848 or early 1849 when this article was written but we have no evidence of it. Proudhon had been elected to the Constituent Assembly in the election of 4 June 1848 and served there until May 1849 when he was arrested and jailed. He may have had opportunities to speak to Bastiat who had been elected in April 1848. The most direct confrontation between the two came in late 1849 and early 1850 in the series of articles on rent in Proudhon's magazine la Voix du Peuple and which were published as Gratuité du crédit (Free Credit). Proudhon wrote his articles from prison. See below, pp. 000.

1316 Bastiat uses the word Rent here, "le capital produise une Rente" (capital generates Rent), when it would be more usual to say capital produces a return or a profit in the form of Interest, while ownership of a piece of land produces Rent. It could be that he just means any annual income or return from an investment, whether capital or land. In the 1880 translation of this essay by David A. Wells he substitutes the word "interest" for Bastiat's "rente" as he senses this fact. However, we have chosen to use Bastiat's preferred terminology throughout this essay because during late 1848 and mid 1850 he was working on a new theory of rent and value which challenged some of the core beliefs of classical political economy.

1317 Here Bastiat does use the word "interest."

1318 Bastiat uses the word "rentier" or someone who has a private income or has independent means.

1319 Bastiat is punning again here on there being "no interest in creating interest" on capital.

1320 This is the first and only time Bastiat uses the expression "les exploiteurs des hommes." Normally he would use the term "les spoliateurs" (the plunderers).

1321 Livre III. Des différentes manière dont on acquiert la propriété. Art. 711. "La propriété des biens s'acquiert et se transmet par succession, par donations entre-vifs ou testamentaire, et par l'effet des obligations." (Property in goods is acquired or transferred by succession, by gifts to the living or to one's heirs, and as the result of obligations.) Code civil des français.Édition originale et seule officielle. (Paris: L'Imprimerie de la République. An XII. 1804).

1322 Concerning theft, Bastiat intended writing a book on the "History of Plunder" but did not live to write more than a few sketches and draft chapters. See the glossary entry on "Bastiat's Theory of Plunder."

1323 This is Bastiat's second use of a key phrase "la mutualité des services" (the mutual exchange of services), which was to become so important to Bastiat's theory of exchange and value in the Economic Harmonies . He first used it in the essay "Property and Plunder" (24 June, 1848) the previous year. Wells translates it as "the reciprocity of services" as does Boyers in the FEE translation of Economic Harmonie s.

1324 Later in 1849 Gustave de Molinari addressed many of the objections to inheritance in Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare, especially Soirée no. 4.

1325 Bastiat uses several words for money, such as "numéraire" (cash), "argent" (silver, or more commonly money), and "monnaie" (money). We have translated them all as "money" in this essay as there is no need to distinguish between paper money and gold or silver backed money as there is is some of his other writings.

1326 Here Bastiat is paraphrasing Say's discussion in the Traité d'économie politique , Book I, Chapter XXI "De la nature et l'usage des Monnaies" (On the Nature and use of Money) on how money is the essential intermediary between two exchanges, or as Say states it, "une vente d'abord, et ensuite un achat" (first a sale followed by a purchase), p. 242. Jean Baptiste Say, Traité d'économie politique, ou simple exposition de la manière dont se forment, se distribuent et se consomment les richesses. Sixième édition entièrement revue par l'auteur, et publiée sur les manuscrits qu'il a laissés, par Horace Say , son fils (Paris: Guillaumin, 1841).

1327 Bastiat uses the term "le régime prohibitif" (the prohibitionist regime) which we have translated as "the protectionist regime". There is a difference, as the French government did ban or prohibit the importation of some goods, but "protectionist" is the more general description of this and other attempts to limit or restrict trade.

1328 This saying is the title of one of the Essays of Montaigne, "Le Profit d'un est dommage de l'autre" (One man's gain is another man's loss). Bastiat called this phrase the "classical example of a sophism, the root stock sophism from which comes multitudes of sophisms." See ES3 15, CW3, pp. 341-43 and Essais de Montaigne , vol. 1, chap. 21, "Le Profit d'un est dommage de l'autre" (One man's gain is another man's loss), pp. 130-31.

1329 Bastiat has not quite broken away from the classical school's belief that things of equal utility or objective value are exchanged in a transaction. He does not use the word "égal" (equal) or "égalité" (equality) but rather the word "équivalente" (equivalent) which he applies to services and not physical objects. Furthermore, these services are not objectively valued but are the result of a process of comparison, evaluation, and assessment by each individual who is a party to the transaction. The phrase Bastiat uses is "l'appréciation comparée des deux services" (the comparative evaluation of the two services).

1330 Bastiat in this sentences shows how similar "loyer, fermage, intérêt" (rent for a house, rent for land, interest) were in his mind.

1331 Note that 1 écu = 5 francs = 100 sous.

1332 Although Bastiat rejects the idea that things of equal utility are exchanged he persists in thinking that "equivalent" services are exchanged. The difference between "equal" and "equivalent" is not always clear.

1333 Here Bastiat is explaining the nature of "time preference" whereby a person places a higher value on present consumption than they do on future consumption and therefore requires compensation to forego that present consumption. In Bastiat's terminology, consumption in the present is a different service to consumption in the future.

1334 Such as Proudhon.

1335 Here Bastiat does use the word "égalité de valeur" (equality of value) and not equivalent for the purposes of the following argument.

1336 Bastiat uses the expression "troc pour troc" (to swap or barter one thing for another).

1337 Bastiat uses the expression "la réciprocité des services" which is how FEE translates "la mutualité des services." We however have kept them distinct.

1338 The name "Mathurin" is associated with an order of monks founded in the 12 century by Saint John de Matha to buy back Christian prisoners of the Moors. It was called the "Ordre de la Très Sainte Trinité pour la Rédemption des captifs", also known as the Order of Trinitaires, or Mathurins.

1339 A liter is about 2 pints and a hectoliter (100 litres) is about 2.8 bushels in volume.

1340 Bastiat first used the character of "Mondor" in ES2 6 "To Artisans and Workers" which originally was published in Le Courrier français, 18 September 1846. He was a profligate spendthrift. He used him again in the pamphlet "Damned Money! in April 1849. The character "Mondor" is based upon Philippe Girard, who with his brother Antoine, were street jugglers and tricksters in Paris in the early 17th century who sold patent medicines to passers-by. They wore brightly coloured costumes and entertained passers-by with witty, philosophical, seductive, and sometimes scatalogical songs and dialogue in order to persuade them to buy their merchandise.

1341 Valère was a character in Molière's play L'Avare (The Miser) (1668). Harpagon, the daughter of the miserly moneylender, wants to marry Valère in order to get away from her family.

1342 Jacques Bonhomme. Elsewhere Bastiat described Jacques Bonhomme as "a carpenter like Jesus", in ES2 3 "The Two Axes", CW3, pp. 138-42; and has his own version of Leonard Read's famous "I, Pencil" story about a village carpenter in "Natural and Artificial Organization" (Jan. 1848), below, pp. 000.

1343 Bastiat is referring to a fable by La Fontaine, "La Laitière et le pot au lait" (The Milk Maid and the Pail of Milk) (c. 1678). A milk maid named Perrette carries a full pail of milk balanced on her head to market. As she walks along she dreams of all the things she would buy with the profits of her sale, some chicken eggs to hatch, a brood of chicks to raise and sell, a pig, and a cow. As she day dreamed about her expected profits she lost control of the pail on her head and it fell to the ground, spilling all her milk. Sadly she had to say farewell to the imaginary "cow, calf, pig and brood" she had planned to buy with her profits from her milk sale. Jean de la Fontaine, "La Laitière et le pot au lait" (The Milk Maid and the Pail of Milk), Livre VII, Fable X, Fables et oeuvres diverses de Jean de la Fontaine, avec des notes et une nouvelle notice sur sa vie, par C.A. Walckenaer (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1842), pp. 212-13.

1344 In the moralizing conclusion of the fable, Fontaine refers to the folly of building fantasy castles in Spain. Tis is also possibly another ref. to Don Quixote. See, "Barataria," below, pp. 000.

1345 Bastiat directly addressed the socialists' appeal for "Fraternity" in his article "Justice et fraternité" (Justice and Fraternity) which appeared in the JDE in June 1848 and was later republished as one of his Anti-Socialist Pamphlets. See, "Justice et fraternité" (Justice and Fraternity), JDE , T. XX, 15 June 1848, 310-27] [OC4.4, p. 298] [CW2] and Propriété et Loi. Justice et Fraternité, par M. F. Bastiat, Membre correspondant de l'Institut, Représentant du peuple à l'Assemblée nationale. Extrait du Journal des économistes, nos. du 15 mai et 15 juin, 1848 (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848).

1346 Here Bastiat puns on the word "rabot" (plane) and the phrase "mettre au rebut" (throw something on the scrap heap), thus something like "scrap the scraper."

1347 "Fagotin" was the name of the pet monkey owned by Pierre Datelin (also known as Jean Brioché) (1567-1671) who founded one of the first puppet theatres in Paris around 1650. The monkey was used to amuse the audience as the puppet show unfolded. The theatre was taken over by Pierre's son François and during his stint as puppet master his side-kick Fagotin was immortalized by being on the receiving end of the famous swordsman, free-thinker, and poet Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) who ran him through with his sword for making faces at him. Fagotin was also used as a character in Molière's Tartuffe (Act II, scene 4) and La Fontaine's "La Cour de lion" (Book VII, Fable 7). See also Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy, "Combat de Cyrano de Bergerac avec le singe de Brioché, au bout du Pont-Neuf" (1704), in Variétés historiques et littéraires, recueil de pièces volantes rares et curieuses en prose et en vers, revues et annotées par M. Édouard Fournier (Paris: P. Jannet, 1855). Tome I, p. 277-87.

1348 See also the 8 th letter in the debate between Bastiat and Proudhon in Free Credit , below, pp. 000.

1349 "Les actions humaines," see the glossary entry on "Human Action."

1350 On the important part that leisure played in human lives, see his moving "reflection on leisure" in Letter 4 of "Free Credit," below, pp. 000.

1351 Bastiat uses the metaphor of a clock to describe the functioning of "the social mechanism," with its wheels, springs, and movement (or driving force) (rouage, ressort, mobile). See the glossary on "The Social Mechanism."

1352 Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1726) was an English physicist and mathematician who made important contributions to gravitation, classical mechanics, optics, and calculus; François Fénelon (1651-1715) was the Archbishop of Cambrai and tutor to the young duke of Burgundy, the grandson of Louis XIV. He wrote Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699) which was a thinly veiled satire of the reign of Louis XIV and a critique of the notion of the divine right of kings.; Blaise Pascal (1623-62) was a French mathematician and philosopher whose best-known work, Pensées (Thoughts), appeared posthumously.

1353 Most likely Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (1749-1827). See the glossary entry on "Laplace." Bastiat uses the word "discordance" (disharmony) which he often paired with its opposite "harmonie" (harmony). See the glossary entry on "Harmony and Disharmony."

1354 "Social Harmonies" was one of the early working titles Bastiat gave to his planned multi-volume work of social theory. The first volume was to have been on the harmony which can be found in peaceful social, political, legal, and private activities of all kinds. The second volume on the harmony which can be found in peaceful economic activities. The third, and possibly fourth volumes, would deal with the "disharmonies" which were introduced into these peaceful harmonies by "disturbing factors" such as the plunder and exploitation which is produced by slavery, war, protectionism, regulation, and socialism.

1355 See above pp. 000 where Bastiat quotes Say.

1356 The phrase "le débat libre et contradictoire (free and open negotiation), or more commonly just "le libre débat" (free negotiation), was crucial to Bastiat's understanding of how the market worked in a free and cooperative fashion in the absence of coercion.

1357 Since an écu was worth 5 francs he is referring to an annual interest rate of 5%.

1358 See Damned Money! (April, 1849), below, pp. 000.

1359 See the 10 th letter in the debate between Bastiat and Proudhon, Free Credit, below, pp. 000.

1360 Bastiat provides here an interesting discussion of the subjective nature of value and is another example of his movement away from the classical Smithian and Ricardian theory of value based upon objective notions of the amount of labour embodied in a good or its absolute utility. For Bastiat, the value of a good to an individual depends upon their circumstances, their changing preferences, and the relative scarcity of the good supplied.

1361 "Ceteris paribus" is a Latin expression commonly used in economics. It means "all other things being equal." Bastiat was the first among the economists in the Guillaumin network to use the phrase. Jean-Baptiste Say used it in his Cours complet d'économie politique (1826-28) and McCulloch used it in his Principles of Political Economy (???) . Bastiat seems to have introduced it into French economic thinking in the late 1840s. See the glossary entry on "Ceteris paribus."

1362 For the differentiation between the various elements of interest, see the final pages of the 12 th letter in the debate between Bastiat and Proudhon, Free Credit . Here Bastiat states: "What one commonly calls interest comprises three components which are often confused: 1. Interest properly understood, which is payment for the delay (in being reimbursed), or the price of time; 2. the costs of (putting money into) circulation; and 3. an insurance premium." Below, pp. 000.

1363 Elsewhere Bastiat distinguishes between the Malthusian notion of "the means of subsistance," which is the bare minimum needed for physical survival, and "the means of existence," by which he meant something more like the modern idea of the "standard of living". Bastiat rejected the idea that the poor were condemned to hovering just above or just below the means of subsistance. The productivity of the free market, if it were unshackled from its protectionist chains and high levels of taxation, would dramatically raise the standard of living of all people.

1364 Here Bastiat switches from using terms like "ouvriers" (workers) and "travailleurs" (labourers) to using the socialist-inspired term "prolétaires" (proletarians or proletarian class).

1365 Bastiat uses the expression "le mécanisme of gouvernement."

1366 See the glossary entry on "The Political Clubs."

1367 Disappointed with the poor showing of the socialists in the election of April 1848, supporters of Louis Blanc protested in the streets of Paris on 15 May, invaded en masse and with guns the Chamber of Deputies while it was sitting, paraded Louis Blanc on their shoulders around the Chamber while they demanded the formation of a new government. Bastiat was in the Chamber when this happened. The protesters were arrested and the Chamber attempted to deprive Blanc of his parliamentary privileges so he too could be tried and deported. Bastiat was one of the few Deputies to vote against legal action against Blanc on account of the action of some of his supporters.

1368 Léon Say, the son of Horace Say (a friend of bastiat's) and grandson of Jean-Baptiste Say, wrote a report for the Chamber of Commerce of Paris on the state of industry in Paris and the Department of the Seine in October 1848: Chambre de commerce de Paris. Enquête sur l'industrie de Paris et du département de la Seine. Instruction générale. (Signé: Les secrétaires adjoints de la commission de statistique, Léon Say, Natalis Rondot. [1er octobre.]) Paris: P. Dupont, 1848).

1369 Here Bastiat reverts to the non-socialist word "Ouvriers".

1370 See the essay "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (Jan. 1848), below, pp. 000.

1371 Louis Napoléon was overwhelmingly elected the first President of the Second Republic on December 10-11, 1848 with 5.5 million votes out of 7.5 million or 74%. He appointed Odilon Barrot as head of his government on December 20 and one of their first legislative acts in the new year was a proposal by Jean-Pierre Lamotte-Rateau on January 12, 1849 to dissolve the Constituent Assembly immediately, and call for new elections for a Legislative Assembly to be held in March. The winding up of the Constituent Assembly would remove the power of the republicans and cement that of the Party of Order which had formed around Louis Napoléon.

1372 Jean-Pierre Lamotte-Rateau (1800-1887) was a lawyer, a member of the general Council of Bordeaux, and a conservative opponent of the restored Bourbon Monarchy during the 1820s. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 and voted with the conservatives. He is best known for introducing the "Rateau proposal" to the Chamber on January 12, 1849 after the election of Louis Napoléon as President the previous December to dissolve the Constituent Assembly immediately, and call for new elections for a Legislative Assembly to be held in March.

1373 Victor Ambroise, vicomte de Lanjuinais (1802-1869) was a lawyer, liberal politician representing la Loire-Inférieure, and friend of Alexis de Tocqueville. In the Second Republic he was the Secretary of the Finance Committee of which Bastiat was Vice-President. He supported Rateau's proposal and was later appointed Minister of Commerce and Agriculture in Odilon Barrot's government.

1374 Pierre Duplan (1806-1878) was elected a Deputy representing Cher during the Second Republic and voted with the moderate left.

1375 Émile Péan (1809-1871) was a journalist for the National during the July Monarchy and was Mayor of the 4th Arrondissement of Paris in February 1848. He was later elected Deputy representing Loiret between 1848-51 and voted with the moderate left.

1376 Louis-Antoine Pagès (Garnier-Pagès) (1803-1878) was a republican politician during the July Monarchy and became active in the political banquets campaign against Louis Philippe's government in 1847-48 which ultimately led to his overthrow in February 1848. He became part of the Provisional Government which replaced the July Monarchy. Steps he took early in the regime, as Minister of Finance, to stabilise the government's finances, such as restricting access to bank notes, a compulsory "patriotic loan", and the much hated "45 centimes tax" were never forgiven by the electorate.

1377 Adolphe Augustin Marie Billault (1805-1863) was lawyer and then a moderate liberal politician who represented la Loire-Inférieure. During the July Monarchy he served as Under-Secretary of State for Agriculture and Commerce in Thiers' second ministry. he served as a deputy in both the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies in the Second Republic.

1378 Hippolyte Passy.

1379 Alexandre Quentin Bauchart (1809-1887) was a magistrate, a member of the General Council of Aisne, and then elected representative of the Department of l'Aisne 1848-1851. He supported Louis Napoléon and was appointed a Councillor of State in January 1852.

1380 Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850). See the glossary on "Peel."

1381 Léon Faucher.

1382 Horace Say.

1383 See the glossary entry on "Hovyn deTranchère."

1384 Louis Wolowski.

1385 Augustin-Charles Renouard (1794-1878) was a lawyer, politician, and wrote on intellectual property rights. He was elected in 1831 to represent la Somme, was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1837, and made a peer of France in 1846. Renouard was also one of the vice-presidents of the Political Economy Society and became a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1861.

1386 Hippolyte Dussard (1798-1876) was a journalist, essayist, and economist. He edited the JDE 1843-45 and was a co-editor with Eugène Daire of the Works of Turgot for the Collection des Principaux Économistes published by Guillaumin. Dussard was also a businessman involved with the Paris to Rouen railway, and during the Second Republic he was appointed the prefect of la Seine-Inférieure and was elected to the Council of State.

1387 Joseph Garnier.

1388 Alexandre Anisson du Péron (1776-1852) was the Director of the Imperial Printing Service 1809-14 and then the Royal Printing Service 1815-23. He was a Deputy during the July Monarchy, President of the General Council of Puy-de-DIome in 1840, and was made of Peer of France in 1844. he was a founding member of the French Free trade Association and one of its Vice-Presidents.

1389 Louis Leclerc.

1390 Gustave du Puynode (1817-1898?) was a doctor of law and barrister at the Royal Court of Paris. He wrote articles and books on property rights, labour law, freedom of education, slavery in the French colonies, the history of economic thought, money and credit, and financial crises. Several of his books were published by Guillaumin and his articles appeared in the JDE and the DEP, most notably articles on "Le communisme", JDE, 1 April 1848, pp. 25-36; "De la centralisation," JDE , 15 July 1848, T. 20, pp. 409-18 and JDE , 1 August 1848, T. 21, pp. 16-24.; "Fermiers généraux," DEP, vol. 1, pp. 766-67; "Crédit public," DEP, vol. 1, pp. 508-25.

1391 We do not have any information about him.

1392 "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" (March 1849), in CW2, pp. 366-400.

1393 "To the Electors of the Department of Les Landes" (Nov. 1830), in CW1 pp. 341-52; "On the Influence on Liberty of the Eligibility of Deputies for Public Office" (c. 1840) in CW1, pp. 459-63; a letter to the editor of La Sentinelle des Pyrénées (21 and 25 March, 1843) in CW1, pp. 452-54; and"A Letter to M. Larnac, Deputy for Les Landes" (c. 1846) in CW1, pp. 367-86.

1394 See "A Few Words about the Title of our Journal" (26 Feb, 1848), above, pp. 000.

1395 See his letter to the editor of La Sentinelle des Pyrénées (21 and 25 March, 1843) in CW1, pp. 452-54.

1396 "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" (March, 1849), CW2, p. 369.

1397 "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" (March, 1849), CW2, p. 382.

1398 "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" (1843), CW1, p. 452.

1399 "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" (March, 1849), CW2, p. 369.

1400 "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" (March, 1849), CW2, p. 368.

1401 Armand Marrast was President of the Constituent Assembly between 19 July 1848 and 26 May 1849 when the new Legislative Assembly was elected.

1402 "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" (March 1849), in CW2, pp. 366-400. As pamphlet (Guillaumin, 1849).

1403 François Rose Joseph Degousée (1795-1862) was a military officer, civil engineer, and politician. He was active in the liberal Carbonari group which opposed the policies of the restored Bourbon monarchy during the 1820s, served with General Lafayette during the "Three Glorious Days" in 1830 when Charles X was overthrown by Louis Philippe, and helped found the Central Democratic Committee which organised political banquets to oppose Louis Philippe's regime in 1847. Degousée was elected to the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 representing la Sarthe, voted with the moderate republican group, and was a member of the Public Works Committee of the Chamber. He was not reelected in May 1849 and retired from politics.

1404 CRANC, vol. 8, p. 507.

1405 Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) was a poet and statesman and as an immensely popular romantic poet, he used his talent to promote liberal ideas. Lamartine was elected Deputy representing Nord (1833-37), Saône et Loire (1837-Feb. 1848), Bouches-du-Rhône (April 1848-May 1849), and Saône et Loire (July 1849- Dec. 1851). He was a member of the Provisional Government in February 1848 and Minister of Foreign Affairs in June 1848. After he lost the presidential elections of December 1848 against Louis-Napoléon, he gradually retired from political life and went back to writing.

1406 Adolphe Augustin Marie Billault (1805-1863) was a lawyer and politician. He was a Municipal Councillor of the city of Rennes 1831-37, Deputy for la Loire-Inférieure 1837-48, and active in the political banquets movement in 1847-48. During the Second Republic he was elected as Deputy for la Loire-Inférieure in April 1848 but failed to be reelected in May 1849. He voted with the moderate republicans. He became active in politics again under Louis Naploéon when he was elected to the Corps Législative of which he was later appointed President, then Minister of the Interior. In his political and economic views he was anti-clerical and a follower of Saint-Simon.

1407 See Letter 130 to Courdroy (Paris, 15 March 1849), CW1, pp. 187-88.

1408 CRANC, vol. 8, pp. 507-9.

1409 Armand Marrast was President of the Constituent Assembly between 19 July 1848 and 26 May 1849 when the new Legislative Assembly was elected.

1410 Bernard Edme Victor Etienne Lefranc (1809-1883) was a fellow Landais citizen like Bastiat and was elected Deputy in the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 (topping the list of 7 candidates, Bastiat came second) and to the Legislative Assembly in May 1849. He studied law and became a judge at Mont-de-Marsan near where Bastiat lived in Les Landes, so they would have known each other. Lefranc was one of the leading figures in the liberal movement in Les Landes which opposed King Louis Philippe during the July Monarchy. His opposition to Louis Napoléon forced him to withdraw from politics and take up his legal practice again. During the Third Republic he returned to politics, becoming Minister of the Agriculture and Commerce (1871-72), Minister of the Interior (1872), and then Senator for life (1881-83).

1411 Jean-Baptiste-Adolphe Charras (1810-1865) was a solider and politician. As a young man he got into trouble for singing "La Marseillaise" and making a toast to General La Fayette. He later took part in the "Three Glorious Days in July 1830 which brought Louis Philippe to power. After he was sent to the Paris garrison in 1834 he became involved in liberal politics writing articles for Le National on military matters. After serving for several years in Algeria he returned after the February Revolution and was appointed an under-secretary in the Department of War in the Provisional Government. He was elected a Deputy representing Puy-de-Dôme and voted with the moderate republicans. He was reelected in May 1849. His total opposition to the increasingly authoritarian policies of Louis Napoleon led to his arrest after his coup d'état in 2 December 1851 and exile in Belgium.

1412 Alexandre Polangie de Rancé (1798-1880) was an army officer and Deputy representing l'Eure (1834-1837) and then Algeria (1848-1851). He voted with the conservative right.

1413 Vincent Paul Marie Casimir Audren de Kerdrel (1815-1899) was a descendant of an ancient Norman noble family. He was a politician who was elected Deputy representing Ille-et-Vilaine (1848-51) but withdrew from politics after the Louis Napoléon's coup d'état.He later returned to politics in the Third Republic where he served as a Deputy and then Senator for life.

1414 Achille, comte Baraguey d'Hilliers (1795-1878) was a distinguished soldier, having served in the conquest of Algeria in 1830. In 1834 he was appointed deputy governor of the Saint-Cyr military academy and full governor in 1836. After serving again in Africa he was promoted to full general and then Inspector General of the Infantry in 1847. During the Second Republic he was elected Deputy representing the Department of Doubs in eastern France. He voted with the conservative right.

1415 Bastiat has a long discussion of the destructiveness of British party politics in his pamphlet "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest," CW2, pp. 382-88. He also criticises the oligarchy which controlled Britain in his "Introduction" to Cobden and the League (1845).

1416 As a member of the General Council of Les Landes for many years bastiat has some personal experience of how they function. He discusses how they would be disrupted if they were run the same way as was being proposed for the Chamber in CW2, pp. 379-81.

1417 That of the July Monarchy under King Louis Philippe in February 1848.

1418 The 1848 Constitution did not provide any means for resolving a conflict between the president of the republic and the Assembly. The president could not dissolve the Assembly; the Assembly could not overthrow the president (short of extraordinary circumstances). President Louis Napoléon solved this problem in December 1851 by seizing power in a coup d'état.

1419 The elections for the new Legislative Assembly would be held in May 1849 and bring an end to the Constituent Assembly.

1420 Edmond Charlemagne (1795-1872) was a judge and magistrate. He was elected to represent l'Indre during the July Monarchy where he voted with the Legitimist opposition (i.e pro-Bourbon). During the Second Republic he had switched sides and was elected Deputy of l'Indre in April 1848 voting with the moderate republicans, and then reelected in June 1849 where he voted with the centre right. He supported Louis Napoléon's coup d'état of 1851 and was appointed Councillor of State in the new regime.

1421 CRANC, vol. 8, pp. 513-14.

1422 Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869). See the glossary on "Lamartine."

1423 The Girondins were a group of liberal-minded and moderate republican deputies and their supporters within the Legislative Assembly (1791-92) and National Convention (1792-95), in the early phase of the French Revolution. They got their name from the fact that many of the deputies came from the Gironde region in southwest France, near the major port city of Bordeaux. They were defeated politically by the radical Jacobins in May 1793 and many were executed in late 1793, such as Jacques Pierre Brissot (1754-1793), Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud (1753-1793), Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), and Étienne Clavière (1735-1793). Lamartine wrote an 8 volume History of the Girondins in 1847.

1424 Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau (1715-1789) was a soldier as well as a diplomat, journalist, and author who spent time in prison or in exile. His economic thinking was influenced by the Physiocrats. During the French Revolution he became a noted orator and was elected to the estates-general in 1789 representing Aix and Marseilles. In his political views he was an advocate of constitutional monarchy along the lines of Great Britain. He is noted for his Essai sur le despotisme (1776) and several works on banking and foreign exchange.

1425 A reference to the August reforms of 1789 which were issued by the National Assembly between 4-11 August effectively destroying the "feudal order" of the old regime.

1426 By circulating his pamphlet.

1427 In his pamphlet he describes journalism and public opinion as "the outer works" which have to be overrun if the "fort" (the Chamber) is to be taken in "the war for portfolios": "Warlike masses are everywhere; only their leaders remain in the Chamber. They know that, in order to reach the body of the fort, they have to start by conquering the outer works—journalism, popularity, public opinion, and electoral majorities." In CW2, p. 394.

1428 Jacques André Manuel (1791-1857) was an army officer under Napoleon and then a banker during the Restoration of the monarchy. He was elected a Deputy representing la Nièvre (1839-1848) and opposed the July Monarchy. During the Second Republic he was a deputy representing la Nièvre (1848-1851) and voted with the conservative right and was a supporter of Louis Napoléon. Under the Second Empire he was a Senator 1852-1857.

1429 Hyacinthe Camille Odilon Barrot (1791-1873) was President of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister) between 20 Dec. 1848 and 31 October 1849, Minister of Justice, and a leading figure in "the Party of Order."

1430 CRANC, vol. 8, pp. 542-44.

1431 Jean-Bernard Sarrans (1796-1874) was a journalist, historian, and politician. He was elected Deputy representing l'Aude in April 1848, was a member of the Chamber's Foreign Affairs Committee, and voted with the left.

1432 Jacques Culmann (1787-1849) was a retired colonel in the French artillery. He was a Deputy representing Bas-Rhin (1848-1849).

1433 Jean Saint-Gaudens (1799-1875) was a lawyer who opposed the July Monarchy. He was elected Deputy representing Basses-Pyrénées (1848-1849).

1434 In his pamphlet Bastiat is more explicit about how the lust for political power drives men to form political coalitions. He states that his premise is that "Men love power" (CW2, p. 377) and that they have "a thirst for power and perhaps worse, a thirst for riches" (CW2, p. 393).

1435 Bastiat uses the medical expression "solution de continuité" which is the same one he used in ES1 17 "The Negative Railway" (c. 1845) which also suffered an embarrassing "fracture." See CW3, pp. 81-83

1436 In his unpublished paper "On the Influence on Liberty of the Eligibility of Deputies for Public Office (early 1840s) (CW1, pp. 459-63) Bastiat uses one of his clever dialogues about how a King should run his Chamber of Deputies if he wanted to maintain control over it. He would need two articles in the constitution, one which said that "The King decides all appointments" and another which said "Deputies are eligible for all posts." The King concludes that "I would have to be very clumsy or human nature of surpassing sophistication if, given these two lines in the Charter, I were not master of the parliament." Quote, p. 461.

1437 In 1831 Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt challenged Ottoman rule of Syria by invading the country and settling it with Egyptian peasants and soldiers. In 1839 a war broke out between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire over control of Syria and in the Treaty of London of 1841 the European powers forced Muhammed Ali of Egypt to withdraw and return control to the Ottomans.

1438 Louis Napoléon.

1439 Joseph de Villèle (1773-1854) was an Ultra Royalist during the Restoration and was Prime Minister and Minister of Finance 1821-28. Under his rule opposition groups were muzzled by strict censorship laws, the Chamber was stacked with new Peers created by the King, and 1 billion francs was set aside to reimburse aristocrats for property taken from them during the Revolution. His political reaction was a major cause of the Revolution of 1830 which saw the Bourbon King Charles X overthrown by Louis Philippe.

1440 François Pierre Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874) was Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1840 and 1848, and was appointed Prime Minister in September 1847 just in time to spark the Febraury 1848 Revolution by banning the political banquets protest movement.

1441 George II of Great Britain (1683–1760); George III (1738-1820) was King of Great Britain and Ireland from 1760-1801 and then King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death in 1820.

1442 Bastiat uses the phrase "le gouvernement à bon marché" which was one of the slogans of the French Free Trade Association and was used on the banner of their magazine Le Libre-Échange .

1443 CRANC, vol. 8, pp. 546.

1444 Adolphe Augustin Marie Billault (1805-1863).

1445 See below, pp. 000.

1446 See, CRANC, vol. 9, 613 and Charles Louvet, Rapport fait, au nom du Comité des finances, sur la proposition de M. Pierre Leroux ayant pour but de faire rembourser par l'Etat à ses créanciers le sixième de la dette consolidée, soit un milliard environ, en papier de circulation, dit bons d'impôt, par M. Louvet, Séance du 14 avril 1849 (Impr. de l'Assemblée nationale, 1849).

1447 Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée Nationale. Exposés des motifs et projets de lois présentés par le gouvernement; Rapports de MM. les Représentants. Tome cinquième. Du 21 Octobre au 30 Novembre 1848. (Paris: Imprimerie de l'Assemblée Nationale (1850). Séance du 24 Octobre 1848, pp. 79-82.

1448 Léon Faucher, Rapport fait, au nom du Comité des finances, sur la proposition du citoyen Pougeard, tendant à remplacer l'impôt extraordinaire de 45 centimes, l'impôt sur les créances hypothécaires et l'impôt sur les successions, par un emprunt forcé de deux cents millions, payable, soit en argent, soit en effets ayant cours de monnaie, par le citoyen Faucher (Léon), Séance du 29 août 1848 (Impr. de l'Assemblée nationale, 1849).

1449 Adolphe Thiers, Rapport fait au nom du Comité des Finances, sur la proposition du citoyen Proudhon, relative à la réorganisation de l'impôt et du crédit: Séance du 26 juillet 1848 (Impr. de l'Assemblée nationale, 1849).

1450 Bastiat, Rapport fait au nom du Comité des Finances, sur le décret relatif au crédit de 2 millions pour secours extraordinaires aux citoyens du département de la Seine qui se trouvent dans le besoin, par le citoyen F. Bastiat, Séance du 9 août 1848 (Impr. de l'Assemblée nationale, 1849).

1451 Molinari, Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare (1849). Translation forthcoming by Liberty Fund.

1452 Achille Fould (1800–1867) was a banker and a deputy who represented the département of Les Hautes-Pyrénées in 1842 and La Seine in 1849. He was close to Louis-Napoléon, lending him money before he became emperor, and then served as Minister of Finance, first during the Second Republic and then under the Second Empire (1849–67). Fould was an important part of the imperial household, serving as an adviser to the emperor, especially on economic matters. He was an ardent free trader but was close to the Saint–Simonians on matters of banking.

1453 Achille Fould, Plus d'assignats. Opinion de M. Achille Fould, sur la situation financière (Paris?: Claye et Taillefer, 1848).

1454 In David Wells' 1877 translation this phrase is translated more coyly as "Hateful money!"

1455 Bastiat is referring to the Finance Committee's Report to the Chamber on 14 April 1849 which was very critical of a proposal put forward by the socialist Pierre Leroux to have the state reimburse some of its creditors the sum of one billion francs with paper money.

1456 In his Sixth Meditation on "Despair" Alphonse de Lamartine writes "Un Brutus, qui, mourant pour la vertu qu'il aime, Doute au dernier moment de cette vertu même, et dit: Tu n'es qu'un nom!" … (A Brutus, who, dying for the virtue which he loves, doubts at the very last moment even this virtue, and says "You are only a name…") Méditations poétique. Troisième édition (Paris: Librairie Grecque-Latine-Allemande, 1820), p. 27.

1457 Croesus (595-547 BC) was King of Lydia until he was defeated and captured by the Persians. His name was synonymous with great wealth. The river Pactolus ran through the Lydian city of Sardis and gold was mined from the river silt thus providing the ore to make the gold coins for which Croesus was famous. He made a name for himself in the ancient world with generous gifts to Greek temples such as the rebuilding of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

1458 Fénelon relates in one his Fables ("VII. L'Anneau de Cygès") numerous stories about Croesus's love of sumptuously made chariots. Callimachus describes one chariot used by Croesus and his Queen which was made of pure silver and decorated with luxurious sculptures in which they liked to ride about discussing matters of state. Another story concerns the sometimes reckless behaviour of the King who liked to have the teeth and claws of lions, tigers, and leopards filed down and then harnessed to chariots made of tortoise shell with silver decorations. These wild animals were used to amuse members of the Court by the staging of chariot races through the neighbouring forest along the river, presumably where onlookers who were too close might get splattered with mud. Oeuvres de Fénelon, archevéque de Cambrai, précédées d'études sur sa vie, par M. Aimé-Martin . Tome deuxième. (Paris: Didot fréres, 1838), pp. 520-21.

1459 The brothers Antoine and Philippe Girard were actors, jugglers, and sellers of patent medicines in Paris in the early 17th century. Antoine Girard played the part of "Tabarin" and Philippe Girard played the part of his master "Mondor." They wore brightly coloured costumes and entertained passers-by with witty, philosophical, seductive, and sometimes scatalogical songs and dialogue in order to persuade them to buy their merchandise. Their routine was much admired and copied and become known as "les tabarinades" (or "coq-à-l'âne" i.e. cock and bull stories).

1460 Zoilus (c. 400-320 B.C.) was a Greek grammarian and philosopher who lived in Thrace. He was a renowned critic of the poetry of Homer and got a reputation for harsh even slanderous criticism of authors.

1461 "ABC" falsely believes "F" is like the other socialist planners and dreamers who want to "reorganise" society to make it an "artificial organisation" and that he wants to be the "Legislator" who will create and plan that new society. Bastiat puns here by using the term "the F* system " which refers to the "système fourieriste" which the socialist Charles Fourier dreamed up where individuals would live and work in common based upon units known as "phalasteries." See the glossary entries on "Fourier," "Phalanstery," and "The Social Mechanism," as well as the Editor's Introduction to "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (Jan 1848), above, pp. 000.

1462 To classical liberals like Bastiat Spartan society would have seemed like a form of militarized socialism where citizens were banned from engaging in any form of manual productive work (this was left to the slave-like Helots) and where the only form of currency permitted until the 3rd century BC were impractical iron bars worn as brooches. The Economists believed that the socialist and communist ideas of their own day had their origins in the ancient Greek and Roman world as Alfred Sudre (1820-1902) makes clear in Histoire du communisme ou Réfutation historique des utopies socialistes (Paris: Victor Lecou, 1848), Chap. II "Le communisme de Lacédémonie et de la Crète," pp. 6-17.

1463 Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-65) was a political theorist, considered to be the father of anarchism. Like Bastiat he was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848. He is best known for Qu'est-ce que la propriété? Ou recherches sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement (1841). His controversy with Bastiat on the subject appears in in the form of letters between Bastiat and Proudhon, "Free Crdit,"below, pp. 000. See the glossary entry on "Proudhon."

1464 The "sou" is an ancient French coin which dates back to the Roman Empire. Originally called the "solidus" its name gradually changed over time into "soldus," "solt" (11th century), "sol" (12-18th centuries), and then "sou," a name which was retained after the decimalization currency reforms of 1795 at which time the sou was worth 1/20th of a franc or one 5 centime coin.

1465 Proudhon lobbied the Constituent Assembly in 1848 to set up a "Banque d'échange" (Echange Bank) which would offer zero interest loans to workers. When this came to nothing he attempted to found his own "Banque du Peuple" (The Peoples' Bank) in early 1849 by selling subscriptions to share holders. This too failed very quickly.

1466 Diogenes (413-327 BC) was a Greek philosopher who renounced wealth and lived by begging from others and sleeping in a barrel in the market place. His purpose was to live simply and virtuously by giving up the conventional desires for power, wealth, prestige, and fame. His philosophy went under the name of Cynicism and had an important influence on the development of Stoicism.

1467 Lucius Annaeus Seneca (ca. 4 BC – AD 65) was a Roman Stoic philosopher who was the tutor and an advisor to Emperor Nero. He advocated leading a simple life and the acceptance of one's fate in life. He committed suicide when ordered to by Nero who accused him of plotting against him.

1468 Bastiat makes several references to Legislators who attempted to found societies based upon their own notions of what was right and proper for their citizens to do. See the long footnote in "Barataria" for a discussion of Minos, Lycurgus of Sparta, Solon of Athens, and Numa of Rome. The "Economist F*" plays a game with the character "ABC" by encouraging him to act if he were such a Rousseauian Legislator who could introduce whatever economic legislation he liked in order to achieve his goals.

1469 This is an amusing reversal of the situation in ES2 11 "The Utopian" where a "utopian" free market politician much like Bastiat is offered the position of Prime Minister by the King with the power to introduce any political and economic reforms he would like. "The Utopian" therefore sets out to radically reform French society but pulls back at the last moment. See ES2 11 "The Utopian" CW3, pp. 187-98. See also "Barataria where Sancho is made king of the island and refuses to induce the socialist policies advocated by Don Quixote. See below, pp. 000

1470 See the footnotes on Bacon and Montaigne below.

1471 The "écu" was a French coin which had its origins in the medieval period. Its main design feature was an image of a shield ("bouclier") hence its name. It began as a gold coin with a value of 3 Livres but after the reign of Louis XIII it became a silver coin worth 60 sols and was called the "écu blanc" (white écu). During the monetary reforms of the French Revolution (1795) a silver coin worth 5 francs was created and it kept the name écu until further reforms were introduced in 1878.

1472 Bastiat criticised the idea of the "balance of trade" and mercantilist trade policies on several occasions. See for example, "On the Export of Gold Bullion" (12 Dec. 1847), above, pp. 000; and "The Balance of Trade" (29 March 1850), below, pp. 000.

1473 In ES2 7 "A Chinese Tale" Bastiat describes the Custom Service as an "army of managers, deputy managers, inspectors, deputy inspectors, controllers, checkers, customs collectors, heads, deputy heads, agents, supernumeraries, aspiring supernumeraries and those aspiring to become aspirants, not counting those on active service." Horace Say also calls those who work for the Customs Service "une armée considérable" (a sizable army) which numbered 27,727 individuals (1852 figures). This army is composed of two "divisions" - one of administrative personnel (2,536) and the other of "agents on active service" (24,727). See ES2 7 "A Chinese Tale," CW3, pp. 163-67; quote on p. 164; and Horace Say, "Douane", DEP, vol. 1, pp. 578-604 (figures from p. 597).

1474 In his "Introduction" to Cobden and the League (1845) Bastiat demonstrates the links between protection, taxes, colonialism, war, and the aristocracy in an 8 point list. See CW6 (forthcoming).

1475 See below for a discussion of Montaigne's quote.

1476 Bastiat used the phrase "numéraire fictif" (imaginary or false money).

1477 Bastiat paraphrases a line from Bacon's essay "Of Seditions and Troubles": "It is likewise to be remembered, that, forasmuch as the increase of any estate must be upon the foreigner, (for whatsoever is somewhere gotten is somewhere lost,) there be but three things which one nation selleth unto another; the commodity as nature yieldeth it; the manufacture; and the vecture or carriage. So that if these three wheels go, wealth will flow as in a spring tide." The following paragraph also has a line which would have interested Bastiat in the context of his discussion of money: "Above all things good policy is to be used, that the treasure and monies in a state be not gathered into few hands. For, otherwise, a state may have a great stock, and yet starve. And money is like muck, not good, except it be spread." See Essays, Moral, Economical, and Political. By Francis bacon, Baron of Verulam, and Viscount of St. Albans. A New Edition, withy the Latin quotations translated. To which are now added his apothegms, select sentences, Christian paradoxes, confession of faith, and essay on death. (Boston: William Hillard, 1833). "Of Seditions and Troubles," pp. 49-57. The quote is on p. 54.

1478 Bastiat wrote a draft of an Economic Sophism he planned to write on Montaigne's maxim which he described as the "standard sophism, one that is the very root of a host of sophisms." See ES3 15 "Le profit de l'un est le dommage de l'autre" (One Man's gain is another Man's Loss) (c. 1847), CW3, pp. 341-43. Michel de Montaigne, Essais de Montaigne, suivis de sa correspondance et de la servitude voluntaire d'Estienne de la Boëtie. Édition variorum, accompangné d'une notice biographique de notes historiques, philologiques, etc. et d'un index analytique par Charles Louandre (Paris: Charpentier, 1862), Tome 1, chapter XXI "Le profit d'un et dommage de l'autre," pp. 130-31. See the glossary entry on "Montaigne." The French editor Louandre notes that Montaigne is commenting on a passage from Seneca's de Beneficiis , VI, 38. He also notes that Rousseau expressed similar views in Émile , Book III: "dans l'état social le bien de l'un fair nécessairement le mal d'autre."

1479 Shem, Ham and Japheth were the sons of Noah. Genesis 10:1.

1480 The California gold rush had began with the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in January 1848 and the hundreds of thousands of gold seekers who flocked to the gold fields were known as the "forty niners" (1849). At this time California was not yet a state in the Union (it was admitted in September 1850) and was occupied by the U.S. following the Mexican-American War 1846-1848.

1481 Bastiat uses the phrase "toutes choses égales d'ailleurs" (all other things being equal). See the glossary entry "Ceteris paribus."

1482 A similar argument is made in the sophism ES1 11 "Nominal Prices," (October 1845), CW3, pp. 61-64.

1483 King Midas was ruler of the Greek kingdom of region Phrygia (in modern day Turkey) sometime in the 8th century BC. According to legend he had the power to turn into gold anything he touched. Aristotle wrote that this Golden Touch backfired and Midas died of starvation because all the food he picked up to put in his mouth turned into inedible gold. Another legend says that he eventually got bored and disillusioned with this power and retired to the country where he fell in love with Pan's flute music. In a competition between Pan and Apollo to see who played the best music King Midas chose Pan's flute over Apollo's lyre. Apollo was so incensed at the tin ears of Midas he turned them into the ears of a donkey. See Bastiat's use of this latter version of the story in ES2 9 "Theft by Subsidy" (January 1846), CW3, pp. 170-79.

1484 Bastiat is describing here a version of the theory of the multiplier effect.

1485 See the glossary entry on "Service for Service."

1486 See Bastiat's ES1 13 on the supposed opposition between "Theory and Practice," CW3, pp. 69-75.

1487 The "Hôtel des Monnaies" is on the quai de Conti in the 6th Arrondissement in Paris and was constructed in the 18th century to house the Paris Mint ("la Monnaie de Paris") and the Museum of Money.

1488 The National Printing Works (L'Imprimerie nationale) is located on the Rue de la Convention, 15th Arrondissement in Paris. It was founded as the Manufacture royale d'imprimerie by Cardinal Richelieu in 1640.

1489 Assignat was the name given to the paper currency issued by the National Assembly between 1789 and 1796. They were originally issued as bonds based upon the value of the land confiscated from the church ("biens national") and were intended to pay off the national debt. Later they became legal tender in 1791. Overissue led to a spectacular hyperinflation which wiped out their value in a few years. The initial number issued in April 1790 was 400 million; in September 1792 2.7 billion were in circulation; and by the beginning of 1796 when they were abandoned there were perhaps 45 billion in circulation. In an effort to control the rise in prices caused by this inflation various attempts were unsuccessfully made to regulate prices such as the "Maximum" in 1793. As a result of this experience Napoleon returned the country to a gold backed currency, the franc, in 1803. See Andrew D. White, Fiat Money Inflation in France, How it came, what it brought and how it ended (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1896) </title/1948>; Charles Coquelin, "Assignats" DEP vol. 1, pp. 77-78.

1490 Bastiat uses the phrase "francs métalliques ou fictifs" which we have translated as "gold or paper francs."

1491 Bastiat has in mind here the pressure which was put on the National Assembly during 1848 to abolish some taxes entirely (like the hated salt tax) without cutting expenditure, and thus make the budget deficit worse. Some on the left, wanted the government to pay its way with paper money; Bastiat recommended deep cuts in expenditure followed by similar large cuts in taxation. When the cuts to expenditure did not come about, Bastiat reluctantly agreed in late 1848 to cuts in the level of the salt tax but not its abolition. See the note above on the activities of the Finance Committee, and the introduction to "The Salt Tax" (June 1847) (above).

1492 Bastiat uses a very strong expression here - "la fausse monnaie légale" which one might translate literally as "counterfeit government issued paper money."

1493 Bastiat uses the word "dupes" which is part of his theory of "economic sophisms." The vested interests (such as protected industries) who use the power of the state to acquire economic benefits at the expense of ordinary consumers are able to do so because of the widespread acceptance of bad economic arguments (economic fallacies or "sophisms") and the willingness of people to be deceived or "duped." Bastiat believed that it was the task of economists to expose these economic "sophisms" and to enlighten the dupes as to what their real interests were.

1494 See Say's discussion in the Traité d'économie politique , Book I, Chapter XXI "De la nature et l'usage des Monnaies" (On the Nature and use of Money) on how money is the essential intermediary between two exchanges, or as Say states it, "une vente d'abord, et ensuite un achat" (first a sale followed by a purchase), p. 242. Jean Baptiste Say, Traité d'économie politique, ou simple exposition de la manière dont se forment, se distribuent et se consomment les richesses. Sixième édition entièrement revue par l'auteur, et publiée sur les manuscrits qu'il a laissés, par Horace Say , son fils (Paris: Guillaumin, 1841).

1495 The "louis" was a gold coin issued during the Old Regime which weighed 6.75 grams. It was first issued by Louis XIII in 1640 and had his head printed on one side, hence the name "louis". During the Napoleonic period the "louis" had a value of 20 francs and the head of the king was replaced by that of Napoleon. As each regime changed in France the head of the current ruler was used on the coin until 1914 when the coin bore a gallic cock on one side and Marianne, or the figure of "lady liberty," on the other.

1496 Bastiat uses the term "fausse monnaie" which might be translated as "counterfeit money." However, we think "false or debased money" is a better translation in this context.

1497 Bastiat is close but has not quite reached the insight of Austrian school economists who argue that the first people to receive the new money created by banks are the ones to benefit the most. Bastiat argues that the "smartest" or most "experienced traders" will be best able to avoid being hurt by the depreciation.

1498 See his essay on "Capital and Rent" (above, pp. 000) for a defense of interest earned on capital and"Free Credit" (below, pp. 000) on his exchange with Proudhon on the idea of free credit which took place between October 1849 and March 1850.

1499 Bastiat wrote the pamphlet "Capital and Rent" in February 1849 and it was published soon after by the Guillaumin publishing firm. See above, pp. 000.]

1500 The quote: similia similibus curantur ( like things are cured by like things) .

1501 The teaching of political economy was a sore point for the Economists. Bastiat had to abandon his series of lectures at the School of Law when revolution broke out in February 1848. Opposition to their teaching reached a peak during the Revolution when the Provisional Government early in 1848 closed down Michel Chevalier's chair in political economy at the Collège de France and replaced it with a school for government bureaucrats and administrators. They succeeded temporarily but intense lobbying by the Political Economy Society and their friends like Bastiat in the government had the decision reversed in November that same year. See the glossary on "Teaching Political Economy in the Universities."

1502 Bastiat had a life long interest in education which stemmed from his own rather unusual experience in going to an innovative school in Sorèze (1814-18) where modern languages and music was taught instead of the Classics. He also began a school for the children of his sharecroppers in Mugron attendance at which he subsidized. See his articles "On a New Secondary School to be founded in Bayonne," pp. 415-19 and the "Freedom of Teaching," pp. 419-20 in CW1; and "Baccalaureate and Socialism," pp. 185-234 in CW2.

1503 Bastiat's hostility to a classical education is a recurring theme in his letters and his other writings which are too numerous to mention here.

1504 Livy and Quintus Curtius were Roman historians who wrote about Roman and Greek imperial expansion and conquest. Titus Livius Patavinus (Livy) (59 BC – AD 17) wrote a lengthy history of Rome from its founding up to the reign of Augustus. He had family and political connections with the powerful Julio-Claudian family. Quintus Curtius Rufus was a Roman historian who lived during the 1st century A.D. His only surviving work is a lengthy history of Alexander the Great.

1505 Bastiat's references to the Gracchi, Cato, and Caesar are ironic. The Gracchi brothers, Tiberius Gracchus (162-133 B.C.) and Gaius Gracchus (154-121 B.C.) were Roman patricians who both held the office of tribune at different times. They attempted to introduce significant land reform in ancient Rome. In response to an economic crisis they proposed to limit the size of the land holdings of aristocratic owners and distribute parcels of land to the poor. They failed to achieve this and were crushed by force. They have been seen by socialists as precursors of the modern socialist movement. The French socialist Babeuf even adopted the pseudonym "Gracchus" in hommage to them. Since Cato the Younger was a politician in the late Roman Republic and a noted defender of "Roman Liberty" and opponent of Julius Caesar, Bastiat is probably not referring to him but to his ancestor Cato the Censor, Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 BC), who used his political position to stamp out "usury" and ostentatious living, hence earning the nickname "the censor". The final reference is to Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) whose activities as general, Consul, and the underminer of the Roman Republic Bastiat totally opposed.

1506 Bastiat discusses at some length his criticisms of the French education system, especially the insidious influence Bastiat thought the teaching of classics had on French youth, in " Baccalaureate and Socialism," CW2, pp. 185-234.

1507 Elihu Burritt (1810-1879) was active in the abolitionist movement and the peace movement, becoming the president of the Society of the Friends of Peace in the United States.

1508 Joseph Sturge (1793-1859) was an English Quaker, pacifist, supporter of the Chartist movement, and abolitionist. He founded the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1823 and was active also in the London Peace Society. In 1854 he led an unsuccessful delation of Quakers to speak to Tsar Nicholas I of Russia to help prevent the outbreak of the Crimean War.

1509 Auguste Visschers (1804-1874) was a Belgian lawyer and peace activist. He chaired the Peace Congress which was held in Brussels in September 1848.

1510 See Bastiat's speech on "Disarmament, Taxes, and the Influence of Political Economy on the Peace Movement" given at the August meeting, below, pp. 000.

1511 The glossary entry on "Victor Prosper Considerant."

1512 Pétition au gouvernement provisoire. Ministère du progrès et de l'organisation du travail, pour étudier la question sociale et réaliser, dans l'intérêt de tous, la liberté, l'égalité, la fraternité par l'association libre et volontaire . (Signé : Les rédacteurs de "la Démocratie pacifique".) (Paris: Impr. de Lange Lévy, [Feb. 1848]).

1513 "Petition from an Economist," La République française (Thursday 2 March, 1848), p.2. Also in CW1, pp. 426-29. Quote on p. 427.

1514 CRANC, vol. 9, pp. 614 ff. but especially pp. 621-22.

1515 EH, Chap. IV Exchange, pp. 000.

1516 Louis Napoléon's government had enough votes in the Assembly on 25 April to send French troops to reinstate Pope Pius IX who was forced to flee Rome by republicans in Italy. Bastiat voted against this measure.

1517 Henry Richard (1812-1888) was an English Congregational Minister and Member of Parliament who was active in the Peace Society, of which he was the secretary for 40 years (1840-1888), and the abolition of slavery.

1518 The Paris Friends of Peace Congress was held between 22-24 August in Saint-Cecila Hall. It was presided over by Victor Hugo. The Political Economy Society was represented by Joseph Garnier, who helped organise the even and edited its Proceedings, and Bastiat who gave one of the major speeches on the second day.

1519 See the glossary entry on "Hovyn deTranchère."

1520 Claude-Marie Raudot (1801-1879) was a lawyer and magistrate who became a Deputy representing l'Yonne during the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy during the 1820s and then again from 1848-1851 and 1871-1876. He voted with the conservative right. In 1874 he was the President of the Budget Committee in the Third Republic.

1521 This is a reference to Louis Blanc and the National Workshops program which sprung up soon after the February Revolution to provide state-funded unemployment relief. Bastiat vigorously opposed this as Vice-President of the Finance Committee. The Chamber decided to close them down in May 1848 due to its spirally costs, thus sparking the June Days rioting the following month.

1522 See the glossary entries on " La République française" and " Jacques Bonhomme (journal)."

1523 Gustave de Molinari, Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare; entretiens sur les lois économiques et défense de la propriété (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849).

1524 Antoine-Elisée Cherbuliez, Le potage à la tortue: entretiens populaires sur les questions sociales (Turtle Soup: Popular Conversations about Social Questions) (Paris: Joel Cherbuliez, Guillaumin, 1849).

1525 See the glossary entries on "Fonteyraud" and "The Cholera Outbreak of 1849."

1526 Molinari called them "a herd of communists." See his "Obituary of Joseph Garnier," JDE, Sér. 4, T. 16, No. 46, October 1881, pp. 5-13. Molinari tells a similar story in his obituary of Coquelin with the added detail that the economists chose not to fight back and so let the communists win by not throwing a single punch to defend themselves: Molinari, "[Nécr.] Charles Coquelin," JDE, N(os) 137 et 138. Septembre et Octobre 1852, pp. 167-76. See p. 172.

1527 Fonteyraud (and Wolowski) "Principes d'économie politique" in Instruction pour le People: Cents traités sur les connaissance les plus indispensables; ouvrage entièrement neuf, avec des gravures intercalées dans le text. Tome second. Traités 51 à 100 . (Paris: Paulin et Lechevalier, 1850). Louis Wolowski and Alcide Fonteyraud, No. 92, "Principes d'économie politique," 2913-3976.

1528 The Almanac Républicain was published by Laurent Pagnerre (1805-1854) with the aim of "gather(ing) together all the intelligent elite, who wanted to consolidate the Republic through the education of the People". It published articles by many famous figures such as Victor Cousin and Lamartine.

1529 See the glossary entry on Pagnerre."

1530 See the glossary entries on "Louis Blanc" and "The National Workshops."

1531 See the glossary entry on "Proudhon."

1532 See "Bastiat's Invention of Crusoe Economics" in the Introduction to CW3, pp. lxiv-lxvii.

1533 Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles, with Power and Market: Government and the Economy. Second Edition. Scholar's Edition (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009); and "6. A Crusoe Social Philosophy," in The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982).

1534 The dangers of cholera at this time were significant. One of Bastiat's close colleagues Alcide Fonteyraud (1822-1849) died in the cholera epidemic which swept Paris in August 1849 which killed about 14,000 people. See the glossary entries on "Fonteyraud" and "The Cholera Outbreak of 1849."

1535 In ES1 22 "Metaphors" (late 1845) (CW3, pp. 100-03) Bastiat objected to supporters of protectionism and subsidies using value-laden military metaphors, such as "invasion" and "paying tribute," and other metaphors drawn from natural disasters such as "floods," to describe imports from other countries. Here he objects to critics of "capital" comparing it to infectious diseases like cholera and the plague.

1536 The "Louis", short for "Louis d'or" is French gold coin which was first issued by King Louis XIII in the 17th century. It featured the head of Louis on one side of the coin, hence the name. It was replaced by the franc during the French Revolution but during the Restoration of the monarchy under Louis XVIII it was revived as a 20 franc gold coin.

1537 On the topic of money see Bastiat's essays "Nominal Prices" ( JDE , October 1845), in CW3, ES1 11, pp. 6164; and "Damned Money" ( JDE , 15 April 1849, above, pp. 000.

1538 Here Bastiat uses the terms "capitaliste" and "prolétaire" which is a little unusual as they have socialist connotations. Words like "ouvrier" or "travailleur" were much more commonly used by him. The fact that he is writing a popular piece directed at workers may explain his choice of words.

1539 The four slogans used by socialists such as Louis Blanc and Charles Fourier during the Revolution to win workers over to their cause were "fraternity" (the brotherhood of all workers), "solidarity," "association" (cooperative living and working arrangements), and "organisation" (the organization of workers to run their own factories and businesses without wages being paid by a capitalist owner). In numerous essays written during the Second Republic Bastiat opposed the socialist idea of state-enforced "Fraternité, Solidarité, Organisation, Association" which he termed "les noms séducteurs" (seductive names) (in "The Law," in CW2, p. 121). He supported the ideals of the Republic (liberty, fraternity, and equality) but in a very different sense. As he saw it there was a vast difference between "la fraternité spontanée" (spontaneous or voluntary fraternity) and "la fraternité légale" (state imposed or enforced fraternity). See also, "Individualism and Fraternity" (June 1848) CW2, pp. 82-92; "Justice and Fraternity" ( JDE , 15 June 1848) in CW2, pp. 60-81.

1540 Hortense Cheuvreux (née Girard) (1808-1893) was married to Jean Pierre-Casimir Cheuvreux (1797-1881), who was a wealthy textile merchant and was active in liberal circles in Paris, helping to fund their activities. Hortense ran an important salon from their Paris home and became a close friend of Bastiat's. In 1877 she published Bastiat's letters to her family in Lettres d'un habitant des Landes which are quite personal and show a very different, more personal side to Bastiat.

1541 Lettres d'un habitant des Landes , p. 27.

1542 Letter 139 to Mme Cheuvreux (Antwerp, June 1849), CW1, p. 205.

1543 Letter 137. Bruxelles, hôtel de Bellevue, June 1849. To Madame Cheuvreux, CW1, pp. 200-2); Letter 138. Bruxelles, June 1849. To Madame Cheuvreux, CW1, pp. 202-3.

1544 CW1, p. 202.

1545 Vilvorde was a town of about 7,000 people (1846) in the Flemish speaking part of Belgium north of Brussels. It is in the province of Brabant.

1546 Malines was a town of about 37,000 people (1846) in the Flemish speaking part of Belgium in the province of Anvers. One of the first public railway lines was built in 1835 connecting Malines and Brussels.

1547 Anvers (Antwerpen) in the Flemish speaking part of Belgium was the capital of the province of Anvers and was a major port city on the Escaut river which flowed into the North Sea. Its population in 1846 was about 89,000 people.

1548 The rest of this paragraph was cut in the version which appeared Cheuvreux's Lettres d'un habitant des Landes , which was reproduced as Letter 139 to Mme Cheuvreux (Antwerp, June 1849), CW1, p. 205.

1549 Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was a Dutch painter of the Flemish Baroque school. He had a large studio in Anvers/Antwerp.

1550 The rest of the letter was cut in the version which appeared Cheuvreux's Lettres d'un habitant des Landes , which was reproduced as Letter 139 to Mme Cheuvreux (Antwerp, June 1849), CW1, p. 205.

1551 Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1682) was a Spanish Baroque painter who was famous for his religious paintings.

1552 Ronce says in a footnote that Bastiat left the sentence unfinished and that it was up to the reader to complete it for themselves.

1553 Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (Raphael) (1483-1520) was an Italian painter and architect during the Italian Renaissance.

1554 According to Garnier there were 21 delegates from the U.S. (including two ex-slaves), over three hundred from England, 230 from France, 23 from Belgium, and a small number of delegates from other European countries. Joseph Garnier, Congrès des amis de la paix universelle réuni à Paris en 1849, p. vi.

1555 Report of the Proceedings of the Second General Peace Congress , p. 13.

1556 John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (1903), p. 512.

1557 Second Session, Thursday, August 23rd, 1849, p. 33.

1558 For example, "The Single-Tax in England. The Proposal of Mr. Ewart" (LE, 27 June 1847), above, pp. 000; and "A Hoax" (JB no. 2 June 1848), above, pp. 000; "Peace and Freedom and the Republican Budget" (Feb. 1849), CW2, pp. 282-24.

1559 "Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" (12 Dec. 1849) in CW2, pp. 328-47.

1560 Letter 186 to Cobden (Paris, 17 August, 1850), CW1. p. 263-64.

1561 See especially Letter 83 to Cobden (Paris, 15 Oct 1847), CW1, pp. 132-35; as well as Letter 96 to Cobden (Mugron, 5 April 1848), on Britain taking the initiative in disarming, CW1, p. 147; Letter 100 to Cobden (Paris, 27 May 1848) on France and Britain simultaneously disarming, CW1, p. 152; Letter 106 to Cobden (Paris, 7 August 1848) and Letter 107 (Paris, 18 August, 1848) on the need for England to make some move to show France it is willing to cut military spending, CW1 pp. 159-60.

1562 Bastiat says he was in England for four days and was accompanied by Horace Say. It is possible they were going to attend a Peace meeting in Bradford and see Cobden along the way. See Letter 151 to Cobden (Paris, 17 October, 1849) about a meeting on 30 October, CW1, pp. 220-21; Letter 152 to Cobden (Paris, 24 October, 1849), CW1, pp. 221-22; Letter 154 to Domenger (Paris, 13 November, 1849), CW1, pp. 222-23. George Roche also thinks this trip took place, George Charles Roche III, Frédéric Bastiat: A Man Alone (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1971), p. 120; as does Dean Russell, Frédéric Bastiat: Ideas and Influence , p. 112.

1563 English version, p. 89.

1564 Bastiat used a similar argument in ES2 2 "Two Moral Philosophies", CW3, pp. 131-38, where he talks about the failure of religion to persuade people who initiate the use of plunder to refrain from doing so, and contrasts this with the economists who attempt to persuade the victims of plunder to resist it. Especially, pp. 134 ff.

1565 In the Garnier French language version the editor adds the following comment: "The speaker is welcomed with repeated applause."

1566 There were two "Athanase Coquerels," a father and a son, both of whom were liberal Protestant preachers. Athanase-Charles Coquerel (Athanase Coquerel père) (1795-1868) was elected Deputy representing la Seine in April 1848 where he voted with the moderate republicans, and reelected in May 1849 but voted with the Party of Order especially in support of France's military intervention in Rome in April 1849. So it is unlikely he would have attended the Peace Congress in August. His son Athanase Josué Coquerel (Athanase Coquerel fils) (1820-1875), although only 29, may be the one mentioned here.

1567 Bastiat warned about growing scepticism among the French public in his speech on Electoral Reform in March 1849. See above, pp. 000.

1568 The following three paragraphs (1,300 words) was cut from Garnier's French edition of the speech.

1569 According to the budget passed on 15 May 1849 the size of the French army was 389,967 men and 95,687 horses. This figure rises to 459,457 men and 97,738 horses for the entire French military (including foreign and colonial forces). The expenditure on the Army in 1849 was fr. 346,319,558 and for the Navy and Colonies was fr. 119,206,857 for a combined total of fr. 465,526,415. Total government expenditure in 1849 was fr. 1.573 billion with expenditure on the armed forces making up 29.6% of the total budget.

1570 In order to maintain an army at about 400,000 men with 7 year enlistments the French government had to recruit about 60-80,000 new men each year by a combination of voluntary enlistment, conscription (by drawing lots), and substitutions. The liberal journalist and anti-conscription campaigner Émile de Girardin estimated that about one quarter of the entire French Army consisted of replacements who had been paid fr. 1,800-2,400 to take the place of some young man who had been called up but did not want to serve. The schedule of payments depended on the type of service: fr. 1,800-2,000 for the infantry; 2,000-2,400 for the artillery, cavalry and other specialized forces. Émile de Girardin, Les 52: Abolition de l'esclavage militaire . (Paris: M. Lévy, 1849). See the glossary on "The French Army and Conscription."

1571 As Vice-President of the Chamber's Finance Committee.

1572 info ??

1573 Bastiat believed that the government should get its revenue for essential services in the short term by imposing a 5% tariff on both imports and exports, which would be replaced in the longer term by a low, income tax on all individuals. See his "The Single-Tax in England. The Proposal of Mr. Ewart" (LE, 27 June 1847), above, pp. 000.

1574 Total revenue for the French government was 1,400 million francs in 1849.

1575 The tax on alcohol was abolished in May 1849 (when Hippolyte Passy (1793-1880) was the Minister of Finance) but the new Minister of Finance, Achille Fould, was able to have it reinstated in December 1849. On 12 December 1849 Bastiat gave an impassioned speech in the Chamber on the need to abolish the tax on alcohol. See, "Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" CW2, pp. 328-47. Also Achille Fould, Lettre sur l'impôt des boissons (1849).

1576 Bastiat discusses how indirect taxation is a "trick" or a "hoax" in "The Single-Tax in England. The Proposal of Mr. Ewart" (LE, 27 June 1847), above, pp. 000; and "A Hoax" (JB no. 2 June 1848), above, pp. 000.

1577 Under the July Monarchy (1830-1848) the right to vote was limited to the wealthiest tax-payers who paid a certain amount in direct tax. Towards the end of the July Monarchy this group numbered about 240,000 individuals or about 5% of the population. Bastiat termed them "la classe électorale" (the electoral or voting class)). After the February 1848 Revolution universal manhood suffrage (men over the age of 21) was introduced for the April 1848 elections at which 7.8 million people participated (or 84% of registered voters). In the May 1849 election there were 9.9 million registered voters. See the glossary on "The Chamber of Deputies and the Electoral Class."

1578 That is, how high the taxes had become.

1579 In ES2 11 "The Utopian" (January 1847) Bastiat wanted to slash immediately the size of the French army by 100,000 men (or one quarter thus saving 400 million francs) and eventually convert it from a standing army into a collection of local militias. See, CW3, pp. 187-98.

1580 This is the end of the section which was cut from Garnier's French edition.

1581 The remainder of this paragraph (about 150 words) were not included in the Garnier version of the speech.

1582 "Sed Caesar in omnia praeceps, nil actum credens, cum quid superesset agendum" (But Caesar, headlong in all his designs, thought nothing done while anything remained to be done). Lucan, Pharsalia , Book II, line 656.

1583 François René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) was a novelist, philosopher, and supporter of Charles X. He was the Minister of Foreign Affairs from December 1822 to June 1824. He was a defender of the freedom of the press and Greek independence from Turkey. He refused to take the oath of allegaince to King Louis-Philippe after he came to power in 1830. He spent his retirement writing Mémoires d'outre-tombe (Memoirs from Beyond the Grave) (1849-50) which was published posthumously. He died the previous July (1848). Bastiat closed his last book, WSWNS with a quote from this book.

1584 The Peace Congress was presided over by the poet and playwright Victor Hugo (1802-1885).

1585 Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869). See the critical letters Bastiat wrote to Lamartine criticising his economic views, above, pp. 000.

1586 Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780-1857). See glossary entry on "Béranger."

1587 This quotation comes from the refrain in Béranger's anti-monarchical and pro-French poem "La sainte alliance des peuples" (The Holy Alliance of the People). (1818) in Oeuvres complètes de P.J. de Béranger contenant les dix chanson nouvelles, avec un Portrait gravé sur bois d'après Charlet (Paris: Perrotin, 1855), vol. 1, pp. 294-96. For a translation see, Béranger's Songs of the Empire, the Peace, and the Restoration. Translated into English verse by Robert B. Clough (London: Addey and Co., 1856), pp. 59-62. The first verse goes as follows: "I saw fair Peace, descending from on high, Strewing the earth with gold, and corn, and flow'rs; The air was calm, and hush'd all soothingly The last faint thunder of the War-gods pow'rs. The goddess spoke: 'Equals in worth and might, Sons of French, Germans, Russ, or British lands, Form an alliance, Peoples, and unite, In Friendship firm, your hands'." This line was also used by Molinari at the end of his 11th Soiréé in Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare (1849).

1588 Richard Cobden (1804-1865), the head of the English Anti-Corn Law League.

1589 See the glossary entry on "Harmony and Disharmony."

1590 This is a slightly secularized version of a verse from Matthew 6:33, "But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you." (King James trans.)

1591 This paragraph was inserted in the Garnier French edition. It should be noted that Cobden gave his speech first in French and then again in English.

1592 Martin Nadaud (1815-1898) was a mason by trade, a socialist politician, and an author. During the February Revolution he was active in a socialist political club where he demonstrated considerable public speaking skills. He was a delegate to the Luxembourg Commission run by Louis Blanc where the National Workshops operated. He was not elected to the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 but was successful in May 1849 when he was elected a Deputy representing la Creuse. He voted with the extreme socialists known as the "Mountain." Because of his opposition to Louis Napoléon he was exiled in January 1852, eventually ending up in England when he taught French and mixed in socialist circles. When the Third Republic was formed he returned to France and served as a Deputy 187-1889 voting with the socialist republican group.

1593 The Law of 7 July 1833 (and amended by the Law of 6 May 1841) created special juries of local landowners which would determine the level of compensation for confiscated land. See, A. Legoyt, "Expropriation pour cause d'utilité publique," DEP , vol. 1, pp. 751-53.

1594 See the glossary entry on "The Fortifications of Paris."

1595 Michel Chevalier, Les fortifications de Paris, lettre à M. Le Comte Molé (Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1841) and Cours d'Économie politique fait au Collège de France par Michel Chevalier (Bruxelles: Meline, Cans, 1851), vol. 2, "Douzième leçon. Concours de l'armée française aux travaux des fortifications de Paris," pp. 183-96. First ed. 1844.

1596 François Arago, Sur les Fortifications de Paris (Paris: Bachelier, 1841) and Études sur les fortifications de Paris, considérées politiquement et militairement (Paris: Pagnerre, 1845).

1597 See, Molinari, "The Third Evening," in Les Soirées (LF forthcoming).

1598 See below, pp. 000.

1599 Molinari's book was published by Guillaumin probably in late September or early October. It was critical reviewed in the October issue of the JDE by Charles Coquelin who agreed with most of the book but objected to Molinari using the figure of "The Economist" to put forward his own views not shared by other economists, such as totally opposing the right of governments to seize private property for public works and the private production of security. See "Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare, Entretiens sur les lois économiques et défense de la propriété, par M. G. de Molinari," JDE , T. 24, No. 104, 15 novembre 1849, pp. 364-72.

1600 Molinari first presented his ideas about the private provision of security by insurance companies competing in the market in an article in the JDE (February) and then in Chapter 11 of his book Evenings on Sait Lazarus Street (Oct. 1849). See Gustave de Molinari, "De la production de la sécurité," JDE, T. 22, no. 95, 15 February 1849, pp. 277-90.

1601 The correct title was Evenings on Saint Lazarus Street: Discussions on Economic Laws and the Defence of Property.

1602 Molinari, "The Third Evening," in Evenings on Saint Lazarus Street (LF forthcoming).

1603 Salomon Lopez-Dubec (1808-1860) was a lawyer and businessman from Bordeaux. He was a judge on the Commerce Tribunal 1841-47, deputy mayor of Bordeaux, and a Deputy representing the Gironde 1849-1851.

1604 See the glossary entry on "Coquelin."

1605 He rephrased this in a more colourful way in a later conversation where he referred to the state as a kind of legislative Mount Sinai: "it alone, soaring above all (human) activities like a Mount Sinai, can guarantee liberty and competition." See the record of the Meeting of the Society on 15 Jan. 1850, below pp. 000.

1606 See the glossary entry on "Parieu."

1607 Towards the end of "The Eleventh Evening" the Socialist raises the question of what happens to nationality in Molinari's future society. The Economist's answer is "I do not see national unity in these shapeless agglomerations of people, formed out of violence, which violence alone maintains, for the most part. … A nation is one when the individuals who compose it have the same customs, the same language, the same civilisation; when they constitute a distinct and original variety of the human race. Whether this nation has two governments or only one, matters very little …"

1608 See the glossary entry on "Rodet."

1609 See the glossary entry on "Wolowski."

1610 See the glossary entry on "Dunoyer."

1611 Pierre Saint-Beuve (1819-1855) was a lawyer, land owner, and factory owner in l'Oise. He was elected Deputy representing l'Oise in 1848-1851 and voted with the conservative right.

1612 See the glossary entry on "Claude-Marie Raudot (1801-1879)."

1613 See below, pp. 000.

1614 See the glossary entry on "Bastiat's Anti-Socialist Pamphlets."

1615 Intérêt et principale. Discussion entre M. Proudhon et M. Bastiat sur l'intérêt des capitaux (Extraits de la Voix du Peuple) (Paris: Garnier frères, 1850).

1616 Gratuité du crédit. Discussion entre M. Fr. Bastiat et M. Proudhon (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850).

1617 For example, See, Le Représentant du Peuple (Feb. - Aug. 1848); Le Peuple (Sept. 1848 - June 1849); La Voix du Peuple (Sept. 1849 - May 1850); Le Peuple de 1850 (June - Oct. 1850).

1618 See, "Vive l'Empereur" in Œuvres complètes de P.-J. Proudhon, Tome XIX. Mélanges: articles de journaux, 1848-1852, Volume 3. Articles de la Voix du Peuple. Articles du Peuple de 1850. Intérêt et Principal. Articles (Extraits de la Voix du Peuple) (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1870), pp. 103-8. See also, Œuvres complètes de P.-J. Proudhon, Tome XVII. Mélanges: articles de journaux, 1848-1852, Volume 1. Articles du Répresentant du peuple. - Articles du Peuple. (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1868).

1619 See, Proudhon, "De la concurrence entre les chemins de fer et les voies navigables", JDE, T.XI, mai 1845, p.157-202; Système des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misère . 2 vols. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1846).

1620 Molinari, [CR] "Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère, par J.-P. Proudhon," JDE, T. 18, N° 72, Novembre 1847, pp. 383-98.

1621 See the glossary entry on "The 45 Centime Tax."

1622 See, L'Organisation du crédit et de la circulation (31 mars 1848), Résumé de la question sociale. Banque d'échange (1848), Banque du peuple: déclaration (1849), which are reprinted in Oeuvres complètes de P.-J. Proudhon, Tome VI. Solution de problème social. Organisation du crédit et de la circulation. Résumé de la question sociale. Banque d'échange. Banque du peuple. Suivi du rapport de la Commission des délégués du Luxembourg (Paris: A. Lacroix, 1868).

1623 Proudhon summarised his views in an article "Réforme de l'impôt", La Voix du peuple , 28 Jan. 1850 republished in Melanges vol. 3, pp. 86-96. His proposal and the debate in the Chamber can be found in Oeuvres complètes de P.-J. Proudhon, Tome VII. La révolution sociale démontrée par le coup d'état du 2 décembre. Le droit au travail et le droit de propriété. Proposition relative a l'impôt et du crédit. Discours prononcé a l'Assemblée nationale (Paris: A. Lacroix, 1868). See, "Proposition relative à l'impôt sur le revenu, présentée le 11 juillet 1848 par le Citoyen Proudhon, envoyée au Comité des finances," pp. 241-44; "Rapport fait au nom du Comité des finances sur la proposition du Citoyen Proudhon relative à la Réorganisation de l'impôt et du credit. Par le Citoyen Thiers (Séance du 26 juillet 1848)," pp. 245-61; and "Discours prononcé à l'Assemblée Nationale le 31 juillet 1848," pp. 263-313.

1624 See his speeches on abolishing or drastically cutting the taxes on salt, alcohol, and sending letters, below, pp. 000.

1625 See "The Single Tax in England" (June 1847), above, pp. 000

1626 In CW2, pp. 60-81. Quote on p. 71.

1627 See above, pp. 000.

1628 See the glossary entry on "Free Banking."

1629 See the glossary entry on "Coquelin."

1630 Bastiat uses the interesting phrases "des boutiques d'argent" (shops where money is sold) and "des bureaux de prêt et d'emprunt" (offices where one can get loans and borrow money).

1631 Coquelin developed his theory "la liberté des banques" (free banking) in the mid 1840s in a series of articles and later a book in which he argued that private banks in a completely free market would compete to provide banking services even in such things as the issuing of money, which would no longer be a government monopoly. Coquelin wrote a series of articles on free banking for La Revue des Deux-Mondes and these ideas were further developed in his major book on the subject, Du Crédit et des Banques (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848). Coquelin provides a history of banking and a defense of his ideas in the article "Banque" in DEP , vol. 1, pp. 107-45. See also, J.-E. Horn, La liberté des banques (Paris: Guillaumin, 1866).

1632 Below, pp. 000.

1633 See, below, pp. 000.

1634 Bastiat uses the word "saturée" (saturated) to describe the inflated supply of money which the Banks would put into circulation. He liked to use water as a metaphor in his writings, as in the "ricochet effect," communication flows through "canaux secrets" (hidden channels), or elsewhere in these letters "gorger" (to swamp) or "affluer" (flood) about the issuing of money. Since it is more common today to use the metaphor of "air" (as in "inflated) we have chosen to use the "air" metaphor in this instance.

1635 See, below, pp. 000.

1636 Hayek, "Introduction" to Frédéric Bastiat, Selected Essays on Political Economy, trans. Seymour Cain, ed. George B. de Huszar, introduction by F.A. Hayek (Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1995), p. xi.

1637 ES1 11 "Nominal Prices" (Oct. 1845), CW3, pp. 61-64 and "The Export of Bullion" (LE, Dec. 1847), below, pp. 000.

1638 See the Editor's Introduction above, pp. 000.

1639 "Plunder and Law" (May 1850), CW2, pp.266-76; The Law (June, 1850), CW2, pp. 107-46; and What is Seen and What is Not Seen (July 1850), CW3, pp. 401-52.

1640 Roderick Long, "Translators' Introductions" to The Bastiat-Proudhon Debate on Interest (1849-1850) at The Molinari Institute <https://praxeology.net/FB-PJP-DOI-Intro.htm>.

1641 In a footnote Paillottet noted that: A few months after the closure of this discussion, Mr. Proudhon, in the name of an industrial company, asked the government for a guarantee of 5 percent of interest for a particular transport business operating between Châlons and Avignon. Shocked by a request like this from the apostle of free credit and anarchy , Bastiat expressed his feelings in a letter that remained unpublished, whose final lines we quote: "Mr. Proudhon, deploring the weakness of my intellectual faculties, said: 'For my part, I would a thousand times rather be condemned for my frankness than be seen as clearly lacking what is man's finest quality, the one that defines his vitality and true being.' Let Mr. Proudhon know this: I accept this arrangement. I will take the humble level of intellect it has pleased God to give me; let him, since he prefers it, have a dubious frankness." In OC5, p. 296. See below, pp. 000.

1642 In Capital and Rent , above, pp. 000.

1643 See "Bastiat's Invention of Crusoe Economics" in the Introduction to CW3, pp. lxiv- lxvii.

1644 See Rothbard's opening two chapters to Man, Economy, and State , "Fundamentals of Human Action" and "Direct Exchange," where he makes considerable use of Robinson Crusoe to explain the foundations of human action and economic exchange and where he acknowledges the originality of Bastiat's use of this thought experiment in the footnotes. Rothbard, Man, Economy and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles, with Power and Market: Government and the Economy. Second Edition. Scholar's Edition (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009).

1645 CW3, pp. 000.

1646 See, for example his speech in the Assembly "Speech on the Tax on Wines and Spirits" (12 Dec. 1849), CW2, pp. 328-47; and the Editor's Introduction to "On the Allocation of the Land Tax in the Department of Les Landes" (July 1844), above, pp. 000 for his other writings on tax matters.

1647 See "Bastiat's Theory of Class: The Plunderers vs. the Plundered," in "Further Aspects of Bastiat's Life and Thought," in CW3, pp. 473-85.

1648 See the glossary entry on "Disturbing and Restorative Factors."

1649 Bastiat uses the term "une classe de fonctionnaires" (a class of government bureaucrats) in EH2 XVII. "Private Services and Public Services," FEE ed. pp. 448; and "un parasite légal" (legal or state-supported parasites) in WSWNS, III Taxes, in CW3, p. 411.

1650 See below, pp. 000.

1651 See EH, FEE edition, pp. 320, 322-23.

1652 See below, pp. 000.

1653 "Economic Harmonies IV," above, pp. 000. See also the Editor's Introduction to Capital and Rent , above, pp. 000.

1654 "Economic Harmonies IV," above, pp. 000.

1655 "Economic Harmonies II," above, pp. 000.

1656 In his review of Bastiat's pamphlet Capital and Rent (Feb. 1849) Molinari talks in more detail about "transport du travail dans le temps" (the transport of labour through time), p. 233, or "cet échange de travail passée contre du travail futur" (this exchange of past labor for future labour), p. 234). See, Gustave de Molinari, "Lettre sur le prêt à intérêt," JDE T.23, no. 90, 15 juin 1849, pp. 231-41; and Say, Traité d'économie politique (Guillaumin, 1841), chap. IX "Des différentes manière d'exercer l'industrie commerciale et comment elles concourent à la production," p. 104.

1657 See, OC5, pp. 314-15.

1658 Nothing is known about F.C. Chevé other than the fact that he was an editor of Proudhon's magazine La Voix du peuple (The Voice of the People) who edited the magazine while Proudhon was in prison. After his first letter to Bastiat Chevé was pushed aside and Proudhon took over the debate with Bastiat.

1659 See Capital and Rent (February 1849) above, pp. 000.

1660 On Bastiat borrowing the phrase "the mutuality of services" from Proudhon, see the glossary entry on Service for Service."

1661 Since 1 sous was worth 5 centimes, 100 sous was the same as 500 centimes.

1662 Chevé quotes repeatedly from Bastiat's pamphlet Capital and Rent throughout this essay. His quotations from Bastiat's pamphlet are in double quotation marks. We will not footnote the location of every instance of this for reasons of space. The conversation between the characters in Chevé's story are in single quote marks.

1663 Here Chevé rewrites a similar conversation between Jacques and Guillaume Bastiat used in Capital and Rent , above, pp. 000.

1664 At a compound interest rate of 5% per annum an investor will double their money in 14 years.

1665 Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1726) was an English physicist and mathematician who made important contributions to gravitation, classical mechanics, optics, and calculus.; François Fénelon (1651-1715) was the Archbishop of Cambrai and tutor to the young duke of Burgundy, the grandson of Louis XIV. He wrote Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699) which was a thinly veiled satire of the reign of Louis XIV and a critique of the notion of the divine right of kings.; Blaise Pascal (1623-62) was a French mathematician and philosopher whose best-known work, Pensées (Thoughts), appeared posthumously.

1666 During the medieval period the obole was a copper coin officially worth 1/2 denier. As monetary devaluation continued to decrease its value the word "obole" came to mean a coin of very little or minimal value.

1667 Chevé is chiding the author of the Economic Sophisms (1846, 1848) for not seeing the sophisms he is using to defend interest on capital.

1668 Chevé does not understand three things: opportunity costs (that capital has different uses and hence different rates of return); time preference (that one might prefer the use of a good now rather than in one year's time); and that the lender has to exercise some entrepreneurial judgement about what is a good investment (risk of losses).

1669 Chevé gets Bastiat's argument completely wrong with this misquotation. Bastiat said "Dire que l'intérêt s'anéantira, c'est dire qu'il n'y aura plus aucun motif d'épargner, de se priver, de former de nouveaux capitaux, ni même de conserver les anciens" (To say that interest will be eliminated is to say that there will no longer be any incentive to save, to deprive yourself, or to build up new capital, nor even to maintain the capital that already exists.), whereas Chevé quotes him as saying "Dire que l'intérêt s'anéantira, c'est donc dire qu'il n'y aura plus un motif de plus d'épargner, de se priver, de former de nouveaux capitaux, et de conserver les anciens" (To say that interest will be eliminated is therefore to say that there will be one more incentive to save, to deprive yourself, and to build up new capital while maintaining the capital that already exists). Chevé's changes in bold. Thanks to Roderick Long for pointing this out.

1670 The economists and the socialists had very different opinions about how societies should be "organised" and what constituted "natural" and "artificial" types of organisation. For socialists like Louis Blanc, "organisation" meant socially or state-supported workshops which would get rid of wage labour and allow workers to share the proceeds from their labour. For the economists, this was rejected as an "artificial" form of organisation based upon coercion. They preferred voluntary, free market organisations which arose "naturally" from economic activity, such as firms and factories, as well as artisan owned and operated workshops. See the Editor's Introduction to "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (Jan. 1848), above, pp. 000.

1671 Proudhon had tried to set up an "Exchange Bank" between March and June 1848, and when this failed, to set up a "People's Bank" in January 1849 to replace the Bank of Paris which would use the assets of the French nation to provide very low or zero interest loans to workers to sent up their businesses and workshops. This also failed.

1672 The quotation comes from pp. 9-11 of the original pamphlet Capital et Rente (1849) and can also be found above, pp. 000. Chevé is quoting back at Bastiat Bastiat's paraphrasing of the socialist critique of interest on capital at the beginning of his pamphlet which he then proceeds to refute.

1673 Some of the economists, like the socialists, also talked about a cancer within society, or society being consumed by leprosy. The socialists believed that the cancer eating away at society was the capitalist system which lived off profit, interest, and rent. Some of the more radical economists, like Molinari, also adopted this vocabulary of "cancer," "leprosy," or "ulcer" but for them, the source of the cancer was the state and the vested interests which it supported, which took wealth from consumers and taxpayers in the form of tariffs, subsidies to manufacturers, taxes, and regulations. See for example, Molinari on "cet ulcère qui dévore les forces vives des sociétés" (this ulcer which eats away the living forces of societies) in Cours d'économie politique (2nd ed. 1863), vol. 2, p. 531.

1674 From La Voix du Peuple , 12 November 1849, translated by Benjamin R. Tucker, in The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator , 12 July 1879.

1675 Bastiat uses the phrase "les classes aisées" (the well-to-do classes) in contrast with "les classes ouvrières" (the working or labouring classes).

1676 See the glossary entry on "Bastiat's Theory of Plunder."

1677 A good example of Bastiat's feeling towards democracy and republicanism can be found in "A Few Words about the Title of our Journal" (Feb. 1848), above, pp. 000.

1678 One of the mottos of Bastiat's revolutionary magazine La République française which appeared in February and March 1848 was "Justice. Économie. Ordre" (Justice. Economy. Order). In his second revolutionary magazine Jacques Bonhomme which appeared in June 1848 one of the mottoes was a quote from the poet Béranger "Peuples, former une Sainte-Alliance, et donnez-vous la main" (People of the World, form a Holy Alliance and take each other by the hands). This phrase "order, justice, and union" is thus an amalgamation of his views he too was attempting to spread during the Revolution.

1679 In fact Bastiat borrowed Proudhon's term "mutuality of service" and adopted it while he was forming his own ideas about exchange as "the mutual exchange of services," or "service for service." See the glossary entry on "Service for Service."

1680 These were the examples Bastiat used in his pamphlet Capital and Rente .

1681 Bastiat sometimes fluctuates between "equivalent" and "equal" services which confuses things as they are not identical.

1682 The écu was a pre-revolutionary silver coin. In the 19th century people still referred to the five franc silver coin as an "écu".

1683 Bastiat keeps stressing the importance of time as a factor in exchanges or potential exchanges which neither Chevé nor Proudhon seem to understand. That a service provided at one moment in time (say earlier) is not the same as another servies provided at another moment in time (say later).

1684 Occasionally both Proudhon and Bastiat use "social economy" instead of the more usual term "political economy." The sense they are trying to give is that "social economy" applies to the impact of economics on society as a whole, not just the buying and selling of goods and services which takes place in markets. They have in mind such things as the family, the size of population, the nature of exploitation by ruling elites, war and peace, and so on. At one stage Bastiat's working title for his magnum opus was "Social Harmonies" not just "Economic Harmonies" which is what was eventually published in 1850.

1685 Bastiat wrote several pieces on the subject of "capital" such as the pamphlet Capital and Rent in February 1849 (see above), the essay "Capital" in mid-1849 (see above), and the Chapter 7 "Capital" in Economic Harmonies (1850).

1686 This is another example of Bastiat's use of abstract "thought experiments" to elucidate his theory of how human beings make economic decisions by using "anecdotes" or stories. In other some of the economic sophisms he used the story of Robinson Crusoe ship wrecked on the Island of Despair in a very innovative fashion. Here we have a simple story about the making of a pair of stockings. See "Bastiat's Invention of Crusoe Economics" in the Introduction to CW3, pp. lxiv-lxvii.

1687 Horace Say provided data on the average daily wages of 13 groups of workers in the Paris area, including unskilled labourers who earned 2.50 to 3 fr per day; stone masons 5 fr.; tailors 4 fr.; textile factory workers 4.30 fr.; metal workers 4.25 fr.; and printers 3.50 fr. Horace Say, "Du taux des salaires à Paris," JDE, 2nd. série, T. VII, no. 7, 15 Juillet 1855, pp. 17-27.

1688 Bastiat uses English word "squatter."

1689 In Capital and Rent , it involves a discussion between Jacques and Guillaume. See above, pp. 000.

1690 Bastiat used the story of plank making several times in his work. One notable example can be found in ES2 14 "Something Else" (March 21, 1847), CW3, pp. 226-34, which is also important for being an early instance where Bastiat uses Robinson Crusoe in an economic thought experiment to make his points. In this economic sophism Bastiat discusses how Crusoe might go about making a plank of wood without a saw. After two weeks of intense labor chipping away at a log with an axe Crusoe finally has his plank (and a blunt axe). He then sees that the tide has washed ashore a proper saw-cut plank and wonders what he should do next (the new plank is an obvious reference to a cheaper overseas import which the protectionists believed would harm the national French economy). Bastiat puts some protectionist notions in Crusoe's head and Crusoe now concludes that he can make more labor for himself (and therefore be better off according to the protectionists' theory) if he pushed the plank back out to sea. The Free Trader exposes this economic sophism by saying that there is something that is "not seen" by the Protectionist at first glance, namely "Did he not see that he could devote the time he could have saved to making something else?" CW3, pp. 000.

1691 Following the upheavals of June 1848, a law required the "transportation" to Algeria of 4,000 insurgents.

1692 Émile de Girardin (1806-1881) was the most successful press baron in mid-19th century France with the mass circulation journal La Presse . In the 1848 Revolution he played a significant role in advising Louis Philippe to abdicate in February and then opposing General Cavaignac's repressive actions during the June Days riots. For the latter Girardin was imprisoned and his journal shut down. He wrote extensively on tax matters advocating a broader based system of tax, including a tax on capital. His debate with Proudhon can be found in Questions de mon temps: 1836 à 1856. Questions financières, Volume 11 (Paris: Serriere, 1858), VI. "L'Impôt sur le revenue et l'impôt sur le capital," pp.284-86; and "De l'impôt sur le capital (opinion de P.-J. Proudhon", pp. 417-49. See also, Les 52. XIII. Le Socialisme et l'impôt (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1849); and L'impôt (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1853).

1693 The Orléans family was the younger branch of the Bourbons, to which Louis-Philippe belonged, since he was Duke of Orléans before becoming king of France in 1830.

1694 The "Party of Order" or the "Comité de la rue de Poitiers" was a group of conservative politicians who came together in May 1848 on the rue de Poitiers following an unsuccessful demonstration of radicals at the National Assembly. The group (between 200 and 400) met weekly and were made up of a broad coalition of conservative, legitimist, Bonapartist, and liberal groups. See the glossary entry on "The Party of Order."

1695 The free market economist Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui (1798-1854) who should not be confused with his younger brother, the communist revolutionary Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881).

1696 Rentier has several meanings, one of which was "landowner" who rented out some of his land to small farmers (see previous articles), which Bastiat was, as well as other derogatory meanings, such as capitalist or some one lived off their loans to the government.

1697 Bastiat was in fact well acquainted with the writings of the socialists, such as Victor Considerant, Louis Blanc, and of course Proudhon, and had been writing against their ideas for several years. His campaign against the socialists reached a high point in mid-1848 when he began, with the assistance of the Guillaumin publishing form, publishing a series of 12 anti-socialist pamphlets over the following two years. See the glossary entry on "Bastiat's Anti-Socialist Pamphlets."

1698 Epimenides of Knossos (Crete) was a 7th or 6th century BC Greek philosopher and poet who fell asleep in a cave while tending his father's sheep. He awoke 57 years later with the power of prophecy.

1699 Bastiat was not a full member of the Academy. He was made a "corresponding member" with fewer rights than full members on 24 Jan. 1846, in recognition of his two published works on Cobden and the League (1845) and Economic Sophisms (1846). He was very proud of this appointment and always listed it as one his titles on the front page of his books.See the glossary entry on "The Academy of Moral and Political Sciences."

1700 Molinari wrote the entry on usury in the DEP , giving the economists' perspective, which he describes as "a more or less imaginary offense," "Usure," DEP , vol. 2, pp. 790-95.

1701 "Whatsoever is added to the principal is Usury" from St. Ambrose, Commentary on Tobias (c. 370). Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum , vol. XXXII S. Ambrosii opera (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1897). "De Tobia," p. 546 #49.

1702 Proudhon introduces a new term into the debate here, "la prestation" (as in "Les prestations que se font réciproquement les producteurs") which means benefits, funds, performance, or even services. In this context he uses it to refer to the "benefits" gained from lending out capital to another person, which is how we translate it for the rest of this chapter. He also uses it in a more general sense in the phrase "mutuality of benefits" in addition to the expression the "mutuality of services" which Bastiat had also adopted. Elsewhere we translated "prestation" as "tax" as it is sometimes used in this context as well. This of course only clouds the debate as Bastiat and Proudhon continue to argue at cross purposes. We will continue to translate "les prestations" (benefits) and "les services" (services) differently in order to show this difference between the two theorists.

1703 Proudhon ignores the fact that different activities might yield different amounts of profit and be assessed differently for risk, or that there might be different degrees of scarcity for different goods and services which would affect the rate of return.

1704 This Keynesian-like theory of the "circulation" or "velocity" on money is addressed by Bastiat later. See, pp. 000.

1705 The Bank of France was modeled on the Bank of England and was founded as a private bank in 1800 with Napoleon as one of the shareholders. It was granted a monopoly in issuing currency in 1803. Payment in specie upon demand was suspended twice in the 19th century, both times during revolutions - 1848-1850 and 1870-1875.

1706 interest rates regulated by state - info from GdM chap.??? 5% and 6%

1707 Bastiat also believed in a single tax but on income not capital. This would be low and would be used to eliminate all indirect taxes levied on food and other essentials. See the Editor's Introduction to "The Single Tax in England," above, pp. 000.

1708 The problem of antinomy (or paradox) was explored in some detail by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In his Critique of Judgement he stated that "The solution of an antinomy only depends on the possibility of showing that two apparently contradictory propositions do not contradict one another in fact, but that they may be consistent; although the explanation of the possibility of their concept may transcend our cognitive faculties." He identified 4 key antinomies in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science , which concerned the boundary of the universe in space and time, the composition of the world in simple and complex parts, the problem of nature and free will, and the relationship between necessary and contingent beings. See, Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement, translated with Introduction and Notes by J.H. Bernard (2nd ed. revised) (London: Macmillan, 1914). and Kant's Prolegomena and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. with a Biography and Introduction by Ernest Belfort Bax (2nd revised edition) (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891). Also, Cantini, Andrea, "Paradoxes and Contemporary Logic", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/paradoxes-contemporary-logic/>.

1709 The economists waged a long intellectual campaign against socialism throughout the 1840s and Bastiat played a leading role in this once he settled in Paris after 1845. The socialist case, or rather cases since there were several schools of socialist thought including Proudhon's, was put forward in a number of influential works, including Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail (1839); Proudhon, Qu'est-ce que la propriété? (1840), and Victor Considerant, Droit de propriété et du droit au travail (1848). This was countered by a series of works by the economists, such as Charles Dunoyer, La Liberté du travail (1845), Léon Faucher, Du droit au travail (1848), Michel Chevalier, Lettres sur l'Organisation du travail (1848), and the important anti-socialist pamphlets written by Bastiat between June 1848 and July 1850.

1710 See the glossary entry on "Saint-Simon."

1711 See the glossary entry on "Fourier."

1712 The Luxembourg Palace housed the Chamber of Peers from 1814 to the February 1848 Revolution, during which the socialist Louis Blanc and his supporters took over the building and made it the headquarters of the "Government Commission for the Workers" (known as the Luxembourg Commission). It was from here that Blanc ran the National Workshops program. See the glossary entries on "Blanc," "The National Workshops," and "The Luxembourg Palace."

1713 Among Proudhon's many criticisms of socialism see in particular the articles collected from his small journals published during the Revolution: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mélanges: Articles de journaux, 1848-1852. 3 vols. (Paris: Librairie internationale, 1868-71), especially the articles criticising Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux in vol. 3 and his essay "Le Socialisme jugé par M. Proudhon," vol. 2, pp. 172-80, in which Proudhon claims he is not a communist but an-anti-statist "mutualist."

1714 Proudhon developed his Hegelian theory of the evolution of society as well as his theory of the history of ideas in a book which was strangely enough published by the Guillaumin firm which normally published all the economists' writings: Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère , 2 Volumes (Paris: Guillaumin, 1846). This was reviewed critically by Molinari, review of "Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère, par J.-P. Proudhon," JDE, T. 18, N° 72, Novembre 1847, pp. 383-98.

1715 In Greek legend, Damocles was a courtier in the court of King Dionysius who announced that the King was not only powerful but also surrounded by great luxury. The King insisted that Damocles experience such power for himself on condition that he sit on the throne with a large hanging over his head suspended by a single horse hair. Damocles became scared for his life after sitting on the throne for a short period and asked to be returned to his normal duties. Cicero used the story of "the sword of Damocles" to argue that one cannot be truly happy when one is constantly afraid. Others like Shakespeare in Henry IV Part 2 have used the story to warn of the dangers inherent in kingly rule given the existence of rivals for the power of the throne ("Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown").

1716 Pyrrho (c. 360 BC – c. 270 BC) was a Greek philosopher who accompanied Alexander on his expedition to India where he became interested in Indian philosophy. Although he left no writings, he founded the school of Greek skepticism.

1717 The standard interpretation of early Greek and Roman economic thought among the economists was provided by Adolphe-Jérôme Blanqui, and Molinari discussed the history of criticisms of usury (including Proudhon's) in his article for the JDE: see, Adolphe-Jérôme Blanqui, Histoire de l'économie politique en Europe: depuis les Anciens jusqu'à nos jours; suivie d'une Bibliographie raisonnée des principaux ouvrages d'économie politique , 2 vols. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845). 3rd ed. (1st ed. 1837.); and Molinari, "Usure," DEP, vol. 2, pp. 790-95. See also the bibliography in Léon Faucher, "Intérêt" DEP, vol. 1, pp. 953-70.

1718 The idea that the deprivation experienced by the lender must be a major element in the legitimacy of interest was expressed by Gustave de Molinari, "Lettre sur le prêt à intérêt," JDE T.23, no. 99, 15 juin 1849, pp. 231-41. In this essay Molinari praises Bastiat for attempting in his pamphlet Capital et rente to refute Proudhon's views on interest which he regards as "l'hérésie économique" (economic heresy), but also criticises him for providing an incomplete defence of interest. Molinari argues that Turgot had a more satisfying theory of interest which he argued was a reimbursement to the lender for the "deprivation" he suffered by not using his capital himself (in other words, the opportunity cost to him of not using the capital for some other purpose), and as a premium paid for assuming risk of loss if the venture failed. Molinari then adds a number of other factors which he believes also contribute to justifying interest payments which Bastiat ignores, including "le travail du prêteur" (the labour of the lender), having "prévoyance" (foresight) in selecting ventures which might be profitable to lend money for, payment for forgoing immediate consumption for consumption in the future (an early statement of time preference, or what Molinari termed "transport du travail dans le temps" (the transport of labour through time), p. 233, or "cet échange de travail passée contre du travail futur" (this exchange of past labor for future labour), p. 234), and that the purpose of saving was to not loan money but to consume goods at some time in the future.

1719 Bastiat puns here on the noun "l'usure" which can mean "wear and tear" of something like a tool, or "usury," the charging of high interest for a loan.

1720 Bastiat has made up this word, "le charpentier-capitaliste" (the carpenter as capitalist).

1721 Bastiat expressed similar concerns in his "Draft Preface to the Economic Harmonies " (written possibly in Sept. 1847 when he began giving lectures on political economy) where he chastises himself for losing sight of the bigger picture by having focussed all of his attention on the free trade movement. He says that by focusing on "a single crust of dry bread" he was in danger of losing sight of "what was grand and majestic in the whole". See, CW1, pp. 316-20. In the following passage on leisure he argues that we must not lose sight of what the purpose of labour is ultimately for. See the glossary entry on "Social Economy."

1722 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German philosopher who taught for many years at the University of Koenigsberg. He made pivotal contributions to the study of ethics and epistemology and was a leading figure in the German Enlightenment.

1723 Such as Karl Marx whom Proudhon met in Paris towards the end of 1844 and later corresponded in 1846. See, "Introduction" to Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Edited and with an Introduction by Stewart Edwards. Translated by Elizabeth Fraser (London: Macmillan, 1969).

1724 Proclus Lycaeus (412-485 AD) was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher whose commentaries on Plato were very influential.

1725 St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was born near Aquino, Sicily and was an Italian Dominican theologian whose scholarship propelled him to the first rank among the Scholastics of the Middle Ages. His major works are the Summa theologica and the Summa contra gentiles .

1726 René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French philosopher and mathematician who lived much of his life in the Dutch republic. His best known works are Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and Discourse on Method (1637) which laid the foundation for modern rationalism.

1727 Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) was a German idealist philosopher who was much influenced by Immanuel Kant. He wrote on atheism (for which he was dismissed from one teaching position), the impact of the French Revolution, natural law, the autarkic nation state, and German nationalism.

1728 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a German idealist philosopher whose work on dialectics had a big impact on the thinking of Karl Marx. He believed that the State was the culmination of social and political evolution.

1729 Thomas Diafoirus is the pedantic doctor from Molière's play Le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid, or the Hypocondriac) (1673) who likes to use overly complicated medical and scientific language. He is however, not very concerned with the actual health of his patients. It is interesting that Proudhon would quote Molière to Bastiat as the latter often used Molière in his own writing to make fun of protectionists. See for example ES2 9 "Theft by Subsidy" CW3, pp. 170-709, where Bastiat parodies Molière's own parody of doctors.

1730 "Distinguo" (I distinguish, or I make a distinction) was used in Latin debates to avoid giving a direct "yes" or "no" answer to a question. The answer would be in the form, "yes in one sense, but no in another."

1731 Pellegrino Rossi (1787-1848).

1732 King Louis IX (1214-1270) was cannonised by the Catholic Church in 1297 and was therefore also known as "Saint Louis." During his reign Louis expanded the size of France by seizing Normandy, Maine, Provence, Languedoc. He also participated in the Seventh and Eighth Crusades, eventually catching dysentery on the last one and dying. As a staunch Catholic, Louis attempted to ban blasphemy, prostitution, gambling, and most interesting for our purposes here, the charging of interest on loans.

1733 On the night of August 4, 1789 the National Constituent Assembly voted to abolish the seigneurial rights of the Nobility and the Church.

1734 Proudhon is best known for his slogan that "property is theft" which is his answer to the question he posed in his book "what is property?" Proudhon Qu'est-ce que la propriété? ou Recherches sur le principe du Droit et du Gouvernement. Premier mémoire (Paris: J.-F. Brocard, 1840).

1735 Mascarille was an unscrupulous servant in Molière's play Les précieuses ridicules (The Ridiculous Precious Ladies) (1659). He mascarades as his aristocratic employer after he had been rejected by one of the precious ladies as a potential husband. Molière himself played Mascarille when the play was first performed. The line "stop thief" comes during some word play with one of the ladies about how she has stolen his heart like a thief in the night. Œuvres complètes de Molière. Avec des notes de tous les commentateurs (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1843), "Les précieuses ridicules," scene x, p. 94.

1736 This is of course something Bastiat could not admit given the fact that he based his moral and legal theory on natural rights which argued that there was a universal human nature which existed in all places and at all times; and the fact that he like the other political economists believed that economics was a science and that economic theorists could identify natural laws which governed how the economy worked. Bastiat's friend and colleague Gustave de Molinari explored this in much greater length in several works, beginning with a book he published in mid-1849, Evenings on Saint Lazarus Street: Discussions on Economic Laws and the Defence of Property (1849). Whereas, Proudhon argued that something could be "accepted as true" in one period and not at a later one; while Bastiat argued that just because something is accepted as true does not make it so.

1737 In his Système des contradictions économiques (1846) Proudhon has a complex 10 stage theory of economic evolution which begins with the stage of "The Division of Labour", and moves through "Competition" (3), "Monopoly" (4), "Credit" (7), and "Community" (9).

1738 Corsairs were buccaneers or pirates who operated off the north coast of Africa between the 16th and 18th centuries. They were also known as "Barbary pirates." One of the most famous of their many captives was Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote , who was captured in 1575 and then released after 5 years after his family paid the ransom money.

1739 See the Editor's Introduction for a discussion of Say's theory of the contribution of transport, both geographical and temporal, to productive activity and Proudhon's misunderstanding of this.

1740 At the Battle of the Caudine Forks (c. 321 BCE), a Roman army was ambushed in a narrow mountain pass near the town of Caudium in central Italy, decisively defeated, and publicly humiliated by the Samnites who forced the soldiers to march under a yoke to show their submission. Proudhon's application of the metaphor is unclear, but perhaps what he means is that we all have to make the humiliating admission of complicity in interest.

1741 There are some striking similarities in the religious views of Proudhon and Bastiat. Proudhon was a deist who rejected the teachings of the Church but he was however a Free Mason who was initiated into a Lodge called "Sincérité, Parfaite Union et Constante Amitié" (Sincerity, Perfect Union, and Constant Friendship) in Besançon (the town of his birth) in January 1847. He explained his objections to organised religion in De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l'Église. Nouveaux principes de philosophie pratique (Paris: Garnier, 1858). Likewise, Bastiat was a Mason joining a Lodge, "La Zélée" (The Zealot), in Bayonne in his early twenties. He too was probably a deist although he referred to Providence and the harmonious order he believed it created in the world on many occasions in his writings. Like Proudhon, Bastiat thought established religion had been instrumental in creating a society based upon organised plunder, referring to "theocratic plunder" in the outline he wrote of his never finished "History of Plunder." Unlike Proudhon, it seems that Bastiat became stronger in his religious views in the last year of his life, especially in his pamphlet The Law (June 1850), and that he was willing to take the last sacrament at the hands of his cousin who was a priest.

1742 Proudhon made this provocative statement on page 1 of his book Qu'est-ce que la propriété? ou Recherches sur le principe du Droit et du Gouvernement. Premier mémoire (Paris: J.-F. Brocard, 1840). The entire paragraph reads: "If I had to answer the following question, "What is slavery?" and do so in a single word, I would reply "It is murder", and my thinking would be understood immediately. I would not need a long discussion to show that the power to deprive a man of his thoughts, his will, and his personality is a power of life and death, and that to enslave a man is to murder him. So why then couldn't I answer this other question "What is property?" the same way, that "It is theft", without having the certainty of being misunderstood, although this second statement is only a transformation of the first?" He then spends the next 244 pages making the case for this claim.

1743 Both Bastiat and Proudhon attacked the ideas of Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux. Bastiat specifically focused on Louis Blanc in his anti-socialist pamphlets "Property and Law" (15 May 1848) in CW2, pp. 43-59, and "Individualism and Fraternity" (June 1848) in CW2, pp. 82-92; and Pierre Leroux in "Justice and Fraternity" (June 1848) in CW2, CW1, pp. 60-81. Proudhon attacked them in a series of articles in La Voix du peuple beginning in Nov. 1849 and continuing until Jan. 1850. See, Mélanges , vol. 3, pp. 1-85.

1744 Pierre Leroux (1798-1871) was a prominent member of the Saint-Simonian group of socialists and founder of Le Globe , a review of the Saint-Simonists. He was a journalist during the 1840s and was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848 and to the Legislative Assembly in 1849. His most developed exposition of his ideas can be found in De l'Humanité (1840) and also in De la ploutocratie, ou, Du gouvernement des riches (1848).

1745 Bastiat's famous definition of the State which he coined in June 1848 was "L'État, c'est la grande fiction à travers laquelle tout le monde s'efforce de vivre aux dépens de tout le monde" (The state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.), "The State" (Sept. 1848), in CW2, p. 97.

1746 Proudhon, "Résistance à la Révolution. Louis Blanc et Pierre Leroux", La Voix du peuple , no. 65, 3 dec. 1849, in Proudhon, Mélanges vol. 3, pp. 5-30.

1747 This quotation is a summary of John Law's thinking about paper money. It is not an actual quote. It comes from Eugène Daire's "Notice historique sur Jean Law, ses écrits et ses opérations du système" in vol. 1 of the Collection des principaux économistes published by Guillaumin in 15 volumes between 1840 and 1848. See, Économistes financiers du XVIIIe siècle. Vauban, Projet d'une dîme royale. Boisguillebert, Détail de la France, Factum de la France, et opuscules divers. Jean Law, Considérations sur le numéraire et le commerce. Mémoires et lettres sur les banques, opuscules divers. Melon, Essai politique sur le commerce. Dutot, Réflexions politiques sur le commerce et les finances. Précédés de notices historiques sur chaque auteur, et accompagnés de commentaires et de notes explicatives, par M. Eugène Daire (Paris: Guillaumin, 1843), pp. 423-24 for Daire's discussion.

1748 Bastiat uses the phrase "des libres banques" for the first time here. In a later Letter 12 he has a lengthy defence of "free banking" by which he means the competitive issuing of currency by privately owned banks in the absence of a government protected monopoly Central Bank, below, pp. 000. This idea was explored in depth by the economists Charles Coquelin, Du Crédit et des Banques (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848) and "Banques" DEP, vol. 1, pp. 107-45. See the glossary entry on "Free Banking."

1749 Here Bastiat talks about another kind of "banques libres" established by and for the workers themselves. His model for these voluntary cooperative banks came from the experience of free banking in the United States at this time. See below for details, pp. 000. Proudhon on the other hand initially wanted the Bank of France (the legally privileged "national bank") to take the lead in establishing free or very low interest loans for workers. later he argued for smaller "Peoples Banks" or "Exchange Banks" to be set up, and even tried unsuccessfully launch his own bank through subscriptions much along the lines suggested here by Bastiat.

1750 In Letter 3, above, pp. 000.

1751 A few years after the revolution Horace Say provided data on the average daily wages of 13 groups of workers in the Paris area, including unskilled labourers who earned 2.50 to 3 fr per day; stone masons 5 fr.; tailors 4 fr.; textile factory workers 4.30 fr.; metal workers 4.25 fr.; and printers 3.50 fr. Horace Say, "Du taux des salaires à Paris," JDE, 2nd. série, T. VII, no. 7, 15 Juillet 1855, pp. 17-27.

1752 Throughout this Letter Proudhon refers to societies in the past which rejected the moral legitimacy of charging interest for loans. He uses the following words which were used for "interest": Nescheck (Hebrew), Tokos (Greek), Foenus (Latin), and Interesse (Medieval Latin).

1753 Also throughout this Letter Proudhon refers to two historical practices for insuring cargo carried in maritime trade which he believed were legitimate at the time but which are no longer legitimate in the present day. The terms are: "le contrat de pacotille" which were contracts for small quantities of private cargo made by several individual traders; and "le contrat à la grosse" which were whole ship cargo contracts in which the entire ship and its contents were put up as collateral for any losses at sea. The latter was also called in English "bottomry." For the sake of simplicity we have translated "le contrat à la grosse" as "whole ship contracts" and "le contrat de pacotille" as "private cargo contracts."

1754 Proudhon was in prison when he was writing these Letters for having offended the President of the Republic in print. No doubt the police were watching his magazine carefully to monitor what he was saying.

1755 Proudhon is referring to his own efforts in the Assembly to introduce legislation to simplify and reduce taxes in July 1848. These were overwhelming voted down by the Chamber. See footnote above, pp. 000.

1756 The development of railways in France began in earnest in the late 1830s and early 1840s with considerable collaboration between private companies and the government. Under the Railway Law of 11 June 1842 the government ruled that 5 main railways would be built radiating out of Paris which would be built in cooperation with private industry. The established road transport operators were naturally suspicious of this new kind of competition.

1757 French law at this time recognized only three kinds of business association: "la société en nom collectif" (partnerships), "la société en commandite" (limited partnerships), and "la société anonyme" (public limited companies) and legislated the maximum rate of interest for each type of company . Here the discussion concerns "la commandite" which were limited partnerships, also sometimes referred to as "silent or sleeping" partnerships. See, Renouard, "Sociétés commercials," DEP, vol. 2, pp. 647-50.

1758 Tyre was a city in Lebanon famous for producing purple dye used in making colourful cloth.

1759 Like Bastiat at this time, Proudhon also seems to be toying with a subjective theory of value which was ahead of its time. The key idea is that each person values goods and services differently (i.e. it is "subjectively" valued), that there is no absolute or "objective" way of evaluating the worth of goods and services (such as the amount of labour or "labour time" they "embody"), and that it is the differences in the way individuals value goods and services which provides opportunities for mutually beneficial trade.

1760 "Interesse" - a Medieval Latin word for "interest"; from inter, "between" or "among," and esse, "to be," hence "to be among," "to take part in" "to share in."

1761 Proudhon uses the Latin work "alea" which means the die used in games of chance.

1762 The Latin word "faenus" or "fenus" meaning the profit of capital, interest, usury. See, Charlton T. Lewis, An Elementary Latin Dictionary (New York: American Book Company, 1890), p. 313.

1763 The Greek word "tokus" meaning interest earned on lending money.

1764 The Hebrew word "neshek" meaning interest or usury.

1765 "Lend not to your neighbour, but to the stranger." Proudhon is slightly misquoting the Vulgate: Non fœnerabis fratri tuo ad usuram pecuniam, nec fruges, nec quamlibet aliam rem; sed alieno, "Lend not money at interest to your brother, nor food nor anything else; but to the stranger," Deuteronomy 23:19-20.

1766 Solon (640-558 BC) was an Athenian political leader and legislator who contributed to the birth of Athenian democracy with his legendary constitutional and economic reforms. Among his economic "reforms" were the banning of exports of grain and other products from the city, the ending of the practice of Athenians enslaving fellow Athenians, and debt repudiation for landholders.

1767 "La République démocratique et sociale" (the democratic and social Republic) was the name given to the kind of republic desired by the left in 1848. It was also used as the subtitle of one of Proudhon's magazines in late 1848: Le peuple: Journal de la République démocratique et sociale (1 Nov. 1848-13 June 1849 (no. 1-206)).

1768 Lycurgus (8th century BC) was a mythical Greek legislator to whom were attributed the severe laws of Sparta. These laws enshrined the virtues of martial order, simplicity of family and personal life, and shared communal living. His counterpart in Athens was Solon. (See entry for Solon.). In the eighteenth century it was common among social theorists to regard Athens and Sparta as polar opposites, with Athens representing commerce and the rule of law, and Sparta representing war and authoritarianism.

1769 The socialist Étienne Cabet (1788-1856) advocated a society in which the elected representatives controlled all property that was owned in common by the community. He named his fictitious communist community Icarie and in 1848 he left France in order to create such a community in Texas and then at Nauvoo, Illinois, but these efforts ended in failure.

1770 Letter 4.

1771 It is not clear where Proudhon gets this information from.

1772 A reference to the liberal Welsh philosopher Richard Price (1723-1791) who advocated the creation of a "sinking fund" into which budget surpluses could be placed in order to pay down the national debt. See, An Appeal to the Public, On the Subject of the National Debt (London: T. Cadell, 1772).

1773 Proudhon uses the terms "une caste de capitalistes exploiteurs, et une caste de travailleurs exploités." Liberals like Bastiat had a different division of society into the class of "les spoliateurs" (the plunders) and "les spoliés" (the plundered) membership of which group depended upon having access to political power in order to get special privileges and favours. However, Bastiat also used the term "caste" from time to time. See the glossary entry on "Bastiat's Theory of Plunder."

1774 France suffered two periods of economic downturn which made life very difficult for the poor. The first were the crop failures of 1846-47 which led to steep increases in the price of staples such as bread. This recession may well have contributed to the outbreak of Revolution in February 1848. Following the Revolution the French economy came to a standstill as a result of political uncertainty, the upheavals caused by street riots and their repression by troops, the collapse in tax collection, and the blowout in the budget caused by new socialist programs such as the National Workshops. This lead to an economic recession of which lasted for most of 1848-49.

1775 In an elaboration of what his law of population meant in practice which Malthus included in the 2nd revised edition of 1803 (but removed in later editions) was the following harsh statement about who could or could not be admitted to a seat at "nature's mighty feast": "A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he does not work upon the compassion of some of her guests." The passage comes from Book IV, Chapter VI "Effects of the Knowledge of the Principal Cause of Poverty On Civil Liberty" in Thomas Robert Malthus, An essay on the principle of population (1803, 2nd revised ed.), p. 531. It was seized upon by Proudhon who harshly criticised the economists for being "sans entrailles" (heartless) in the willingness to condemn the poor for the hardship they suffered as a result of having large families.

1776 Possibly a reference to Anne Campbell (1715-1785) the wife of William Wentworth, the Second Earl of Strafford (1722-1791). They owned Wentworth Castle in Yorkshire and moved in Horace Walpole's social circle. Joshua Reynolds painted her portrait.

1777 Following the crackdown on political protesters who took part in the June Days riots of June 1848 many thousands were arrested, tried, executed, exiled, or transported. The army under General Cavaignac was used to suppress the rioting which resulted in the death of about 1,500 people and the arrest of 15,000 (over 4,000 of whom were sentenced to transportation). The Assembly immediately declared a state of siege (martial law) in Paris and gave Cavaignac full executive power which lasted until October.

1778 In fact Say says the exact opposite in Cours complet , vol. 1, (Guillaumin, 1852) p. 108, where he has a long passage explaining the activities of several groups of individuals who are essential for the production of useful things. He discusses the functions of the land owner, the capitalist (a word Say uses too), the skilled worker, and the entrepreneur who brings all the different groups together and coordinates their activities for "a single end" (to produce and sell useful things to customers). Concerning the capitalist, Say notes that he has choices about how his capital might be invested (i.e. opportunity costs) and one of his productive contributions is to identify what are the most productive and hence profitable activities to invest in. He thus concludes that capitalists are also part of "la classe des producteurs" (the class of producers).

1779 Proudhon does not reveal the name of the island until the end of the Letter.

1780 Proudhon no doubt knew of Bastiat's earlier use of the Robinson Crusoe story to illustrate the nature of economic thinking and how economic choices were made by individual actors (starting with Robinson) and then between two or more actors (Friday and then visitor). Bastiat's use of these "thought experiments" to explain economic decision making was original and establish him as a proto-Austrian twenty years ahead of his time. Murray Rothbard in particular acknowledged this in Man, Economy, and State (1962). Proudhon as well made use of the Crusoe story as early as 1840 in What is Property? where he does not mention Crusoe by name, merely an unidentified "naufragé" (ship wrecked sailor) who is in a boat with provisions but refuses to let another person in the water to come aboard. (See, 1840 ed., p. 191.) The story that follows here is an expansion of that and Crusoe is now identified by name.

1781 This is an example of the common anti-semitism of the day. Bastiat also sometimes used similar phrases. See above, pp. 000.

1782 Proudhon paraphrases Bastiat's "reflection on leisure" which he gives at the end of Letter 4 where he talks about leisure and how accumulated capital makes more leisure possible. See, above, pp. 000.

1783 A reference to Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel in which Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked on the Island of Despair.

1784 Such as Proudhon himself on the "Peoples Bank," the socialist Montagnard group within the National Assembly who advocated a tax on capital, Louis Blanc on the National Workshops, and Charles Fourier on the organisation of work in "Phalanxes."

1785 Above, pp. 000.

1786 From Proudhon, Confessions d'un Révolutionnaire pour servir à l'histoire de la Révolution du Février (Paris: Au Bureau du journal La Voix du Peuple, 1849), p. 76; reprinted in Oeuvres complètes de P.-J. Proudhon. Tome IX (Paris: A. Lacroix, 1868), Chap. XV Banque du Peuple," p. 213.

1787 Bastiat debunked this idea in ES1 11 "Nominal Prices" (Oct. 1845), CW3, pp. 61-64, and Damned Money! (April 1849), above pp. 000.

1788 "Non foenerabis fratri tuo foenus pecuniae, foenus cibi, foenus cujuscunque rei in qua foenus exercetur." (Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury.) Deut. xxiii, 20, 21: 19: 19.

1789 See for example the account in Adolphe-Jérôme Blanqui, Histoire de l'économie politique en Europe: depuis les Anciens jusqu'à nos jours; suivie d'une Bibliographie raisonnée des principaux ouvrages d'économie politique , 2 vols. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845). 3rd ed. (1st ed. 1837.). Vol. 1, Chapter IX, pp. 141-54.

1790 See the glossary entry on "Social Economy."

1791 Luke 6: 35: "verumtamen diligite inimicos vestros et benefacite et mutuum date nihil desperantes et erit merces vestra multa et eritis filii Altissimi quia ipse benignus est super ingratos et malos" (But love ye your enemies: do good, and lend, hoping for nothing thereby: and your reward shall be great, and you shall be the sons of the Highest. For he is kind to the unthankful and to the evil.) Latin Vulgate.

1792 Verses in order: Matthew 5-11, Luke 6:21-22; Matthew 26:11, Mark 14:7, John 12:8; Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17, Luke 20:25; Romans 13:1-7, Ephesians 6:5, Colossians 3:22, 1 Timothy 6:1, Titus 2:9, 1 Peter 2:18; Matthew 6:25-34, Luke 12:22-32; Matthew 5:39-40, Luke 6:29.

1793 Today, philosophers talk about contrast the moral choices which might be made in extreme "life-boat situations" vs normal social and economic conditions. It should be noted that Proudhon in What is Property? and "Letter 7" literally used such a life boat situation in his discussion.

1794 Letter 6, above, pp. 000.

1795 Shoemakers used a "last" made from wood or iron in the shape of a human foot to hold the shoe while the leather upper was tacked onto the sole.

1796 Bastiat uses the word "la rente" (rent) and not "intérêt" (interest) here, but interest is what is meant.

1797 [See the long Note at end of chapter.]

1798 Bastiat uses the word "l'association" (partnership or business association), which was also often used by the socialists, to make his point that for-profit businesses were also forms of association between capital and labour.

1799 Bastiat uses the phrase "l'infâme capital" (infamous or vile capital) which reminds one of Voltaire's description of the Church as "l'Infâme" (the infamous or vile one).

1800 This is similar to one of Zeno's paradoxes, the "dichotomy paradox.

1801 This is not a direct quote. Proudhon is paraphrasing Bastiat.

1802 Proudhon paraphrases Bastiat again.

1803 Pope Pius IX (1792-1878) was born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti and served as Pope from 16 June 1846 to his death in 1878. He became Pope only 3 years before this exchange between Proudhon and Bastiat took place.

1804 Bastiat was not a full member of the Academy but a "corresponding" member. He was elected to that position on 24 Jan. 1846. See the the glossary entry on "The Academy of Moral and Political Sciences."

1805 Bastiat was elected to the new Constituent Assembly of the Second Republic to represent the département of Les Landes on 23 April 1848. He was nominated by the Assembly to the Finance Committee to which he was reappointed 8 times. Part of his duties included giving reports of the Committee's activities to the Chamber on a periodic basis. He served as its VP until he took a leave of absence in February 1850 due to his failing health.

1806 Bastiat was an active member of an international association called the Friends of Peace and took a great interest in their congresses in spite of finding it difficult to attend them because of his declining health. Because of his ill health and political commitments Bastiat was only able to attend the Paris congress in August 1849 at which he gave an address on "Disarmament, Taxes, and the Influence of Political Economy on the Peace Movement," see above, pp. 000.See the glossary on "Peace Congress."

1807 There was no such group as the "Anglo-French League for Free Trade" which is an invention of Proudhon, possibly designed to impugn the French free trade movement with an English connection. In England there was the "Anti-Corn Law League" founded by Richard Cobden and John Bright in 1838. In 1846 a French Free Trade Association began modelled on that of the Cobden's and Bastiat was made the editor of its journal Le Libre-Échange. See the glossary entries on "Association pour la liberté des échanges (Free Trade Association)" and "The Anti-Corn Law League."

1808 The Institute's address was La place de l'Institut, with an entrance off the quai de Conti. The Banque de France was on the rue de la Vrillière in the 1st Arrondissement in Paris. They were only 1.1 km apart and it would take 15 minutes to walk between them.

1809 Antoine Maurice Appolinaire, Comte d'Argout (1782-1858), was the Minister for the Navy and Colonies, then Commerce, and Public Works during the July Monarchy. In 1834 he was appointed Governor of the Bank of France, a position he held until 1857.

1810 Gilbert-Urbain Guillaumin (1801-1864) was a mid-19th century French classical liberal publisher who founded a publishing dynasty which lasted from 1835 to around 1910 and became the focal point for the classical liberal movement in France. He became a publisher in 1835 in order to popularize and promote classical liberal economic ideas, and the firm of Guillaumin eventually became the major publishing house for liberal ideas in the mid nineteenth century.

1811 The Bank of France was modeled on the Bank of England and was founded as a private bank in 1800 with Napoleon as one of the shareholders. It was granted a monopoly in issuing currency in 1803. Payment in specie upon demand was suspended twice in the 19th century, both times during revolutions - 1848-1850 and 1870-1875. The banks of the different Départmentes were merged into the Bank of France in 1848 in an attempt to solve the fiscal crisis brought on by the Revolution.

1812 See the glossary entries on "Fonteyraud" and "The Cholera Outbreak of 1849."

1813 The capital of the Banque de France on 10 May 1849 was declared to be 91,250,000 fr. See, Courcelle-Seneuil and Paul Coq, "Banque, Banquier," in Dictionnaire universel théorique et pratique du Commerce et de la Navigation (Paris: Guillaumin, 1859), vol. 1, p. 240. See also the official Report for the year 1849 by Argout, the Governor of the Bank, in "Opérations des banques publiques en France pendant l'année 1849. Rapport annuel de M. d'Argout, gouverneur de la Banque" in Annuaire de l'économie politique et de la statistique pour 1851 , par MM. Joseph Garnier et Guillaumin (Paris: Guillaumin, 1851), pp. 62-83.

1814 Proudhon uses a term "fictif" (fictitious, false, fake) which Bastiat also liked to use. Bastiat contrasted "francs fictifs" (imaginary or false francs) and "francs métalliques" (gold francs). Here Proudhon makes a similar distinction between "le capital fictif" (fictitious or false capital) and "le capital réel" (genuine or real capital).

1815 The French saying "appeler un chat un chat" can be translated into English as "to call a spade a spade." The quote comes from one of the Satires of Nicolas Boileau Despréaux (1636-1711) who immortalised Charles Rollet, a 17th century lawyer who was fined and banished for defrauding his clients. See, Oeuvres de Boileau-Despréaux, avec un commentaire par M. de Saint-Surin. (Paris: J.J. Blaise, 1821). Volume 1, p. 81.

1816 Again, Proudhon is very similar to Bastiat in wanting to use "harsh language". Bastiat had come to the same conclusion in January 1846 when he decided to call subsidies to industry "theft" in ES2 9 "Theft by Subsidy" (Jan. 1846, JDE) - "Frankly, my good people, you are being robbed. That is plain speaking but at least it is clear." CW3, p. 171.

1817 It is not clear where Proudhon gets this figure of 431 million fr. According to Courcelle-Seneuil and Paul Coq, the figure for "billets au porteur en circulation" (notes in circulation) for 1849 was 411 million fr., "Banque, Banquier," in Dictionnaire universel théorique et pratique du Commerce et de la Navigation , vol. 1, p. 240.

1818 This is another example of Proudhon inventing a new term - "le parasitisme gouvernemental et propriétaire".

1819 Another example of the similarity in ideas between Bastiat, Molinari, and Proudhon on the existence of a non-producing, plunder class who lived off ordinary people. In this paragraph Proudhon contrasts "la classe travailleuse" (the labouring classe) and"la classe parasite" (the parasitic class).

1820 The population of France at this time was about 35-36 million people.

1821 See the data provided by Courcelle-Seneuil and Paul Coq, "Banque, Banquier," in Dictionnaire universel théorique et pratique du Commerce et de la Navigation (Paris: Guillaumin, 1859), vol. 1, p. 240.

1822 The figure of 12 billion fr. of secured or mortgaged debt in France is mentioned by Charles Barre (quoting Wolowski, p. 105) and Coffinières (p. 206). See, Charles Barre, Du crédit et des banques hypothécaires (Paris: Guillaumine, 1849); A. S. G. Coffinières, Etudes sur le budget et spécialement sur l'impôt foncier (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848). Also "Chroniques", pp. 172 ff. JDE, T. 20, no. 79, 1 mai 1848, Horace Say, "Premières idées du nouveau Ministre des Finances," JDE, T.20, no. 84, 15 juillet, pp. 427-34; and "Bulletin. Opérations des Banques publiques en France pendant l'année 1848" - Compte rendu, au nom du Conseil Général de la Banque, par M. d'Argout, Gouverneur," JDE, T. 22, no. 96, 15 mars 1849, pp. 426-39.

1823 In 1849 the interest paid on the national debt amounted to 455 million fr. See, Appendix on "French Government Finances 1848-49"??

1824 Proudhon uses the expression "ateliers de l'usure et de l'intérêt" (workshops) in a disparaging way here.

1825 Another neo-logisim by Proudhon "le capital-argent" (money as capital).

1826 Proudhon is very vague about which economist he has in mind and we have not been able to track the reference down.

1827 The Saint-Simonian socialist Pierre Leroux (1798-1871) based his social theory on groups of three (triads), borrowing from the Pythagorean philosophy of numbers. In "Doctrine de l'humanité", p. 15 ff. he has an elaborate social structure based upon various "trinities" such as "property, family, city", "liberty, fraternity, equality", and "citizens, associates, and functionaries." See, Pierre Leroux, De l'égalité (Boussac, Imprimerie de Pierre Leroux, 1848).

1828 In Le Nouveau Monde of December 15 1849 , a paper that he had launched in London, Louis Blanc blamed Proudhon "for having reserved for M. Bastiat, the defender of interest on loans, …all the urbanity of his polemic." Le nouveau monde, revue historique et politique, par Louis Blanc . No. 6 - Décembre 1849. (Bruxelles: Ve Wouters, 1849). "Un homme et une doctrine. Aux délégués du Luxembourg." 3. "D'une destination ultérieur de l'état," pp. 227-28.

1829 Which Proudhon explores in great detail in is book in Système des contradictions économiques, ou philosophy de la misère (Paris: Guillaumin, 1846).

1830 Letter 7, above, pp. 000. "si la peine de créancier est zéro, l'intérêt doit devenir zéro."

1831 Letter 9, above, pp. 000. "le produit net ne se distingue pas du produit brut ; de même, dans l'ensemble des faits économiques, le capital ne se distingue pas du produit . Ces deux termes ne désignent point en réalité deux choses distinctes ; ils ne désignent que des relations. Produit, c'est capital ; capital, c'est produit "

1832 One franc is worth twenty sou, and 300 francs therefore worth 6,000 sous.

1833 That is, "la gratuité du travail" (unpaid labour).

1834 Bastiat says "la liberté des transactions" which might also mean freedom of commerce or any other kind of economic activity.

1835 Charles Coquelin wrote a series of articles on free banking in the early 1840s for La Revue des Deux-Mondes and these ideas were further developed in his major book on the subject, Du Crédit et des Banques (Paris: Guillaumin, 1848). See the glossary entry on "Coquelin."

1836 The reference is to French rationalist philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) and his doctrine of the relation of human to divine cognition.

1837 Bastiat uses the interesting phrases "des boutiques d'argent" (shops where money is sold) and "des bureaux de prêt et d'emprunt" (offices where one can get loans and borrow money).

1838 This letter was printed in January 1850 and Bastiat must have known he was dying from his throat condition. He would be dead on Christmas eve later that same year.

1839 See another amusing reductio ad absurdum argument which is Bastiat's stock in trade in"Capital and Rent" (above, pp. 000) where he talks about breeding a sheep with no head. "The sophism that I am combating here is rooted in the possibility of dividing something infinitely, which applies to value as well as to materials." The sophism here that he is refuting is "the pretence that what in this world is regarded as bad can be a remedy."

1840 Which of course Proudhon did in Système des contradictions économiques, ou philosophy de la misère (The System of Economics Contradictions, the Philosophy of Poverty) (1846).

1841 From the Pensées of French essayist Joseph Joubert (1754-1825). Pensée XVIII, in Pensées, Essais. Maximes et Correspondance de J. Joubert. Recueillis et mis en ordre par M. Paul Raynal, et précédés d'une notice sur sa vie, son caractère et ses travaux. Seconde édition revue et augmentée. Tome deuxième (Paris: Ve le Normant, 1850), p. 178.

1842 Bastiat's worsening throat condition made it very difficult for him to speak, especially in the Chamber.

1843 La Patrie was an independent newspaper founded in 1841. It initially supported Guizot's government but became increasingly critical after 1846. After the Revolution of 1848 and the creation of the Second Republic it remained a supporter of constitutional monarchy and supported Louis Napoléon's bid for the presidency in December 1848.

1844 Bastiat gave a summary of his views in a speech in the Chamber on 12 December, 1849 (3 weeks before he wrote this letter) on "The Tax on Wines and Spirits" in which he stated, "The number of things included in the essential attributions of the government is very limited: to ensure order and security, to keep each person within the limits of justice, that is to say, to repress misdemeanors and crimes, and to carry out a few major public works of national utility. These are, I believe, its essential attributions, and we will have no peace, no financial wherewithal, and we will not destroy the hydra of revolution if we do not regain, little by little if you like, this limited governance toward which we should be aiming." CW2, p. 343. Also in this speech Bastiat stated that he thought the government's annual budget of 1.57 billion fr. (1849) could and should be cut drastically to only to 200-300 million fr.

1845 Proudhon had been in prison for the entire duration of this debate with Bastiat. He had "offended the President of the Republic" with some articles he had written. This may partly explain his testiness, even rudeness, in the discussion.

1846 This is a reference to a debate that Proudhon had at the same time with Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux after the publication of his book Confession d'un révolutionnaire. It was a very strange polemic as Proudhon was in jail for offending the President, Blanc was exile in London following his involvement in the National Workshops and the crackdown after the June Days rioting of 1848 for which he was partly held responsible, and Leroux was still in Paris having been re-elected to the Chamber in May 1849 but would also go into exile after Louis Napoléon's coup d'état in December 1851. Leroux first went to London and then to the island of Jersey where he was a neighbour of the fellow exile Victor Hugo. See, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Les confessions d'un révolutionnaire: pour servir à l'histoire de la révolution de février (Paris: Garnier frères, 1850) 1st ed. Paris: Au Bureaux du Journal la Voix du Peuple, 1849).

1847 In the first edition of Say's Traité d'économie politique (1803) he defines capital as "L'accumulation des capitaux ne consiste donc pas dans l'accumulation des monnaies d'or et d'argent seulement, mais dans l'accumulation des produits quels qu'ils soient" (The accumulation of capital does not consist solely of the accumulation of money or gold, but in the accumulation of products whatever they might be), Jean-Baptiste Say, Traité d'économie politique ou simple exposition de la manière dont se forment, se distribuent et se consomment les richesses (Paris: Deterville, 1803), Tome 1, Livre Premier "De la Production," Chap. XIV "De quelle manière se forment les Capitaux,"p. 94. In a later edition (6th edition, Guillaumin 1841) Say changed his definition and talks about capital as "accumulation des valeurs produites" (the accumulation of things of value which have been produced), p. 572.

1848 In his Cours d'économie politique (1843) Pellegrino Rossi states that "Tout le produit du travail n'étant point consommé, il y a épargne; si l'épargne est appliquée comme force productive, la production s'accroît" (Since not all the product of labour is consumed, and if what is saved is used as a productive force, production will increase), in Pellegrino Rossi, Cours d'économie politique, Volume 1. 2nd ed. (Paris: G. Thorel, 1843), Deuxième leçon, p. 32.

1849 Joseph Garnier, Eléments de l'économie politique exposé des notions fondamentales de cette science (Paris: Guillaumin, 1846), Section 74, p. 32.

1850 Garnier states "Les fonctions d'un capital sont de fournir la valeur de ces avances, de se laisser consommer pour renaître sous d'autres formes, de se laisser consommer de nouveau pour renaître encore, et ainsi de suite, constamment, d'une manière productive" (The functions of capital are to supply these valuable advance payments, to let them be consumed again in order to be reborn in other forms, and then again and again indefinitely, in a productive manner). In Joseph Garnier, Eléments de l'économie politique exposé des notions fondamentales de cette science (Paris: Guillaumin, 1846), Section 199, p. 102.

1851 See Bastiat's definition of "capital" in the Editor's Introduction, above, pp. 000. In brief, he believed it was made up of three things, raw materials, tools, and provisions.

1852 Garnier, Eléments de l'économie politique , Section 68, p. 30.

1853 Garnier, Eléments de l'économie politique , Section 198, p. 100.

1854 Proudhon is probably referring to Say's classic distinction between productive and unproductive consumption in his Traité d'économie politique : "Par leur consommation, j'entends toute celle qu'ils font, de quelque nature qu'elle soit; aussi bien celle qui est improductive et qui satisfait à leurs besoins et à ceux de leur famille, que celle qui est reproductive et alimente leur industrie. " (By their consumption I include everything they make, of whatever kind it might be; also including that which is unproductive and which satisfies their needs and those of their family, as well as that which is reproductive and contributes to their industry), (Guillaumin 1841), p. 140.

1855 Proudhon uses the word "produit" which have translated as "product" or "output" depending on the context.

1856 After giving his definition of capital, Garnier goes on to give an answer to Proudhon's question about how product become converted into capital, which Proudhon ignores: "c'est l'entrepreneur qui le (les avances) consomme et le reproduit, soit que le capital lui appartienne en propre, soit qu'on le lui prête." (it is the entrepreneur who consumes it (the advance payments) and reproduces it, whether the capital belongs to him personally or whether he borrows it). Garnier, Eléments de l'économie politique , Section 199, p. 102.

1857 Proudhon uses the phrase "simple produit valeur" which we have translated as a "simple product with (some) value). It is a phrase coined by Proudhon.

1858 This idea is explicitly rejected by Bastiat in his stories about "Crusoe economics." The tools Crusoe creates (such as a fishing net) are just like any other kind of capital because they are created by a combination of forgoing present consumption and saving, in order to enable greater productivity and consumption sometime in the future.

1859 Not a lot is known about Georges Duchêne (1824-1876) other than that he was a friend of Proudhon, wrote a book with him on speculation, and was later a member of the Paris Commune in 1870. We could not locate the source of this quotation. See, Actualités. Livrets et prud'hommes (Paris: Bureau de la Société de l'industrie fraternelle, 1847); with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Manuel du spéculateur à la bourse. 5th ed. (Paris: Garnier frères, 1857).

1860 Proudhon introduces another new term here "la valeur faite" (value that has been created or made), which we have translated as "created value." Benjamin Tucker translated it as "realized value" in his 19th century translation of this text. The sense we are trying to convey is that capital is something that is created by men and women for a purpose, that it embodies previous work and effort, and that it has been evaluated by individuals as being something of value.

1861 A typical statement of Say's view can be found in Cours complet (Guillaumin, 1840), Septième partie, Des consommations opérées dans la société, CHAPITRE II. De l'objet qu'on se propose en consommant: "I have have shown production to be an exchange where one gives productive services (or what they cost), and where one receives products (or what they are worth). Likewise, one can show consumption to be another exchange in which one gives wealth one has acquired, or if you like services, and in which one receives satisfaction, or new wealth if you like, depending upon whether one's consumption is unproductive (sterile) or productive." p. 201-2.

1862 Another neologism: a "propriétaire-capitaliste-entrepreneur" (a landowner-capitalist entrepreneur), that is a capitalist-minded landowner who acts as a businessman or entrepreneur.

1863 Proudhon uses the phrase "le produit fait valeur" (the product made or transformed into value). He later makes considerable use of another related term "la valeur faite" which we translate as "made or created value".

1864 This is a reference to François Quesnay's Le Tableau économique (The Economic Table) (1758). This was an early attempt at input-output analysis which socialists and central planners in the 20th century thought would be able to replace the free market in solving the problem of what to produce. In a letter to Mirabeau, Quesnay explained its purpose: "I have tried to construct a fundamental Tableau of the economic order for the purpose of displaying expenditure and products in a way which is easy to grasp, and for the purpose of forming a clear opinion about the organization and disorganization which the government can bring about." In Ronald L. Meek, The Economics of Physiocracy. Essays and Translations (Fairfield, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1993. First edition 1962), p. 108. Quesnay's Tableau was republished as part of the Guillaumin firm's Collection des principaux économistes 15 vols. (1840-48). See, Quesnay, "Analyse de Tableau économique," in T. II. Physiocrates. Quesnay, Dupont de Nemours, Mercier de la Rivière, l'Abbé Baudeau, Le Trosne, avec une introduction sur la doctrine des Physiocrates, des commentaires et des notices historiques, par Eugène Daire (Paris: Guillaumin, 1846), vol. 2a, pp. 57-78.

1865 Literally "le capitaliste a mangé un travailleur" (the capitalist has eaten a worker).

1866 Another example of Proudhon's neologisms: " producteur-consommateur"

1867 This is another neologism of Proudhon, "les non-valeurs" (things of no value).

1868 This goes to the heart of the difference between Bastiat's and Proudhon's view of the production process. Bastiat would say that Proudhon ignores the role of the entrepreneur in finding an opportunity to satisfy a consumer need, the skills and knowledge of those who manage the project, the patience of the capitalist who lends the firm money, and the coordination of the different actors in the project. The labour of the worker is only one component of the process which needs to be paid.

1869 Another neologism: "la société consommatrice et reproductrice" (the consumer and producer firm or business) and "la société capitaliste et propriétaire" (the capitalist and landowning firm or business). In each case, Proudhon is treating each group as if it were acting as one person or one firm, for the sake of his argument.

1870 Proudhon uses the term "la société mutuelliste" (mutualist society or firm) which was similar in many ways to Louis Blanc's concept of workers' "organisations" or "workshops," but with the important difference that in Proudhon's world the firms or workshops would be owned by the workers or artisans and not by the state. Proudhon also seems to be sliding between using the word "la société" to mean both "society"in the broader sense and a business or firm in the narrow sense.

1871 It is not clear what Proudhon is referring to here. In P. Félix Thomas, Pierre Leroux: sa vie, son oeuvre, sa doctrine. Contribution à l'histoire des idées au XIX siècle (Paris: F. Alcan, 1904) there is a brief discussion of this dispute between Leroux and Proudhon but few details are provided, pp. 107-9

1872 Two more neologisms by Proudhon, "du propriétarisme, du bourgeoisisme."

1873 Proudhon is here making the point that the only people interested in maintaining the régime of usury were the old voting class which Bastiat called "la classe électorale." See the glossary on "The Chamber of Deputies and the Electoral Class."

1874 The name "démoc-socs" (democratic socialists) was given to the radical socialists and republicans in 1848-49 under the leadership of Armand Barbès and Alexandre-Auguste Ledru-Rollin. They were also known as "La Montagne" (the Mountain) after a similar group in the National Assembly and National Convention in the 1790s. Bastiat said he wrote his famous essay on "The State" (June, Sept. 1848) to oppose the arguments of the Montaigne faction. See, CW2, pp. 000.

1875 Here "conservatrice" (conservative) is meant in the sense of conserving or preserving, rather than politically conservative. The name for "Conservatives" in France in 1848-49 was "le Parti d'ordre" (the Party of Order) which consisted on monarchists, loyalists, and supporters of Louis Napoléon.

1876 In the period 1847-49 France had about 400,000 men in the Army and 118,000 men in the Navy for a total of about 500,000. Several economists, such as Ambroise Clément, noted that it was a curiosity that the number of "fonctionnaires" or public employees was also about 5-600,000 who in their minds constituted another kind of army. See, Ambroise Clément, "Fonctionnaire," DEP, vol. 1, pp. 787-89; Vivien, Etudes administratives par Vivien (Paris: Guillaumin, 1859) 3rd edition; Louis Reybaud, "Navigation," DEP, vol. 2, pp. 266-67; and "Marine" in Dictionnaire universel théorique et pratique de Commerce et de la Navigation (Paris: Guillaumin, 1859), T.1 A-G, pp. 274-5. State expenditure in 1849 was approximately 1.57 billion fr. thus Proudhon's statements about the number of state employees and expenditure are a bit of an exaggeration. See the Appendix on "French Government Finances 1848-49."

1877 Proudhon uses the term "la spoliation bancocratique" (bankocratic plunder) which was also used by Molinari in Les Soirées , 5th Evening, pp. 000. It is probably another neologism.

1878 "1792" is possibly a reference to the bi-partisan support for the war waged by France against its monarchist opponents, beginning with Austria in April 1792.

1879 Bastiat uses the term "la monnaie de papier" here for the first and only time in his writings. His usual term is "papier-monnaie" (paper money) so we have translated the former differently for emphasis.

1880 Bastiat uses the latin words "conclusum" (the conclusion), "ultimatum" (the last word), "desideratum" (the final goal ) which form part of a syllogism in logic.

1881 La Démocratie pacifique was a journal founded and edited by Victor Considérant to promote the socialist ideas of Fourier and the creation of "harmonious communities." It ran from 1843 to 1851.. See the glossary on "Phalanstery" and "Fourier."

1882 It is not clear what Proudhon means here.

1883 Bastiat usually contrasted "francs métalliques" (gold or silver francs) and "francs fictifs" (paper francs which were false, imaginary francs). Here he uses the phrase "la monnaie fictive."

1884 John Law (1671-1729) was a Scottish financier who worked for Louis XV to set up the first central bank funded by fiat paper money, believing that paper money was preferable to gold. He consolidated all the government chartered companies in French-controlled Louisiana into one monopoly company called the Mississippi Company which issued shares. An over issue of these shares caused a speculative bubble which burst catastrophically in 1720.

1885 A reference to the issuing of "Assignat" paper currency issued by the National Assembly between 1789 and 1796. They were originally issued as bonds based upon the value of the land confiscated from the church and the nobility("biens national") and were intended to pay off the national debt.See the glossary entry on "Assignat."

1886 Bastiat uses the expression "une fabrique inépuisable de papier-monnaie" (an inexhaustible paper money factory) which is very similar to a expression he used in his pamphlet What is Seen and What is Not Seen (July 1850) where he describes the National Assembly as "une grande fabrique de lois" (a great law factory) to produce privileges for special interests. WSWNS, CW3, pp. 000.

1887 See the glossary entry on "The Social Mechanism."

1888 This is quite close to Bastiat's definition he gave in Capital and Rent (Feb. 1849), as "raw materials, implements, and provisions." See, above, pp. 000.

1889 ( Bastiat's note. ) This retention of 10 francs, whose object is to cover just office expenses, is improperly called discount (interest). It could be reduced to a few centimes. Perhaps it would have been even better not to have bothered with it in the theory and the accounting we are doing.

1890 Bastiat is talking about what will later be known as "moral hazard", namely that banks and other investors will tend to make risky, even unsound, economic decisions if they know that they will get to keep any profits they might make but that any losses they might make will be paid for by the government at taxpayer expence. See Bert Ely, "Financial Regulation." The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. 2008. Library of Economics and Liberty. < https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/FinancialRegulation.html >.

1891 On Free Banking in America, Larry White notes that "Proponents of free banking have traditionally pointed to the relatively unrestricted monetary systems of Scotland (1716–1844), New England (1820–1860), and Canada (1817–1914) as models. Other episodes of the competitive provision of banknotes took place in Sweden, Switzerland, France, Ireland, Spain, parts of China, and Australia. In total, more than sixty episodes of competitive note issue are known, with varying amounts of legal restrictions. In all such episodes, the countries were on a gold or silver standard (except China, which used copper)." See, Lawrence H. White, "Competing Money Supplies." The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. 2008. Library of Economics and Liberty. <https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CompetingMoneySupplies.html>. See also, Charles Coquelin, Du Crédit et des Banques (1848), Chap. X "Les banques aux États-Unis," pp. 369-421.

1892 Bastiat uses the phrase "le cours forcé" which could be translated as "compulsory or legal tender."

1893 The "lois de maximum" (Maximum price, or price controls) was decreed on 29 September 1793 in an attempt to regulate the high prices of food by setting a maximum price which could be charged by food suppliers with very severe penalties for those who broke the law. The high prices were caused by war shortages, a failed harvest, and inflation caused by the issuing of the Assignat paper currency.

1894 Total debt held by the French government in 1848 amounted to fr. 5.2 billion. In 1849 the government spent 455 million fr. paying off the debt, which amounted to 29% of total expenditure. See Gustave de Puynode, "Crédit public," DEP, vol. 1, pp. 508-25.

1895 Bastiat is mocking Proudhon by inventing two characters "la dame Offre" (Madame Supply) and "la dame Demande" (Madame Demand).

1896 Bastiat is making a play on words here as one of the socialists' key demands was for the compulsory "organisation" of work and even society by means of the state. Here he predicts that their form of socialist "organization" will end in "disorganization."

1897 Bastiat gets this quote slightly wrong, probably because he is quoting from memory again. Pascal says in Pensées , chap. IV, article III, XVII, that "La volonté est un des principaux organes de la créance" (The will is one of the principle organes of belief). The word "créance" usually means "belief", which is what Pascal probably had in mind. Bastiat has in mind its economic meaning of "credit," "credit worthiness," or "debt". He also misremembers the subject of the quote, which is "la volonté" (the will) not "la cupidité" (greed). It seems that here the economist in Bastiat has got the better of his memory. See Pensées de Blaise Pascal: rétablies suivant le plan de l'auteur (Dijon: Victor Lagier, 1835), pp. 98-99; and The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal, translated from the text of M. Auguste Molinier by C. Kegan Paul (London: George Bell and Sons, 1901). < /titles/2407#Pascal_1409_772 >.

1898 Such as Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux. See above, pp. 000.

1899 Here Bastiat uses the term "la liberté des Banques" (free banking) for the first time in his writing. This letter is also his first use of the similar term "la liberté du crédit" (the freedom to issue credit).

1900 Bastiat uses the English phrase "Time is money".

1901 This is a quote from Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac . Franklin had been popular in France for his pretend rustic ways which played to the French's perceptions of frontier America. He had been the new American Republic's Minister to France 1778-1785 and had made a name for himself and had supervised a French translation of his Almanac which sold very well. Bastiat may have read a popular edition from 1834 and would have been aware of Molinari's edition of 1847 which was done for the Guillaumin firm. This edition was for the economists. The quote comes from the latter, p. 633. The economists were interested in Franklin's idea about hard work, saving, and other bourgeois values, as well as his ability to appeal to ordinary people in his writings. Another edition was published during the revolution of 1848 when Franklin's writing was enrolled in the battle against socialism, especially the struggle against the idea of "the right to a job." This was an edition for the workers with a forward by the economist Michel Chevalier. See, Benjamin Franklin, Morceaux choisis, comprenant la science du bonhomme Richard, et autres écrits populaires de Benjamin Franklin, précédées d'une notice sur sa vie (Paris: rue Taranne, 1834); Collection des principaux économistes (Paris: Guillaumin, 1840-48), T. XIV. Mélanges d'économie politique I. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1847); Benjamin Franklin et al., Conseils pour faire Fortune. Avis d'un vieil ouvrier à un jeune ouvrier, et la Science du Bonhomme Richard par Franklin. Caisses d'Épargnes. Organisation du travail. Introduction à la science populaire de Claudius (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1848).

1902 Bastiat translates Franklin's character "Poor Richard" as "Bonhomme Richard" which links it to the well known French popular figure of "Jacques Bonhomme", or the French everyman. Bastiat used the character of Jacques Bonhomme in his writings, as Franklin did with Richard, in order to appeal to a popular audience. In many respects, Bastiat was the French "Franklin", as Molinari observed in his obituary of Bastiat. See the glossary entries on "Franklin," "Jacques Bonhomme." Also, Molinari, "Nécrologie. Frédéric Bastiat, notice sur sa vie et ses écrits, par M. G. de Molinari," JDE, T. 28, N° 118, 15 février 1851, pp. 180-96.

1903 Throughout these passages Bastiat has been hinting at the idea of "time preference" with regards to people's preference for goods and services in the present compared to goods and services sometime in the future, for which they are willing to pay some kind of premium.

1904 In 1816 David Ricardo published "Proposals for an Economical and Secure Currency" in which he argued for a fractional reserve system of banking where a small amount of gold could serve as backing for paper money in circulation. It was based upon the idea that not all holders of notes would ask for their paper to be redeemed for gold at the same time. See, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo , ed. Piero Sraffa with the Collaboration of M.H. Dobb (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005). Vol. 4 Pamphlets and Papers 1815-1823 , pp. 51-114.

1905 See, Notes by J.-B. Say, "Proposition faite par David Ricardo d'une nouvelle monnaie de papier", in Heinrich Friedrich von Storch, Cours d'économie politique; ou, Exposition des principes qui déterminent la prospérité des nations. Ouvrage qui a servi à l'instruction de LL.AA. II. Les Grands-Ducs Nicolas et Michel. Avec des notes explicatives et critiques par J.-B. Say (Paris: J. P. Aillaud, 1823), vol. 2, Liv. V Du Numéraire, chap. vi "Que le numéraire n'est point une mesure exacte des valeurs", p. 143. Say is intrigued with Ricardo's idea but raises the obvious public choice problem. The currency scheme might work if there are several private banks competing for customers, but if there were only a single, government, monopoly Central Bank what would stop it from issuing too much paper money in order to satisfy the needs of all the vested interests he mentions in the quote. Say returned to this question 5 years later in Cours complet d'économie politique pratique (1828), vol. 3, Troisième Partie. "Des Échanges et des monnaies", Chap. XVIII. "Des billets de confiance et des banques de circulation" and Chap. XIX. "Abus des banques de circulation".

1906 In this Letter Bastiat talks about "le prix du temps" (the price of time) for the first and only time in his writing. Below, he also refers to "la vente du temps" (the sale of time."

1907 Charles Mallet (1815-1902) was a member of a successful Parisian banking family which consisted of his father Jules Mallet and his brother with whom he formed the Banque Mallet frères. He later joined forces with another banking family, the Pereire brothers (Jacob Pereire (1800-1875) and Isaac Pereire (1806-1880), to form Crédit mobilier in 1852.

1908 The Swiss-born Jean-Conrad Hottinguer (1764-1841) founded a family banking dynasty which specialised in funding government debt under the ancien régime. He founded the Banque Hottinguer in Paris in 1786 and was one of the founders of the privately owned Banque de France in 1800. His son Jean-Henri Hottinguer (1803-66) took over the family bank in 1833, and invested cleverly in a number of innovative industries such as savings banks for people on average incomes (Caisse d'Epargne et de Prévoyance de Paris), and utilities such as electricity and water supply (la Compagnie générale des eaux in 1853).

1909 James Mayer de Rothschild, baron Jacob, (1792-1868) founded the Parisian branch of the famous banking family's business. He sided with the restored Bourbon monarchy in 1815, lending Louis XVIII 5 million franc in order to reestablish his regime after the fall of Napoleon and remain close to whatever government followed. He also was instrumental in funding the new states of Belgium, Greece, and Italy. In 1843 he obtained a very profitable railway concession, that of the Compagnie des chemins de fer du Nord. By 1847 he had become the wealthiest private individual with a fortune of 40 million francs (after the King of France).

1910 By phrasing it in this way, "la Liberté du crédit", Bastiat is reminding Proudhon of one of the key slogans of the liberals during the 1848 Revolution, namely "la liberté (droit) du travail" (the freedom of working, or the right to engage in work) which they put forward in opposition to the socialists' demand for "le droit au travail" (the right to a job) which they unsuccessfully attempted to have inserted into the new constitution of the Second Republic in November 1848.

1911 "Viviparous quadrupeds utter different voices; none can speak—for this is the characteristic of man, for all that have a language have a voice, but not all that have a voice have also a language." in Aristotle, Aristotle's History of Animals: In Ten Books. Edition by Johann Gottlob Schneider. Translated by Richard Cresswell (London: Bell, 1887). Book IV, #9, p. 96.

1912 "Identity is thus the sign by which one recongnizes that a proposition is self-evident; and one recognizes the identity when a proposition can be translated in terms which return to the latter, i.e., the same is the same. Consequently, a proposition which is self evident is that whose identity is immediately perceived in the (very) terms by which it is expressed." in Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Oeuvres complétes de Condillac. Tome 6. Art de raisonner et grammaire (Paris: Lecointe et Durey, 1821), Livre premier, Chap. premier "De l'évidence de raison", p. 9.

1913 Most likely Letter 7 (17 December, 1849), above pp. 000.

1914 Letter 8 (24 December, 1849).

1915 By this Proudhon means democracy organized along socialist lines.

1916 This is a very interesting passage by Proudhon where he seems to be arguing for a subjective theory of value - "This difference (between capital and product) is purely subjective for individuals." - but does not develop it further.

1917 Say actually says that "goods are exchanged for other goods."

1918 Letter no. 12.

1919 "Commercial accountability is one of the most beautiful and happiest applications of metaphysics; it is a science, since it merits this name however limited it might be in its purpose and its area of activity, which does not cede anything to arithmetic and algebra for its precision and certainty," in Proudhon, Système des contradictions économiques, ou philosophy de la misère (1846), vol. 2, pp. 159-60.

1920 Letter no. 9.

1921 See the glossary entry on "The Bank of France."

1922 These and the following quotes and paraphrasing come from Letter 12.

1923 See above for source, pp. 000.

1924 Proudhon's book Economic Contradictions , was published by Guillaumin in 1846. Bastiat had written to Félix Coudroy on 5 June 1845, telling him about his plan to write a book on Social Harmonies , which eventually became Economic Harmonies , so it was not conceived as a direct response to Proudhon. See, Letter 39. To Félix Coudroy, Paris, 5 June 1845, CW1, p. 64.

1925 Proudhon ended the conversation here and published the 13 articles as a book, Intérêt et principale. Discussion entre M. Proudhon et M. Bastiat sur l'Intérêt (Extraits de la la Voix du Peuple) (Paris: Garnier frères, 1850). Bastiat was dissatisfied with this and wanted to have the last say, so he wrote another letter which he published in his own edition published by Guillaumin, Gratuité du crédit. Discussion entre M. Fr. Bastiat et M. Proudhon (Free Credit. A Discussion between M. Fr. Bastiat and M. Proudhon) (Paris: Guillaumin, 1850).

1926 This was a doubly harsh thing by Proudhon to say of Bastiat as he was in fact dying and did not have long to live. He died on Christmas eve later that year (1850) from a serious throat condition which might well have been cancer of the throat.

1927 This Letter was not part of the original debate between Bastiat and Proudhon in la Voix du Peuple . It was added to Bastiat's edition of the exchange which was published by Guillaumin. See footnote above.

1928 This malediction is only a small part of a much longer malediction from 900 AD which lists in meticulous detail the things which would be cursed. Bastiat thoughtfully condensed a section of it for the reader: "Cursed be he in living, in dying, in eating, in drinking. Cursed be he within and without. Cursed be he in his hair and in his brain. Cursed be he in his crown, in his eyes, in his ears, in his arms, etc., etc. ; cursed be he in his breast and in his heart, in his reins, in his knees, in his legs, in his feet, and in his nails." The full malediction can be found in Lester K. Little, Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), "2. Excommunication Formula, about 900" pp. 255-56.

1929 Proudhon wrote his letters from Sainte-Pélagie prison where he was serving time for "offending the President of the Republic" (Louis Napoléon).

1930 By reverting to his standard practice of writing economic fables and stories to make his points it is clear that Bastiat is no longer speaking to Proudhon but to the workers who read his magazine. This story about Hellen and the construction of his bow and arrows follows the same pattern as his earlier story of Robinson Crusoe. This is followed below by yet another fable about a hospice for the blind and the sighted.

1931 Deucalion was the son of Prometheus both of whom were able to survive a flood sent by Zeus to destroy mankind by building a chest which was able to float on the water and thus save them.

1932 Hellen was the son of Deucalion and the mythic ancestor of the Greeks (Hellenes).

1933 "And God saw that it was good," Genesis 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, with variants at 1:4 and 1:31.

1934 It is not clear which Bidault or Bidauld Bastiat is referring to. One Bidault was an editor of the official government newspaper Le Moniteur in the late 1830s. Another Bidauld (Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld (1758-1846)) had been the leading painter of the French countryside and a member of the Academy of fine arts. Either one of whom would have used skilled workers to assist them.

1935 In Greek mythology Proteus was a sea god who, like the sea, could change his shape and form at will. He supposedly knew the past and the future but normally refused to reveal what he knew. Only when harassed and exhausted by his interrogator would he reveal what he knew.

1936 Bastiat uses the word "saturée" (saturated) to describe the inflated supply of money which the Banks would put into circulation. He liked to use water as a metaphor in his writings, as in the "ricochet effect", communication flows through "canaux secrets" (hidden channels), or elsewhere in these letters "gorger" (to swamp) or "affluer" (flood) about the issuing of money. Since it is more common today to use the metaphor of "air" (as in "inflated) we have chosen to use the "air" metaphor in this instance.

1937 The Bank of France increased its "billets au porteur en circulation" (bearer notes) from 311 million fr. in 1848, to 411 million fr in 1849, to 481 million fr. in 1850, which was an increase of 170 million fr. or 55% in two years. See, Courcelle-Seneuil and Paul Coq, "Banque, Banquier," in Dictionnaire universel théorique et pratique du Commerce et de la Navigation (Paris: Guillaumin, 1859), vol. 1, p. 240.

1938 Bastiat uses the English term "Clearing House."

1939 This quote comes from Letter 13.

1940 The "Cour des comptes" (Budget Office) was established by Napoléon in the law of 16 September 1807 to oversee the government budget and spending by the state.

1941 Alexandro Maria Aguado, marquis de Las Marismas del Guadalquivir, viscount de Monte Ricco (1784-1842) was a Spanish banker who fought with Joseph Bonaparte in Spain, seeing service at the Battle of Baylen (1808) and then rising to the rank of colonel in the French Army and aide-de-campe of Marshall Soult. After 1815 he made a fortune in business in Cuba and Mexico and set up his own bank in Paris. His bank handled most of the state loans to King Ferdinand VII of Spain throughout the 1820s and he was made a Marquis for his work in 1829. Throughout this period he purchased several large properties and châteaux in the French countryside as well as in Paris, collected a large number of paintings, and was active in running the French opera.

1942 Jean-Baptiste Juvigny (1772-1836) wrote many books on life insurance, money, banking, public finance, and accounting during the 1820s and 1830s. See, Application de l'arithmétique au commerce et à la banque, terminé par un traité de négociations de banque. Nouvelle édition. (Paris, 1824); Moyen de suppléer par l'aritmétique à l'emploi de l'algèbre dans les questions d'intérêts composés, d'annuités, d'amortissemens (Paris : Bachelier, 1825); De la Nécessité de maintenir l'amortissement, et des motifs qui peuvent seuls en justifier la réduction (Paris : Librairie du commerce, 1832).

1943 Greek mythology contains multiple Æoluses with multiple sons, but Bastiat probably means Sisyphus, famous inter alia for theft and trickery.

1944 Baetica is the ancient Roman name of the present Spanish province of Andalusia.

1945 From the "Fragment of an ancient Mythologist" in Montesquieu's Persian Letters no. 142. In this letter Rica talks about inheriting a large fortune from an uncle and spending it on acquiring ancient Roman artifacts and reading the classics. At the end of the letter he quotes this fictitious "Fragment" about Sysphus trying to persuade the people of Baetica to exchange their gold, silver, and precious stones for "buckets of wind" he carried with him on his travels. Eventually, after failing to take him seriously and give him half their wealth, Sysphus suddenly disappeared taking with him 3/4 of their entire wealth.

1946 Horace Say had accompanied Bastiat on a brief trip to England in October when Bastiat may have been acting unofficially for the French government to sound out Richard Cobden about the possibility of disarmament talks with the English. See the Editor's Introduction to his "Speech on Disarmament" (Aug. 1849), above, pp. 000.

1947 François-Eugène-Gabriel, duc d'Harcourt (1786-1865) served briefly in the military in the early years of the Restoration before resigning in order to support the Greek struggle for independence from Turkey. He was elected to represent Seine-et-Marne in 1827 and supported the liberal opposition to Charles X. Under the July Monarchy he was appointed ambassador to Madrid, was active in the reform of secondary education, and was a supporter of free trade. Because of his speeches on behalf of free trade in the Chamber and because of his social and political contacts he was appointed president of the Free Trade Association when it was founded in 1846. During the Second Republic he was appointed ambassador to Rome by Lamartine.

1948 Alexandre-François-Auguste Vivien (1799-1854) was a lawyer, a member of Thiers' liberal group Société de la Morale Chrétienne, and was elected a Deputy representing l'Aisne in 1833. He was the Minister for Justice and Religion in the second government of Thiers in 1840 and was appointed to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (Legislation) in 1845. During the Second Republic he was elected a Deputy representing l'Aisne in April 1848, voted with the conservative right, and was appointed to the Committee which supervised the drawing up of the new constitution. He was briefly appointed Minister of Public Works in late 1848 before Louis Napoléon took power. He resigned after Louis Napoléon's coup d'état in December 1851. He wrote several articles for the JDE and a book Études administratives (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845).

1949 See the glossary entry on "Faucher."

1950 Antoine Auguste Walras (1801-1866) was a professor of rhetoric, philosophy, and literature who also wrote on economics. He taught economics at the college of Évreux from 1832 and then at the Athénée in Paris in the 1830s. Guillaumin published his book on Théorie de la richesse sociale (Theory of Social Wealth) in 1849. He is best known as the father of Léon Walras (1834-1910) one of the founders of the Marginalist School of economics.

1951 Victor Destutt de Tracy (1781-1864) was the son of the Ideologue and economist Antoine Destutt de Tracy, an army officer, and then politician. He was a supporter of General Lafayette during the Restoration and elected a Deputy representing Moulins from 1826-1848. During the July Monarchy he was active in liberal causes such as the abolition of the death penalty and the abolition of slavery, being one of the founders and then President of the French Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1834. During the Second Republic he voted with the conservative right and was appointed Minister of the Navy and Colonies in Odilon Barrot's government. He was elected again in May 1849 but resigned from politics after Louis Napoléon's coup d'état of December 1851.

1952 See the Glossary on "Passy."

1953 Louis-Jacques-Marie Fournier (1786-1862) was a businessman with interests in the Antilles and Marseilles, a member of the Chamber of Commerce, and in May 1849 was elected Deputy representing Bouches-du-Rhône. He voted with the conservative right.

1954 Jules Dupuit (1804-1866) was an engineer and a political economist who wrote on the economics of public works. He trained at the École polytéchnique (1822) and rose to become the chief engineer of the Corps des ponts et chaussées (the Bridges and Roads Department) where he worked on the design and building of roads and the sewers of Paris. He wrote several articles in the DEP on roads, highways, and transport matters.

1955 Jules Dupuit, "De la législation actuelle des voies de transport; nécessité d'une réforme basée sur des principes rationnels," JDE, T. 23, N° 99, 15 juin 1849, pp. 217-31.

1956 Bastiat uses here the word "duperie" (trickery, fraud) which he had used frequently in his Economic Sophisms and his theory of plunder to criticise tariffs and subsidies.

1957 Gabriel Pierre Lafond de Lurcy (1802-1876) was a French navigator and explorer who spent much time in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific during the 1820s and 1830s, on occasion working with Simon Bolivar and José de San Martín in their struggle for independence from Spain. After returning to Paris he set up companies to encourage trade with South America and the Pacific. He was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1845.

1958 Jules Dumont d'Urville (1790-1842) was a naval officer and explorer who in the 1820s explored New Guinea, New Zealand, Tonga, and other Pacific islands in his ships the Astrolabe and the Zélée. In the late 1830s he set out to explore Antarctica for which he was strongly criticised by the astronomer François Arago. Ironically for an explorer who took risks, he died in 1842 in the first large French railway crash with his wife and young child.

1959 The overthrow of the July Monarchy in which Dunoyer had a high position as Councillor of State turned him in a more conservative direction. He supported the use of the army to repress the June Days uprising in 1848 and in 1849 wrote an angry book in which he attacked what he called "demogogic socialism." See, Charles Dunoyer, La Révolution du 24 février (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849).

1960 One of the organisers of the Peace Congress in August 1849 in Paris. See the glossary on "Garnier."

1961 The First Schleswig War (1848-1851) was fought between Denmark and Prussia over control of the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein after the death of the Danish King Christian VIII left no heir acceptable to the German Confederation. Denmark won but was decisively defeated in the Second Schleswig War of 1864.

1962 The First Italian War of Independence (1848-1849) was fought between the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Austrian Empire. Under the command of General Joseph Radetzky the Austrians reasserted control of the break away kingdom.

1963 The 1848 Revolution in the Kingdom of Hungary grew into a war for independence from the Austrian Empire. After a series of defeats in 1849 the young Emperor Franz Joseph I called upon Russian assistance under the terms of the Holy Alliance which came out of the defeat of Napoléon in 1815. Czar Nicholas I sent an army of more than 200,000 men and with the assistance of the Austrian Empire defeated the Hungarian independence movement.

1964 info ???

1965 In his speech at the Paris Peace Congress Bastiat linked expenditure on war and the military, with the need for high taxation (especially indirect taxation), which impoverished the workers and drove them towards revolution to seek relief. See"Disarmament, Taxes, and the Influence of Political Economy on the Peace Movement" above, pp. 000.

1966 In the Legislative Assembly elected on 13 May 1849 there were 780 Deputies who were divided between "the party of Order" (monarchists and Bonapartists) (500), the extreme left ("Montagnards" or democratic socialists) (200), and the moderate republicans (80). Bastiat and the other economists usually voted with the moderate republicans. See the glossary entry on "The Chamber of Deputies."

1967 The English phrase "free trade" is used.

1968 Cyr-François-Natalis Rondot (1821-1900) was an industrialist in the textile business, a member of the Chamber of Commerce of Lyon, an economist, and art historian. As a young man he went to China, South East Asia, and Africa in 1843 to negotiate treaties of commerce on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce of Rheims. In 1848 he co-authored with Léon Say a major inquiry into manufacturing in the city of Paris for the Paris Chamber of Commerce. He retired from industry in 1869 to write on art and art history.

1969 Or what he termed "le socialisme d'amélioration avec le socialisme spoliateur."

1970 Wolowski's meaning is not clear here.

1971 François Félix de Lafarelle (1800-1872) was a magistrate during the Restoration and a Member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. He was elected a Deputy representing Gard from 1842 to 1848. Guillaumin published his book on Du progrès social au profit des classes populaires non indigentes (1847) and he wrote several articles for the JDE.

1972 The Prussian Landwehr or citizen's militia was created in 1813 to defend the country from Napoleon's tropps. All men between the ages of 18 and 45 not in the regular army were liable for call up. After 1815 the Landwehr was fully integrated into the Prussian army until reforms of 1859 made them part of the reserves.

1973 See the glossary entry on "Saint-Julle de Colmont (1792-??)."

1974 He means by "l'impôt du recrutement" the conscription of young men into the French army. Bastiat made the same point in his Peace Congress speech that conscription was a "tax" on the poor.

1975 See the glossary entry on "Claude-Marie Raudot (1801-1879)."

1976 CRANL, vol. 4, pp. 497 ff.

1977 See the glossary entry on "Wolowski."

1978 Étienne François Théodore Morin (1814-1890) was a politician who was a member of the General Council of the Canton of Dieulefit in 1846, the mayor of Dieulefit in 1847, and elected Deputy of la Drôme 1848-1870. In the Second Republic he voted with the conservative right.

1979 Antoine François Henri Lefebvre de Vatimesnil (1789-1860) was the Advocate General of the Cour de Cassation (Supreme Court), a Councilor of State, and the first Minister of Eduction and Religion in 1828-29. He was a Deputy representing du Nord 1830-34 and a Deputy representing l'Eure 1849-1851. He resigned from politics following Louis Napoléon's coup d'état in December 1851.

1980 André-Marie Dupin (1783-1865) was President of the Legislative Assembly between June 1, 1849 and December 2, 1851.

1981 John Prince-Smith (1809-1874) was born in London, where he worked as a parliamentary reporter before moving to Hamburg in 1828 to write for an English-language newspaper there. While in Hamburg Prince-Smith discovered economics , especially the work of Richard Cobden and Bastiat, and began writing about British economic developments for his German readers. In 1846 he founded a German free-trade association and was elected deputy representing Stettin in the Prussian parliament.

1982 See the glossary entry on "Claude-Marie Raudot (1801-1879)."

1983 See the glossary entry on "Théodore Morin."

1984 See the glossary entry on "Charles Renouard."

1985 Louis Joseph Buffet (1818-1898) was a lawyer and politician. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 and was Minister of Agriculture and Commerce in Odelin Barrot's first government in 1849. He was briefly imprisoned for his opposition to Louis Napoléon but returned to politics towards the end of the Second Empire and served as President of the National Assembly in the Third Republic 1873-75 and was made a Senator for life in 1876.

1986 Prosper Paillottet (1804-78) was a successful businessman in the jewelry industry and was active in the French Free Trade Association. He became a close friend of Bastiat and in his final days spent time with him in Rome and agreed to become his literary executor, forming a group called the "Société des amis de Bastiat" (Society of the Friends of Bastiat) which would preserve his papers and edit his collected works.

1987 See the note above, pp. 000 for details. Gustave de Molinari attended but Bastiat could not because of his editing duties for the journal Le Libre-Échange . Prince-Smith was there as was Karl Marx but there is no evidence that any of the free market economists met him.

1988 A reference to Say's law of markets that "goods create their own market."

1989 Capital and Rent (February 1849), above, pp. 000; Protectionism and Communism (Fall 1848), CW2, pp. 235-65; The State (Sept. 1848), CW2, pp. 93-104; and Damn Money! (April 1849), above, pp. 000.

1990 Copies must have been circulating although it was not due for release until early in 1850.

1991 See the glossary entry on "Coquelin."

1992 See the glossary entry on "Walras."

1993 See the Editor's Introduction to that essay, above, pp. 000.

1994 CW2, pp. 185-234.

1995 Bastiat described the Chamber of Deputies as "une grande fabrique de lois" (a great law factory" which produced privileges and benefits to favoured interests. See CW3, p. 428.

1996 The proverb is "Il y a quelqu'un qui a plus d'esprit que les gens d'esprit, ce quelqu'un, c'est tout le monde " (There is someone who has more intelligence than men of intellect, and this someone is everybody ). To maintain the alliteration it could be translated as "There is more sense in common sense than in men of good sense" or what we used above.

1997 In his proposed History of Plunder Bastiat begins his account with war and slavery, then moves onto the other historical stages of theocracy, monopoly, exploitation by governments, and communism. See the sketches in ES2 1 "The Physiology of Plunder," CW3, pp. 114-15, and EH2, p. 335. Also the glossary entry on "Bastiat's Theory of Plunder."

1998 Here he uses the expression "violer par l'intervention de la loi" (to violate (property) through the intervention of the law). Elsewhere he often uses the expression "la spoliation légale" (legal plunder) to distinguish state-sanctioned and institutionalised plunder from "la spoliation extra-légale" (regular theft and highway robbery). See "Justice and Fraternity" (June 1848), CW2, p. 76.

1999 In his pamphlet "Protectionism and Communism" (Jan. 1849) Bastiat accused the conservative protectionists of doing just this. See CW2, pp. 235-65.

2000 "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine" (JDE, February 1845), above, pp. 000.

2001 EH, chapter IV "Exchange."

2002 "Justice and Fraternity" (JDE, 15 June 1848, T. 20, no. 82, pp. 310-27; also in CW2, pp. 60-81.

2003 In "The Right to Work and the Right to Profit,"CW3, p. 451.

2004 FEE translated it as "the union of efforts," EH, p. 566.

2005 Part 2: Action Within the Framework of Society, Chap. 8: Human Society, Section 4 "The Ricardian Law of Association" in Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, in 4 vols., ed. Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007). Vol. 1, p. 160.

2006 Chapter IV "Exchange" in both EH1 and EH2.

2007 One of Bastiat's main criticisms of Malthus was that he didn't see this, or the benefits of living in populous cities and towns which made mutually beneficial exchanges easier to engage in. In other words, it lowered transaction costs.

2008 Roger de Fontenay, "Notice sur la vie et les écrits de Frédéric Bastiat" in Vol. 1: Correspondance et mélanges (1862) in Oeuvres complètes de Frédéric Bastiat, mises en ordre, revues et annotées d'après les manuscrits de l'auteur. Deuxième Édition (Paris: Guillaumin, 1862-64), pp. ix-liii, quoted on p. xxxi-xxxii; "Avertissement," in Bastiat, Harmonies économiques. 2me Édition. Augmentée des manuscrits laissés par l'auteur. Publiée par la Sociétée des amis de Bastiat. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1851), pp. v-xi, quoted on p. vi.

2009 See the Editor's Introduction to T.317 "Introduction and Post Script to Economic Sophisms" (March 1845) above for details.

2010 See the glossary entries on "Dunoyer" and "Comte.".

2011 Letter 13. Félix Coudroy, Bordeaux, 9 April 1827, CW1, pp.21-22. In particular Dunoyer, "Esquisse historique des doctrines auxquelles on a donné le nom d' Industrialisme , c'est-à-dire, des doctrines qui fondent la société sur l' Industrie ," Revue encyclopédique , February 1827, no. 90, pp. 368-94.

2012 David M. Hart, Class Analysis, Slavery and the Industrialist Theory of History in French Liberal Thought, 1814-1830: The Radical Liberalism of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer (unpublished PhD, King's College Cambridge, 1994). And Robert Leroux, Aux fondements de l'industrialisme: Comte, Dunoyer et la pensée libérale en France (Paris: Hermann, 2015).

2013 Phrase used in the "Note" below.

2014 Letter 107. Letter to Richard Cobden, Paris, 18 August 1848, CW1, pp. 160-61.

2015 Letter 184. Letter to M. Cheuvreux, Mugron, 14 July 1850, CW1, pp. 260-62. Quote p. 261.

2016 T.149 "A Draft Preface to the Economic Harmonies " (Fall 1847), CW1, pp. 316–20. Quote p.320.

2017 In a letter to Félix the month before he died Bastiat talked of dedicating the next edition of the Harmonies to him in the hope that he might be able to complete it: "If my health returns and I am able to write the second volume of the Harmonies , I will dedicate it to you. If not, I will insert a short dedication in the second edition of the first volume. In the second of these cases, which will imply the end of my career, I will be able to set out my plan to you and bequeath to you the mission of completing it." Letter 203. Letter to Félix Coudroy, Rome, 11 November 1850, CW1, pp. 288-89.

2018 Letter 39. Letter to Félix Coudroy, Paris, 5 June 1845, CW1, pp. 62-65. Quote on p. 64.

2019 Letter 65. Letter to Richard Cobden, Mugron, 25 June 1846, CW1, pp. 105–6; and Letter 80. Letter to Richard Cobden, Paris, 5 July 1847, CW1, pp. 129-31. Quote on p. 131.

2020 Both appear as chapters in this volume below, pp. 000: T.64 "On Competition" (May 1846) and T.81 "On Population" (October 1846).

2021 In addition to the ones mentioned above, see also Letter 108 to Félix Coudroy, Paris, 26 August 1848, CW1, pp. 161–63.

2022 See in particular the list of planned chapters following chapter 10 "Competition" in Economic Harmonies (1851) FEE ed. pp. 554-55.

2023 The chapters would cover responsibility, solidarity, self interest or the "social motor or driving force," perfectibility, public opinion, and the relationship between political economy and morality, politics, legislation, and religion.

2024 The chapters would cover producers and consumers, individualism and sociability, the theory of rent, money, credit, wages, savings, population, private services, public services, taxation, on machines, free trade, on middlemen, raw materials and finished products, and on luxury.

2025 The chapters would cover plunder, war, slavery, theocracy, monopoly, governmental exploitation, false fraternity or communism. See the glossary on "Harmony and Disharmony."

2026 See in particular T.220 Property and Plunder (July 1848) in CW2, pp. 147-84 andT.257 Plunder and Law (May 1850) in CW2, pp. 266-76.

2027 Paillottet's footnote in "Conclusion" to ES1, CW3, p. 110.

2028 In a letter to Félix (26 Nov. 1848) he said that "They (the book's chapters) are in my head but I am very much afraid that they will never come out." Letter 115. Letter to Félix Coudroy, Paris, 26 November 1848, CW1, pp. 168-70. Quote on p. 169.

2029 "Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine" (Now Thou dost dismiss Thy servant, O Lord). In Letter 158. Letter to Félix Coudroy, Paris, January 1850, CW1, pp. 228-29. Quote on p. 229.

2030 T.258 The Law (June 1850) in CW2, pp. 107-46 and T.259 What is Sen and What is Not Seen (July 1850) in CW3, pp. 401-52.

2031 Bastiat uses the term "le moteur social" to which he devoted an unfinished chapter XXII in EH2. It is a hard term to translate adequately. In the Stirling translation (1880) it is "the social motive force"; in the FEE translation it is "the motive force of society"; in our forthcoming translation we call it "the driving force of society."

2032 Ronce omits the last part of the sentence "how I wish I could correct this error in another edition!" which can be found in Paillottet's and Fontenay's Foreword to the 1851 edition of EH.

2033 CW2, pp. 235-65.

2034 Molinari, obit. Garner, JDE 1881, p. 9.

2035 The previous meeting of the Society was held on December 10, 1849 on dealt with the topic of state support for popularising the teaching of free market economic ideas (see above, pp. 000), and the meeting before that was held on October 10, 1849 where the topic was on the limits to the size of the state and Molinari's book on Evenings on the rue Saint Lazare (see above, pp. 000.

2036 See the glossary entry on "Wolowski."

2037 See the glossary entry on "Hovyn deTranchère."

2038 The former meeting place for the Chamber of Peers which was taken over by Louis Blanc in the first weeks of the February Revolution in order to organise the National Workshops program. See the glossary entry on "National Workshops."

2039 Louis Flandin (1804-1877) was made Advocate general to the Court of Appeals of Paris by the Provisional Government following the February Revolution. He was elected Deputy representing Seine-et-Oise from 1848 to 1851 and served on the Agriculture Committee. He vote with the conservative right and supported general Cavaignac for President of the Republic in the December 1848 election. He was a Councillor of State between 1852 and 1874. He published a report to the Assembly on the establishment of state supported land credit: Rapport fait, au nom du Comité de l'agriculture, sur les propositions des citoyens Turck et Prudhomme, relatives à l'établissement du crédit foncier, par le citoyen Flandin (Paris : Impr. de l'Assemblée nationale, 1849).

2040 The establish of state-supported "Peoples' Banks" was a pet scheme of Proudhon who tried to set up one through voluntary subscriptions (which failed) and then with government, i.e. tax-payer funded support.

2041 Antoine-Elisée Cherbuliez (1797-1869) was a Swiss lawyer, judge, and professor of law and political economy at the Académie de Genève. In 1848 he moved to Paris and became active in the Economists' circle, writing for the JDE and participating in the pamphlet war of 1848 on socialism. In 1849 he wrote a collection dialogues called Turtle Soup: Popular Discussion on Social Issues which Guillaumin published alongside Bastiat anti-socialist pamphlets and Molinari's Evenings on Saint Lazarus Street to appeal to ordinary workers.

2042 See the glossary on "Colmont."

2043 Say uses the expression "les agents d'une association générale" (agents or officers of a general association).

2044 See the glossary entry on "Coquelin."

2045 In the previous discussion on the limits to state action he had drawn a boundary line for the state "above" which there could be no competition but "below" which there could be. He offers a similar but more literary (or even biblical) distinction here. See above, pp. 000.

2046 He has in mind here Molinari who had the most radical theory of limiting the power of the state.

2047 Which it would do for third time in its February 10 meeting. See below, pp. 000.

2048 CW2, pp. 185-32.

2049 CRANL, vol. 5, p. 353.

2050 Named after Alfred-Frédéric Falloux (1811-1886) who was a liberal Catholic and was Minister of Education from 20 December 1848. He was elected Deputy of Maine-et-Loire in 1846. He was arrested after Louis Napoléon's coup d'état of 2 December 1851 and retired from politics.

2051 Pierre Saint-Beuve (1819-1855) was a lawyer, land owner, and factory owner in l'Oise. He was elected Deputy representing l'Oise in 1848-1851 and voted with the conservative right.

2052 Victor Richardet (1810-??) was a radical republican who voted with the left. He had been a road surveyor before being elected Deputy representing Salins-les-Bains (in the Jura) between 1849 and 1851. He went into exile after the coup d'état of Louis Napoléon of 2 December 1851.

2053 CRANL, vol. 5, p. 378.

2054 André-Marie Dupin (1783-1865) was President of the Legislative Assembly between June 1, 1849 and December 2, 1851.

2055 Bastiat goes into considerable detail on what he had in mind in his pamphlet on education Baccalaureate and Socialism , CW2.11, pp. 185-234. He wanted the state University to lose its monopoly on issuing degrees and requiring teachers to have one of these state issued degrees, to stop requiring the teaching of Greek and Latin which he believed passed onto students the warrior values of the ancient Romans and indirectly ideas about socialism, and forcing taxpayers to pay twice for the education of their children if they wanted to send them to a private school.

2056 André-Marie Dupin (1783-1865) was President of the Legislative Assembly between June 1, 1849 and December 2, 1851.

2057 French and English naval forces blockaded the La Plata river for five years 1845-50 in order to put pressure on Juan Manuel de Rosas of the Argentine Confederation and support their allies in Uruguay, the Colorado Party, and bring an end to Rosas' policy of high tariffs of European products entering Argentina. The blockade ended when England (1849) and then France (1850) signed treaties with Argentina recongising its sovereignty over its rivers. Bastiat probably has in mind a major debate in the Chamber on 30 April 1849 on a bill to spend 8-10 million fr. to bring the La Plata Affair to an end and to begin negotiations to make a treaty recognising Argentina's independence and the freedom of river traffic. CRANL, vol. 10, pp. 340 ff.

2058 Jacques André Manuel (1791-1857).

2059 The previous meetings where they discussed limits to the power of the state were 10 October 1849 and 10 January 1850. See above, pp. 000 and pp. 000.

2060 Wolowski had made this point at the January 10 meeting, above, pp. 000.

2061 Ambroise Clément (1805-86) was an economist and secretary to the mayor of Saint-Étienne for many years. He was a member of the PES from 1848, a regular writer and reviewer for the JDE , and was made a corresponding member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1872.

2062 In English in the original.

2063 Michel Chevalier became interested in pubic works in North America after a trip in 1836 and wrote a book on it Histoire et description des voies de communications aux Etats-Unis (1840-41) and devoted several chapters to it in his Cours d'économie politique (1845–55).

2064 Chevalier might be thinking of the creation of the New York State Normal School in Albany established by the state legislature of New York in May 1844 to train teachers.

2065 The main opposition to the French Free Trade Association was the protectionist "Association pour la défense du travail national" (Association for the Defense of National Employment) established in 1846 by the textile manufacturer Pierre Mimerel de Roubaix and Antoine Odier. See the glossary entries on "Association pour la défense du travail national" and "Mimerel."

2066 In English in the original.

2067 See the glossary entry on "Renouard."

2068 Estimating the number of people employed by the French state at this time is almost impossible given the lack of accurate figures. Auguste Vivien attempted to do this in his Études administratives (Paris: Guillaumin, 1845; 2nd edition 1852) and came up with a figure of 250,000 employed by the central government, not counting those employed by local government or the armed forces (vol. 1 pp. 177-78). Ambroise Clément wrote in his article on "Fonctionnaires" (Public Servants) in DEP, vol. 1 , pp. 787-89, building upon Vivien's figures estimated that there were 500,000 to 600,000 pubic servants plus another 500,000 officers and soldiers in the military for a total of 1.1 million. A proportion of 1/16 (6.25%) in a total population of about 36 million would mean there were 2.5 million people who worked for the French state which seems far too many according to these figures.

2069 We have no information about Dussart.

2070 London had been hit by cholera outbreaks in 1832 and 1849 (one had swept through Paris in 1849 as well killing the young economist Alcide Fonteyraud). The latter killing over 14,000 people. The Broad Street outbreak of 1854 led to the pioneering work of John Snow who traced the cause back to contaminated water supplies. See the glossary entries on "Fonteyraud" and "The Cholera Outbreak of 1849."

2071 Denis Louis Rodet (1781-1852).

2072 Jacques Cujas (1522-159) was a French humanist legal theorist who wrote on Roman law, especially Justinian, and the evolution of law through history. He found it difficult to get a job in established universities because of the controversial nature of his thinking. After much travelling about he was finally offered a position in the Faculty of Law in Bourges where he taught from 1555-57 and 1559-66.

2073 See "Balance du commerce" (The Balance of Trade) in JDE , October 1845, T. 12, pp. 201-04. It was republished in ES1 6 "The Balance of Trade," CW3, pp. 44-49.

2074 Note by Paillottet in OC4, p. 52.

2075 François Mauguin (1785-1852) was a successful lawyer and then Deputy during the July Monarchy and the Second Republic. He usually voted with the conservatives.

2076 Bastiat is referring to the older of the Darblay brothers, Auguste-Rodolphe Darblay (1784-1873) who was in the Legislative Assembly when Bastiat was there and voted with the conservatives. They had made a fortune in the flour milling business.

2077 Louis-Martin Lebeuf (1792-1854) was a banker, Vice-President of the Association for the Defence of National Labour, and served as Deputy in 1849. As an ardent protectionist he clashed often with Bastiat.

2078 The écu was a pre-revolutionary silver coin. In the 19th century people still referred to the five franc silver coin as an "écu."

2079 In his 1845 article Bastiat was much harsher in his criticism of the concept of the balance of trade. He mockingly argued that "according to the theory of the balance of trade, France has a very simple way of doubling its capital at every moment. To do this, once it has passed it through the customs, it just has to throw it into the sea. In this case, exports will be equal to the amount of its capital; imports will be nil and even impossible, and we will gain everything that the ocean has swallowed up." CW3, p. 48.

2080 Bastiat wrote a sophism on the protectionist's habit of disparaging theory. He wrote "People accuse us, advocates of free trade, of being theoreticians and not taking sufficient account of practical aspects ... you monopolists claim that facts are on your side and that we have only theories to support us ... No, you are not men of practice; you are men of abstraction . . . and of extortion.. See ES1 13 "Theory and Practice", CW3, pp. 69, 72, 75.

2081 Bastiat uses term "laissez-faire" here, which could also be translated as "to adopt a policy of laissez-faire."

2082 See, above, pp. 000.

2083 "Réforme coloniale en Angleterre. Discours prononcé au meeting de Bradford, par M. Cobden," JDE, T. 25, no. 107, 15 fév. 1850, pp. 264-70; and "Nouvelle politique coloniale de l'Angleterre. Plan de Lord John Russel," JDE, T. 26, 15 April 1850, pp. 8-15.

2084 John, first Earl Russell (1792-1878) was the leader of the opposition in 1845 and favored the repeal of the Corn Laws and advised the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, to take a similar stance. Russell became prime minister in 1846 after the collapse of Peel's government. See the glossary entries on "Russell," "Peel," and "The Corn Laws.".

2085 Hansard 1803-2005 . Colonial Policy. HC Deb 08 February 1850 vol 108 cc535-67: <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/sittings/1850/feb/08#commons>.

2086 Bastiat first used this expression in his first essay published in the JDE in October, 1844, "On the Influence of French and English Tariffs on the Future of the Two People" in CW6 (forthcoming).

2087 "Réforme coloniale en Angleterre. Discours prononcé au meeting de Bradford, par M. Cobden," JDE, T. 25, no. 107, 15 fév. 1850, pp. 264-70.

2088 In Hansard, online at: Colonial Policy. HC Deb 08 February 1850 vol 108 cc535-67: <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/sittings/1850/feb/08#commons>.

2089 The page numbers in Hansard are indicated in the passage.

2090 The protectionist Corn Laws were repealed in in 1846 and the Navigation Acts were repealed in 1849. See discussion in the SEP on the emancipation of the colonies in December 1848, above p. 000; and the glossary entry on "The Navigation Act.".

2091 Russell gave the example of the colony of New South Wales which had at that time 200,000 inhabitants of which only 6,000 were convicts. Convicts were first sent to New South Wales on 20 January 1788 and continued until1 October 1850 when it was abolished. About 160,000 were sent to Australia in total, of which about half were sent to NSW. Between 1788 and 1842 about 80,000 convicts had been sent to NSW.

2092 Russell stated: "the total emigration from these kingdoms for the last three years was 796,354 persons; giving an average of 265,450 per annum." [563]

2093 Hansard, p. 564.

2094 Ambroise Clément, "Harmonies économiques, par M. Frédéric Bastiat. (Compte-rendu)," JDE, T.26, no. 111, 15 juin, 1850, pp. 239-47.

2095 Louis Wolowski, "De l'organisation du crédit foncier," JDE, T.21, no. 92, 15 novembre 1848, pp. 401-24; "De l'organisation du crédit foncier. Deuxième partie: Les associations de crédit," JDE, T.22, no. 93, 15 décembre 1848, pp. 19-39; and Louis Wolowski, "De la réforme hypothécaire," JDE, T. 27, no. 116, 15 novembre 1850, pp. 305-23.

2096 See above, pp. 000.

2097 Louis Leclerc reported on the Council for the JDE: Louis Leclerc, "Congrès central d'agriculture. — Septième session," JDE, T. 26, N° 109, 15 avril 1850, pp. 48-57.

2098 Wolowski had introduced in the National Assembly a motion to discuss reorganising the system of land credit on June 2, 1849. He wrote several articles on land credit for the JDE between 1848 and 1850 as well as the official report for the Council for Agriculture, Manufacturing, and Commerce: Rapport fait au Conseil général de l'agriculture, du commerce et des manufactures, au nom de la Commission chargée de la question relative au crédit foncier (1850).

2099 Bastiat had recently finished his long debate with Proudhon on "Free Credit" which took place between October 1849 and March 1850. See above, pp. 000.

2100 Louis Leclerc (1799-1854) was a founding member of the Free Trade Association, a member of the Société d'Économie Politique, an editor of the JDE and the Journal d'agriculture.

2101 Leclerc, "Congrès central d'agriculture," JDE, p. 56.

2102 See the glossary entry on "Rodet."

2103 Fontenay, Roger-Anne-Paul-Gabriel de (1809–91) was a member of the PES and worked with Prosper Paillottet, as "the friends of Bastiat," in editing the Œeuvres complètes of Bastiat. He was a regular contributor to the JDE right up to his death.

2104 See his letter to Félix Coudroy, L.40. Letter to Félix Coudroy, 16 June 1845, in CW1, p. 65.

2105 Dictionnaire de l'Économie Politique, eds. Charles Coquelin et Guillaumin (1852-1853), 2 vols. See the glossary on "Dictionnaire de l'économie politique."

2106 See the glossary entry on "Bastiat's Anti-Socialist Pamphlets."

2107 Molinari made the distinction between the threat of "socialisme d'en haut" (socialism from above) and "socialisme d'en bas" (socialism from below) with respect to the events of 1848-52 in his obituary of Joseph Garnier in 1881, JDE, Sér. 4, T. 16, No. 46, October 1881, pp. 5-13. Reference on p. 9.

2108 It was in fact written by the editor Charles Coquelin, "Économie politique", DEP, vol. 1, pp. 643-70.

2109 Bastiat's DEP entries: "Abondance," DEP, vol. 1, pp. 2-4; "La Loi" (The Law), DEP, vol. 1, pp. 733-36 (signed by Charles Coquelin, the editor); and "L'État" (The State)," DEP, vol. 2, pp. 93-100.

2110 See the glossary entry on "The Social Mechanism."

2111 Bastiat uses the phrases "un libre arbitre social" (social or societal free will) and "un libre arbitre personnel" (individual free will).

2112 At the same this article was written in the summer of 1850 Bastiat also wrote WSWNS which has a chapter on "Machines," CW3, pp. 432-36.

2113 In ES1 22 "Metaphors" Bastiat discusses the use of martial metaphors like "invasion" and "tribute", or physical disasters like "flood" which were commonly used by critics of the free market and free trade. See CW3, pp. 100-03.

2114 In ES3 1 "Recipes for Protectionism" Bastiat criticises the argument that a major fire in Paris would create work in rebuilding which would be of benefit to the people. See, CW3 pp. 258. The advocate of protectionism, Saint-Chamans, argued in Nouvel essai sur la richesse des nations (1824) and again in Traité d'économie politique (1852) that the Great Fire of London in 1666 (so not Paris) destroyed a huge amount of the capital stock which was quickly replaced and was thus a net gain for the nation of some one million pounds stirling (or 25 million francs) because of the need to rebuild the city. See M. le vicomte de Saint-Chamans, Traité d'économie politique suivi d'un apercu sur les finances de la France (Paris: Dentu et Ledoyen, 1852), vol. 1.

2115 See the glossary entry "Ceteris paribus."

2116 "Primo vivere, deinde philosophare" [in original] also written as "Primo vivere, deinde philosophari". Variously attributed to Aristotle or Thomas Hobbes. "First, one must live, then one can philosophise".

2117 Bastiat does not use the normal expression for "freedom of trade" (la liberté des échanges) here. He uses a more abstract phrase "la liberté des transactions" (the freedom to engage in transactions) instead. This suggests that more than the exchange of physical goods is involved, but also non-material goods such as services.

2118 Croesus (595-547 BC) was King of Lydia until he was defeated and captured by the Persians. His name was synonymous with great wealth. See Glossary entry on "Croesus."

2119 This was the intention of the petitioners in one of Bastiat's best known Economic Sophisms, ES1 7 "Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles," CW3, pp. 49-53.

2120 See the glossary entry on "The Apparatus of Exchange."

2121 See below, pp. 000 for details of the illness which killed him.

2122 Letter 165 to Hortense Cheuvreux (Paris, April 1850), CW1, pp. 235-36.

2123 Letter 171 to Paillottet (Mugron 2 June, 1850), CW1, p. 245.

2124 Letter 175 to Paillottet (Les Beaux-Bonnes 23 June, 1850), CW1, pp. 250-51.

2125 Letter 180 to Fontenay (Les Eaux-Bonnes 3 July, 1850), CW1 pp.255-56. He expressed similar frustrations to Horace Say in Letter 182 to H. Say (LesEaux-Bonnes, 4 July, 1850), CW1, pp. 259-60.

2126 Letter 189 to Félix Coudroy (Paris, 9 September, 1850), CW1, pp. 269-70.

2127 Ambroise Clément, "Harmonies économiques, par M. Frédéric Bastiat. (Compte-rendu)," JDE, T. 26, no. 111, 15 June 1850, pp. 235-47.

2128 Clément, review of "Harmonies économiques," p. 239.

2129 Letter 180 to Fontenay (Les Eaux-Bonnes, 3 July, 1850), CW1, p. 255.

2130 CW5 (forthcoming); FEE edition, p.126; EH1, pp. 202-3.

2131 The phrase he uses is "puisqu'ils les évaluent" (since they evaluate them, or they place a value on them).

2132 Turkey, or the Ottoman Empire, was seen as a poor, despotic, and very foreign place.

2133 Bastiat introduces a new term he hasn't used before, "valeur incorporée" which we have translated as "incorporated value" or "embodied value." The only other time he uses it was in several pages of notes which Paillottet appended to the chapter on "Value" in the second, expanded edition of EH which he published in July 1851. They were not part of that chapter which Bastiat published in the first edition of January 1850 during his lifetime. Thus it would appear that this was an idea he was working on during the last year of his life. In the Stirling translation of 1880 the phrase is translated as "value incorporated in a product." In the FEE translation it is "value incorporated in a product" or "value incorporated with a commodity." It is interesting to compare this expression with one used by Proudhon in their debate on "Free Credit," namely "la valeur faite", which we have translated as "created value." See above, pp. 000.

2134 Letter 208 Paillottet to Cheuvreux (Rome, 22 December 1850), CW1, pp. 296-97. Bastiat's wish for confession, p. 297.

2135 For example, ES2 1 "The Physiology of Plunder," CW3, pp. 113-30. Theocratic plunder is discussed on p. 114; theocratic fraud on pp. 121-23.

2136 Letter 184 to Casimir Cheuvreux (Mugron, 14 July 1850), CW1, p. 261.

2137 Russell, Frédéric Bastiat: Ideas and Influence , p. 121.

2138 Letter 197 to Paillottet (Pisa, 11 October 1850), CW1 pp. 279-80.

2139 This is a reference to the collection of Economic Sophisms which were published in two "Series." Series I appeared in January 1846. Series II in January 1848.

2140 Volume two of the Economic Harmonies which "the friends of Bastiat" (Paillottet and Fontenay) would complete as best they could and publish in July 1851.

2141 We have not been able to locate this letter from Cobden.

2142 France used currency made of both gold and silver.

2143 Garcia Quijano was a member of the Société d'économie politique and an occasional contributor to Le Journal des économistes.

2144 The collection included I. Protection et communisme, II. Capital et rente, III. Incompatibilités parlementaires, IV. Paix et liberté, ou le Budget républicain, and V. L'Etat. Maudit argent! They were reviewed by "?" (probably Alcide Fonteyraud by the style of the writing), Review of "Petits pamphlets de M. Frédéric Bastiat," JDE, T. 23, no. 98, 15 Mai 1849, pp. 203-8.

2145 See the glossary entry on "Fonteyraud." Fonteyraud was a precocious Ricardo scholar, and a close companion of Bastiat and Molinari when they launched their revolutionary journal Jacques Bonhomme on the streets of Paris in June 1848. He died at the age of 27 during the cholera epidemic which swept through France in August 1849, soon after this piece was written.

2146 Fonteyraud's review, p. 203.

2147 Fonteyraud review, p. 208.

2148 ES2 15 "The Free Trader's Little Arsenal" (LE, 26 Apr. 1847), in CW3, pp. 234-40.

2149 "Profession de foi électorale d'avril 1849" (Statement of Electoral Principles in April 1849) [OC7.65, p. 255] [CW1] and "Profession de foi électorale de 1849. À MM. Tonnelier, Oegos, Bergeron, Camors, Oubroca, Pomeoe, Fauret, etc." (Statement of Electoral Principles in 1849. To MM. Tonnelier, Oegos, Bergeron, Camors, Oubroca, Pomeoe, Fauret, etc.) [OC1.17, p. 507] [CW1]

2150 Chambre de Commerce de Paris [Horace Say], Statistique de l'Industrie a Paris résultant de l'enquête. Faite par la Chambre de commerce pour les années 1847-1848 (Paris: Guillaumin, 1851). "Chap. XXII. 13e Groupe - Imprimerie, Gravure, Papeterie," pp. 187-94.

2151 CW1, pp. 390-95.

2152 See "The Social Mechanism and its Driving Force" in Further Aspect of Bastiat's Thought , below, pp. 000, for further discussion of this topic.

2153 See "Natural and Artificial Organizations," above, pp. 000.

2154 I would like to thank Alberto Mingardi for bringing to my attention the importance Bastiat placed on the notion of "l'appareil."

2155 In a Note added to EH2 XX. "Responsibility," FEE ed., pp. 000.

2156 In the article "Economic Harmonies I, II, III" (JDE), above, pp. 000.

2157 Both in a Note added to EH2 XX. "Responsibility," FEE ed., pp. 000.

2158 In EH2 XXII. "The Motive Force of Society," FEE ed. pp. 000.

2159 In a Note to EH2 XX "Responsibility," FEE ed., pp. 000.

2160 In EH2 XXI. "Solidarity," FEE ed., pp. 000.

2161 In "The League's Second Campaign" (LE, 7 Nov. 1847), CW6 (forthcoming).

2162 "To the Electors of the Arrondissement of Saint-Séver" (Mugron, July 1, 1846), in CW1, p. 359-60.

2163 In reference to the system of "legal plunder" in "The Law," CW2, p. 115.

2164 EH1, IV "Exchange." FEE ed. p. 79

2165 EH1 IV "Exchange," FEE ed. p. 178.

2166 Also written as "cæteris paribus," "cœteris paribus," and "ceteris paribus."

2167 There are 12 references to "toutes choses égales d'ailleurs" beginning with his article "Reflections on the Petitions from Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Lyons Relating to the Customs Service" (April 1834), in CW2, pp. 000; and 5 instances of Bastiat using the term "ceteris paribus" in his work beginning in November 1846 with "To the Editors of Le National " in Courrier français (11 Nov. 1846), CW6 (forthcoming). Interestingly, J.B. Say preferred a slightly different phrase, "toutes choses d'ailleurs égales" in the Cours complet . There is only one reference to "cœteris paribus" there.

2168 Alexander Reutlinger, Gerhard Schurz, and Andreas Hüttemann, "Ceteris Paribus Laws" Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Spring 2014 edition (Mar 14, 2011) < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/ceteris-paribus/ >.

2169 For example, McCulloch used the term only once in the 1825 edition of Principles of Political Economy when he quoted Petty directly. However, in the 3rd edition of 1843 he used it three times on his own accord, as in "There is no longer any doubt of the maxim that money is the sinews of war; that the wealthiest nation is, coeteris paribus, the most powerful" (p. 159). See The Principles of Political Economy: with a Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the Science (Edinburgh: Tait, William & Tait, 1825). Third edition Tait 1843.

2170 James Mill, "Beggar" in Supplement to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. With Preliminary Dissertations on the History of the Science. Illustrated by Engravings. (Edinburgh, Archibald Constable and Company, 1824).

2171 John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXII - Newspaper Writings December 1822 - July 1831 Part I , ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 53.

2172 J.S. Mill, "On the Words Productive and Unproductive", Essay III in Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1844), in John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume IV - Essays on Economics and Society Part I, ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by Lord Robbins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967).

2173 Harriet Martineau, Illustrations of Political Economy (3rd ed) in 9 vols. (London: Charles Fox, 1834). Vol. 9, "The Moral of Many Fables," p. 114.

2174 Molinari, [CR] "Contes sur l'économie politique, par miss Harriet Martineau," JDE, T. 23, N° 97, 15 avril 1849, pp. 77-82.

2175 T.5 [1834.04] "Reflections on the Petitions from Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Lyons Relating to the Customs Service, CW2, pp. 1-9.

2176 T.87 "To the Editors of Le National (2)", Le Courrier français , 11 Nov. 1846. CW6 (forthcoming).

2177 "On Competition" (1846), above, pp. 000.

2178 Capital and Rent (Feb. 1849), above, pp. 000.

2179 Damn Money! (April, 1849), above, pp. 000.

2180 "Abondance", DEP, (1852), below, pp. 000.

2181 Letter 180 to M. de Fontenay344 (Les Eaux-Bonnes, 3 July 1850), CW1, p. 256.

2182 "On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Philosophical Investigation in that Science," London and Westminster Review , IV and XXVI (Oct., 1836), 1-29. In John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume IV - Essays on Economics and Society Part I , ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by Lord Robbins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 335-37.

2183 EH II "Needs, Efforts, and Satisfactions," pp. 000. FEE p. 24.

2184 See the glossary entry on "Laplace" and the Editor's Introduction to "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine" (Feb. 1845), above, pp. 000.

2185 It did not appear in EH1 which was published in early 1850 but the introductory section to a draft chapter on it did appear in the posthumous EH2. See EH2 Chapter XVIII "Disturbing Factors," (FEE ed.), pp. 466-74.

2186 He gives some indication of what this second book might have covered in chapters XVIII and XXII of Economic Harmonies ("Causes perturbatrices" (Disturbing Factors) and "Moteur social" (The Motive Force of Society)) and in ES2 I "Physiologie de la Plunder" (The Physiology of Plunder) in CW3, pp. 113-30.

2187 Bastiat refers to "the healing force" in his article "On Population," above, pp. 000.

2188 EH1 Chapter VIII "Private Property and Communal Property" (our translation, but see also FEE ed., p. 203.

2189 See "On Population," above, pp. 000 and the Editor's Introduction.

2190 See "Competition," above, pp. 000 and the Editor's Introduction.

2191 In EH XVII "Private and Public Services." In the Fee translation "déplacé" is translated as "dislocated," p. 461.

2192 In CW6 (forthcoming).

2193 In the opening chapter "On Society" in his Traité d'économie politique (1823) Destutt de Tracy stated that "a société est purement et uniquement une série continuelle d'échanges" (society was purely and simply a continual series of exchanges) and "la société ne consiste que dans une suite continuelle d'échanges" (society is nothing but a continual succession of exchanges). In Traité d'économie politique, par le comte Destutt de Tracy (Paris: Bouget et Levi, 1823. Chap. I. "De la Société", pp. 65-80. Quote, pp. 68-69. See also the discussion in the glossary "Service for Service."

2194 See the glossary entry on "Fox."

2195 From Book I, Chapter 1 "Of the Division of Labour," Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, edited with an Introduction, Notes, Marginal Summary and an Enlarged Index by Edwin Cannan (London: Methuen, 1904). Vol. 1, pp. 000???

2196 W.J. Fox, speech given at the Covent Garden Theatre on January 25, 1844, Collected Works, vol. IV: Anti-Corn Law Speeches , pp. 62-63. Lengthy extracts from the meeting were included in Bastiat's book on Cobden and the League (1845) including Fox's speech, OC3, pp. 223 ff, Fox's speech on "being independent from foreigners in trade matters, pp. 232-34.

2197 EH (FEE edition), p. 440.

2198 In "On Population" (mid 1846), below, pp. 000.

2199 "Second Speech given in the Montesquieu Hall in Paris" (29 Sept. 1846), in CW6 (forthcoming).

2200 See the Editor's Introduction to "Money and the Mutuality of Services," above, pp. 000.

2201 See Free Credit (Oct. 1849 to March 1850), below pp. 000.

2202 "Appendice: Société de l'Exposition perpétuelle: projet," in Appendix to Théorie de la propriété. Deuxième édition (1866), pp. 249-308. The discussion of the permanent bazaar is on p. 297.

2203 See below, pp. 000. Bastiat also has a story about "The Feeding of Paris" where he makes a similar argument about how no central planner organises or even can organise the vast task of feeding a city of one million people very day. See, ES1 18 "There Are No Absolute Principles" in CW3, p. 84.

2204 See "The Social Mechanism and its Driving Force" in Further Aspect of Bastiat's Thought , below, pp. 000.

2205 Leonard E. Read, I Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Reed (Irvington-on-Hudson, New York: Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1999).

2206 Voltaire published the first edition of Éléments de la Philosophie de Newton in 1738 and then an expanded edition in 1741.

2207 Laplace wrote a multi-volume work on Traité de mécanique céleste (Treatise on Celestial Mechanics) (1799-1805) and Arago was a friend of Bastiat who worked at the Paris Observatory and also served in the provisional Government in 1848 as Minister of War. See the glossary entries on "Laplace" and "Arago."

2208 See above, pp. 000.

2209 See above, pp. 000.

2210 Molinari, Gustave de, Les Soirées de la rue Saint-Lazare; entretiens sur les lois économiques et défense de la propriété. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849).

2211 Gustave de Molinari, Les Lois naturelles de l'économie politique (Paris: Guillaumin, 1887).

2212 These were "la loi naturelle de l'économie des forces ou du moindre effort" (the natural law of the economising of forces, or of the least effort), "la loi naturelle de la concurrence" (the natural law of competition) or "la loi de libre concurrence" (the law of free competition), "la loi naturelle de la valeur" (sometimes also expressed as "la loi de progression des valeurs") (the natural law of value, or the progression of value), "la loi de l'offre et de la demande" (the law of supply and demand), "la loi de l'équilibre" (the law of economic equilibrium), and "Malthus' law of population growth."

2213 From Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 5th ed. (London: T. Cadell, 1782). </titles/1428>.

2214 The French edition was Adam Ferguson, Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile , 2 vols. Translated by Jean Nicolas Démeunier (Paris: Chez la Veuve Desaint, 1783). See the entry on "Fergusson, Adam," (sic) in DEP, vol. 1, pp. 758-59.

2215 ES1 18 "There Are No Absolute Principles" in CW3, pp. 84-85.

2216 See "The Social Mechanism and its Driving Force" in Further Aspect of Bastiat's Thought , below, pp. 000.

2217 See above, pp. 000.

2218 See "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine" (JDE, February 1845), above, pp. 000.

2219 See EH, FEE ed. p. xxxv.

2220 Interestingly, this sentence was not in the version which appeared in the JDE article but was added to the version which appeared as a chapter in EH1 II. Besoins, Efforts, Satisfactions".

2221 It should be noted that Bastiat talked about "social harmony" in the singular and "social harmonies" in the plural but only about "economic harmonies" in the plural.

2222 Letter 39 to Félix Coudroy (Paris, 5 June 1845), in CW1, p. 64.

2223 Letter 81 to Félix Coudroy (Paris, Aug. 1847), CW1, p. 131.

2224 "A Draft Preface to the Economic Harmonies " (Fall 1847), CW1, pp. 316-20.

2225 Letter 80 to Richard Cobden (Paris, 5 July 1847), in CW1, pp. 000.

2226 See the undated note by Bastiat on the "Economic and Social Harmonies" found among his papers (c. June 1845), above pp. 000.

2227 See above, pp. 000.

2228 Our translation in CW5 (forthcoming).

2229 Our translation, in EH2 11 "Producers and Consumers"; FEE ed. p. 325.

2230 See above, pp. 000.

2231 Letter 65 to Richard Cobden (Mugron, 25 June 1846) in CW1, 106.

2232 Letter 80 to Cobden (Paris, 5 July, 1847), in CW1, p. 131.

2233 See above, pp. 000.

2234 Our translation. FEE ed., p. 319.

2235 See "Disturbing and Restorative Factors" in Further Aspect of Bastiat's Thought , below, pp. 000.

2236 Our translation in CW6 (forthcoming).

2237 Our translation, EH FEE ed. p. xxiv.

2238 See above, pp. 000.

2239 "Baccalaureate and Socialism," in CW2, p. 225.

2240 Our translation, but see also FEE ed., pp. xxi-xxii.

2241 See "Disturbing and Restorative Factors" in Further Aspect of Bastiat's Thought , below, pp. 000.

2242 See above, pp. 000.

2243 FEE translated this as "harmonious discord", EH1 Conclusion, p. 319.

2244 VII. "Trade Restrictions" in WSWNS, CW3, p. 428.

2245 See ES3 15 "One Man's Gain is Another Man's Loss," in CW3, pp. 341-43.

2246 See "Justice and Fraternity" (June 1848), in CW2, p. 76.

2247 CW2, pp. 147–84.

2248 See footnote in CW3, p. 110.

2249 See Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Action: A Study in Conscience and Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp.221-22, where she sates that "The History of Liberty that was to have been his monument as an historian was never constructed. Only fragments of it can be pieced together from essays and lectures posthumously published and from notes bequeathed to future historians."

2250 See, Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis. Edited from Manuscript by Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 1st ed. 1954), pp. 500–01, and Hayek's "Introduction," Bastiat, Selected Essays (FEE ed.), p. ix.

2251 Rothbard, Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. Volume II (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006). See, especially chap. 14 "After Mill: Bastiat and the French laissez-faire tradition," pp. 439–75.

2252 See, Salerno, J.T. (1988) "The Neglect of the French Liberal School in Anglo-American Economics: A Critique of Received Explanations." The Review of Austrian Economics 2: 113–56.; Thornton, Mark, "Frédéric Bastiat as an Austrian Economist," Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines , vol. 11, no. 2/3 (June 2001), pp. 387-98; Thomas J. DiLorenzo, "Frédéric Bastiat: Between the French and Marginalist Revolutions," in 15 Great Austrian Economists. Edited and with and Introduction by Randall G. Holcombe (Auburn Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999), pp. 59–69; Jörg Guido Hülsmann, "Bastiat's Legacy in Economics," The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics , vol. 4, no. 4, (Winter 2001), pp. 55–70.

2253 James A. Dorn, "Bastiat: A Pioneer in Constitutional Political Economy" Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines , vol. 11, no. 2/3 (June 2001), pp. 399-413; Caplan, Bryan; Stringham, Edward (2005). "Mises, Bastiat, Public Opinion, and Public Choice". Review of Political Economy 17: 79–105; and Michael C. Munger, "Did Bastiat Anticipate Public Choice?" in Liberty Matters: Robert Leroux, "Bastiat and Political Economy" (July 1, 2013) /pages/bastiat-and-political-economy#conversation3 .

2254 Garello et al., Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines, vol. 11, no. 2/3 (June 2001). Editor-in-Chief: Garello, Pierre.

2255 See above, pp. 000 and pp. 000.

2256 See above, pp. 000.

2257 See above, pp. 000.

2258 In CW2, p. 150.

2259 EH2 XX "Responsibility," pp. 000. FEE ed. p. 496. FEE translates "l'être agissant" as "the person performing an act."

2260 Our new translation but see FEE ed. pp. 523-24.

2261 Our translation of EH2 XXII "The Motive Force of Society." See also FEE ed. p. 521.

2262 Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, in 4 vols., ed. Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007). Vol. 1, Part I Human Action, Chapter 2: The Epistemological Problems of the Sciences of Human Action, 3: The A Priori and Reality, p. 39.

2263 "Economic harmonies IV", above pp. 000.

2264 See "Bastiat's Invention of Crusoe Economics" in the Editor's Introduction to CW3, pp. lxiv-lxvii.

2265 See above, pp. 000.

2266 "Draft Preface for the Harmonies ," CW1, pp. 318-20.

2267 Letter 4 to Proudhon, above, pp. 000.

2268 See above, pp. 000.

2269 See the economic sophism ES3 15 "One Man's gain is another Man's Loss"([c.1847), in CW3, pp. 341-43; and Montaigne, "Le profit d'un et dommage de l'autre," in Montaigne, Michel de. Essais de Montaigne, suivis de sa correspondance et de la servitude voluntaire d'Estienne de la Boëtie. Édition variorum, accompangné d'une notice biographique de notes historiques, philologiques, etc. et d'un index analytique par Charles Louandre . 4 Vols. Paris: Charpentier, 1862. Tome 1, chapter XXI "Le profit d'un et dommage de l'autre," pp. 130-31.

2270 See the two short pieces Bastiat wrote sometime in 1849 "On the Value of Services" and "Money and the Mutuality of Services," above, pp. 000 and pp. 000.

2271 English version: Antoine Louis Claude, Comte Destutt de Tracy, A Treatise on Political Economy: to which is Prefixed a Supplement to a Preceding Work on the Understanding or Elements of Ideology; with an Analytical Table, and an Introduction on the Faculty of the Will (Georgetown: Joseph Milligan, 1817), pp. 6-7. French version: Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, Traité d'économie politique (Paris: Bouquet et Lévi, 1823). pp. 68-69.

2272 See above, pp. 000.

2273 See above, pp. 000.

2274 He first used the phrase "services pour services" (services for services) in an article "To Artisans and Workers" in the Courrier français , 18 September 1846, which was republished in ES2 6, in CW3, p. 157.

2275 In CW6 (forthcoming).

2276 He stated: "Scientifiquement, la richesse, c'est l'ensemble des services réciproques que se rendent les hommes, et à l'aide desquels la société existe et se développe" (Scientifically speaking, wealth is the ensemble/collection of reciprocal services which men render to each other and with the aid of which society exists and grows). "Third Speech given in Paris at the Taranne Hall" (3 July 1847), CW6 (forthcoming).

2277 See his critique of Proudhon in the First Letter of his essay "Property and Plunder" ( JDD , 24 July 1848), CW2, p. 150.

2278 Here he argues that "la Spoliation consiste à employer la force ou la ruse pour altérer à notre profit l'équivalence des services" (Plunder consists in the use of force or fraud to change the equivalence of services to one's own benefit), CW2, p. 171.

2279 Proudhon uses the phrase "mutualité des services" in Lettre à M. Blanqui sur la propriété. Deuxième mémoire (Paris: Prévot, 1841), p. 27; and Système des Contradictions économiques (Guillaumin, 1846), Tome II, "Chap. XI. La Propriété," p. 262-63.

2280 Here he uses the phrase "service contre service", as in "Échange librement débattu de service contre service." ES2 1 "The Physiology of Plunder," CW3, pp. 114, 117.

2281 EH XVIII "Disturbing factors," FEE ed., p. 467.

2282 ES1 "Conclusion," in CW3, pp. 110.

2283 Letter 81 to Félix Coudroy (Paris, Aug. 1847), CW1, p. 131.

2284 Conclusion to ES1, CW3, p. 104

2285 See, above, pp. 000, and the glossary entry on "The Importance of Leisure" pp. 000.

2286 EH2, XVII Private Services and Public Services, our translation. See also FEE ed. p. 445. The FEE translator translates "l'économie sociale" as "political economy" and "la science" as "political economy," thus confusing the issue.

2287 Dunoyer, Charles, Nouveau traité d'économie sociale, ou simple exposition des causes sous l'influence desquelles les hommes parviennent à user de leurs forces avec le plus de LIBERTÉ, c'est-à-dire avec le plus FACILITÉ et de PUISSANCE (Paris: Sautelet et Mesnier, 1830), 2 vols.

2288 See also "The 'Apparatus" or Structure of Exchange" and "Disturbing and Restorative Factors" in Further Aspect of Bastiat's Thought , below, pp. 000, and pp. 000, for further details of Bastiat's ideas concerning the mechanisms and forces which governed the workings of society and its institutions.

2289 The expression "le moteur social" which was used as the title of a chapter in EH2 was translated by Stirling as "the social motive force" and by FEE as "the motive force of society."

2290 See "Natural and Artificial Organizations," below, pp. 000.

2291 See below, pp. 000.

2292 New passage added to EH1 and not in original JDE article.

2293 See above, pp. 000.

2294 Two of many examples which could be cited are: "ce moteur universel du monde social : l'attrait pour les satisfactions et la répugnance pour la douleur ; en un mot, dans ce mobile que nous portons tous en nous-mêmes : l'intérêt personnel" (this universal motor or driving force of the social world (is) the attraction to satisfactions and repugnance for pain/suffering, in a word, in this driving force which we all carry within ourselves, namely self-interest) and "je signale l'intérêt personnel comme le moteur universel de l'humanité" (I mean by self-interest the universal driving force of humanity).

2295 In EH2 XXII. Moteur social, CW5 (forthcoming). Our translation. FEE ed. pp. 000.

2296 In T.152 (1847.09.15) "Minutes of a Public Meeting in Marseilles by the Free Trade Association: Speech by M. Bastiat", JDE, Septembre 1847, T. XVIII, no. 70, pp. 163-165. Report also given in LE 5 Sept. 1847, no. 41, pp. 325-27. [DMH] [CW6]

2297 "Abondance" (Abundance), below, pp. 000.

2298 In EH XIX. Guerre

2299 "Natural and Artificial Organisation" below, pp. 000.

2300 See A. Legoyt, "Recrutement," DEP , vol. 2, pp. 498-503; "Conscription," in Dictionnaire de l'armée de terre: ou recherches historiques sur l'art et les usages militaires des anciens et des modernes , Volume 3, ed. Etienne Alexandre Bardin and Oudinot de Reggio (Paris: Perrotin, 1841), pp. 1539-1542.

2301 See Plus de conscription! (Signé: Allyre Bureau, l'un des rédacteurs de "la Démocratie pacifique") (Paris: Impr. de Lange Lévy, 1848) and Émile de Girardin, Les 52: Abolition de l'esclavage militaire . (Paris: M. Lévy, 1849).

2302 See Andrew D. White, Fiat Money Inflation in France (1896) and Charles Coquelin, "Assignats" DEP vol. 1, pp. 77-78.

2303 In ES3 6 "The People and the Bourgeoisie" (LE, 23 May 1847), in CW3, pp. 281-87, especially p. 286.

2304 Bastiat campaigned to ban civil servants from also sitting in the Chamber. See "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" (March 1843) in CW1, pp. 452-57.

2305 For information about Bastiat's activities in the National Assembly see, Dean Russell, Frédéric Bastiat: Ideas and Influence (Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1969), Chap. 9 "Bastiat as Legislator," 106-24; Bibliography, p. 155; Dictionnaire des parlementaires français comprenant tous les Membres des Assemblées françaises et tous les Ministres français, depuis le 1er mai 1789 jusqu'au 1er mai 1889. Vol. I. A-Cay, publié sous la direction de MM. Adolphe Robert et Gaston Cougny (Paris: Bourloton, 1889-1891). "Bastiat", pp. 192-93.

2306 On Bastiat's activities in the Legislative Assembly see Table analytique par ordre alphabétique de matières et de noms de personnes du Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée nationale législative (28 mai 1849 - 2 décembre 1851) et des documents imprimés par son ordre. Rédigée aux Archives du Corps législatifs (Paris: Henri et Charles Noblet, Imprimeurs de l'Assemblée nationale, 1852). Bastiat, p. 56. Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée Nationale Législative (28 May 1849 - 2 December 1852) . 17 vols. (28 Mai 1849 - 1 Déc. 1851). Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée Nationale Législative. Exposés des motifs et projets de lois présentés par le gouvernement; rapports de Mm. les Représentants (Paris: Imprimerie de l'Assemblée national, 1849-1852). Henceforth CRANL.

2307 Patricia O'Brien, "L'Embastillement de Paris: The Fortification of Paris during the July Monarchy," French Historical Studies , Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring, 1975), pp. 63-82.

2308 François Arago, Sur les Fortifications de Paris (Paris: Bachelier, 1841) and Études sur les fortifications de Paris, considérées politiquement et militairement (Paris: Pagnerre, 1845). Michel Chevalier, Les fortifications de Paris, lettre à M. Le Comte Molé (Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1841) and Cours d'Économie politique fait au Collège de France par Michel Chevalier (Bruxelles: Meline, Cans, 1851), vol. 2, "Douzième leçon. Concours de l'armée française aux travaux des fortifications de Paris," pp. 183-96. First ed. 1844.

2309 Horace Say, "Douane", DEP, vol. 1, pp. 578-604 (figures from p. 597). Additional information can be found in Molinari, "Union douanière" (Customs Union), DEP , vol. 2, p. 788; Pierre Clément, Histoire du système protécteur en France (1854); Henri Fonfrède, "Du système prohibitif" in Oeuvres de Henri Fonfrède (1846), Vol. 7, pp. 285, 319, 344; Léon Faucher, "Du projet de loi sur les douanes," JDE, no. 75 February 1848, vol. XIX, pp. 254-65.

2310 Antonio Tena Jungito, "Assessing the protectionist intensity of tariffs in nineteenth-century European trade policy," in Classical Trade Protectionism 1815-1914 (2005), pp. 99-120.

2311 Frank Taussig, The Tariff History of the United States (1914), pp. 110-115.

2312 See ES2 11 "The Utopian," above, pp. ???

2313 Horace Say, Paris, son octroi et ses emprunts (1847) and Esquirou de Parieu, "Octrois," DEP , vol. 2, pp. 284-91.

2314 See, Salerno, J.T. (1988) "The Neglect of the French Liberal School in Anglo-American Economics: A Critique of Received Explanations." The Review of Austrian Economics 2: 113-56; and Joseph T. Salerno, "The Neglect of Bastiat's School by English-Speaking Economists: A Puzzle Resolved," Journal des économistes et des Etudes Humaines vol. 11, no. 2/3 (June/September 2001), pp. 451-95. On teaching economics in France see "A Puzzle Resolved," pp. 3 ff. See also, Lucette Le Van-Lemesle, "La promotion de l'économie politique en France au XIXe siècle jusqu'à son introduction dans le facultés (1815-1881)," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine , 27 April 1980, pp. 270-94 and Alain Alcouffe, "The Institutionalization of Political Economy in French Universities: 1819-1896," History of Political Economy , Summer 1989, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 313-44.

2315 See, Maurice Block, Statistique de la France, comparée avec les autres états de l'Europe . 2 vols. (Paris: D'Amyot, 1860). Vol. 1, Chap. VII Bienfaisance, section on "Bureaux de bienfaisance", pp. 291-95.

2316 ES2 3 "The Two Axes", CW3, pp. 138-42.

2317 Benjamin Franklin, Mélanges de morale, d'économie et de politique (1824).

2318 In CW3, pp. 198-214.

2319 CW3, pp. 138-42.

2320 CW2, pp. 179-87.

2321 CW3, pp. 214-26.

2322 Jacques Bonhomme appeared briefly in ES3 21 "The Immediate Relief of the People," (La République française, 12 March, 1848), CW3, pp. 377-79.

2323 The history of how Jacques Bonhomme came to publish a journal is explained in the first issue: "Histoire de Jacques Bonhomme. Comment est venue à Jacques Bonhomme l'idée d'écrire un journal." Jacques Bonhomme , no. 1, 11-15 June 1848, p. 1. Unsigned but probably by Bastiat.

2324 "The State (Draft)", in CW2, pp. 105-6.

2325 "The Broken Window," in WSWNS, CW3, pp. 405-7. Jacques Bonhomme also plays a role in "3. Taxes," "7. Trade Restrictions," "8. Machines," and "10. Algeria."

2326 Bastiat, Lettres d'un habitant des Landes (1877), pp. 3-4.

2327 J.-B. Say, Traité d'économie politique (1841). Bk I, Chap. XI "De quelle manière se forment et se multiplient les capitaux," p. 117.

2328 Bastiat, Harmonies économiques (2nd ed. 1851), pp. 454-64; Economic Harmonies (FEE ed. 1964), pp. 557-67.

2329 Roger de Fontenay, "Notice sur la vie et les écrits de Frédéric Bastiat," in vol. 1 of the Oeuvres complètes de Frédéric Bastiat (2nd ed. 1862), pp. ix-lii.

2330 Gérard Minart, Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912), pour un gouvernement à bon marché dans un milieu libre (Paris: Institut Charles Coquelin, 2012), p. 381. See also Levan-Lemesle, A. L.. "Guillaumin, éditeur d'économie politique, 1801-1864)," Revue d'économie politique , vol. 95, no. 2, 1985, pp. 134-49.

2331 G. de Molinari, "Dictionnaire de l'économie politique," JDE, T. 37, N° 152, 15 December 1853, pp. 420-32.

2332 Obituary of Joseph Garnier, JDE, Sér. 4, T. 16, No. 46, October 1881, pp. 5-13. Molinari tells a similar story in his obituary of Coquelin with the added detail that the economists chose not to fight back and so let the communists win by not throwing a single punch to defend themselves: Molinari, "[Nécr.] Charles Coquelin," JDE, N(os) 137 et 138. Septembre et Octobre 1852, pp. 167-76. See p. 172.

2333 Joseph Garnier, Congrès des amis de la paix universelle réuni à Paris en 1849, p. vi.

2334 Séances et travaux de l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques : compte rendu par MM. Loiseau et Ch. Vergé. Sous la direction de M. Mignet, secrétaire perpétuel de l'Académie. Tome neuvième. premier semestre de 1846 (Paris: Au bureau du moniteur universel, 1846), pp. 5, 8, 84.

2335 Amable Charles comte de Franqueville, Le premier siècle de l'Institut de France, 25 octobre, 1795-25 octobre, 1895: Notices sur les membres libres, les associés étrangers et les correspondants. Fondations et prix décernés. Personnel des anciennes académies. Two vols. (Paris: J. Rothschild, 1896). On Bastiat, vol. 2, pp. 233-34; on Molinari, vol. 2, p. 293.

2336 See, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences website < http://www.asmp.fr/sommaire.htm >.

2337 In ES3 6 "The People and the Bourgeoisie" (LE, 23 may 1847), in CW3, pp. 281-87, especially p. 286.

2338 Bastiat campaigned to ban civil servants from also sitting in the Chamber. See "Parliamentary Conflicts of Interest" ( Sent. des pyr. , 21-25 March 1843), in CW1, pp. 452-57.

2339 For information about Bastiat's activities in the National Assembly see, Dean Russell, Frédéric Bastiat: Ideas and Influence (1969), Chap. 9 "Bastiat as Legislator," 106-24; Bibliography, p. 155; Dictionnaire des parlementaires français (Paris: Bourloton, 1889-1891). "Bastiat", pp. 192-93.

2340 On Bastiat's activities in the Legislative Assembly see Table analytique par ordre alphabétique de matières et de noms de personnes du Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée nationale législative (28 mai 1849 - 2 décembre 1851) (1852), "Bastiat," p. 56; and Compte rendu des séances de l'Assemblée Nationale Législative (28 May 1849 - 2 December 1852) . 17 vols. (28 Mai 1849 - 1 Déc. 1851) (1849-1852).

2341 A history of the Society can be found in Breton, Yves. "The Société d'économie politique of Paris (1842–1914)." In The Spread of Political Economy and the Professionalisation of Economists: Economic Societies in Europe, America and Japan in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Massimo M. Augello and Marco E. L. Guidi. London: Routledge, 2001.

2342 See his letter to his friend Félix Coudroy recounting this experience, "Letter 37 to Coudroy (May 1845)," CW1, pp. 59-61.

2343 Annales de la Société d'Économie Politique (1889), pp.49-50.

2344 See ES3 23. "Disastrous Illusions" (March 1848),in CW3, pp. ???

2345 Lawrence H. White, "Competing Money Supplies" The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics < https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CompetingMoneySupplies.html >.

2346 Coquelin provides a history of banking a defense of his ideas in the article "Banque" in DEP , vol. 1, pp. 107-45. See also, J.-E. Horn, La liberté des banques (Paris: Guillaumin, 1866).

2347 Joseph Garnier, "Laissez faire, laissez passer," DEP, vol. 2, p. 19.

2348 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). 1st edition. < /titles/malthus-an-essay-on-the-principle-of-population-1798-1st-ed#Malthus_0195_24 >.

2349 The passage comes from Book IV, Chapter VI "Effects of the Knowledge of the Principal Cause of Poverty On Civil Liberty" in Thomas Robert Malthus, An essay on the principle of population (1803, 2nd revised ed.), p. 531.

2350 Malthus, Du Principe de population, ed. Joseph Garnier (1857).

2351 Malthus' Principle of Population (1885), Du principe de population (2e éd. augm. de nouvelles notes contenant les faits statistiques les plus récents et les débats relatifs à la question de la population), précédé d'une introduction et d'une notice, par M. G. de Molinari (1885).

2352 Bastiat, "De la population" JDE , T. 15, no. 59, October 1846, pp. 217-34.

2353 Economic Harmonies , (FEE ed.), p. 426.

2354 See, Bastiat's Chapter 16 on Population in the 1851 edition of Economic Harmonies and the editor Roger de Fontenay's Addendum, pp. 454-64. FEE trans., pp. 431 ff.

2355 See Le Droit au travail à l'Assemblée Nationale. See also Faucher, "Droit au travail", DEP, vol. 1. pp. 605–19.

Collected Works of Bastiat, vol. 4: Miscellaneous Economic Writings

Introduction

Table of Contents

Some Additional Letters (7)↩

1. Letter 209 to M. Muiron (Eaux-Bonnes, 7 Nov. 1844)↩

2. Letter 216 to Félix Coudroy (1845)↩

3. Letter 210 to Paillottet (Pisa, 30 Sept. 1850)↩

4. Letter 211 to Paillottet (Pisa, 7 Oct. 1850)↩

5. Letter 212 to Paillottet (Pisa, 11 Oct. 1850)↩

6. Letter 213 to M. Soustra (Pisa, 12 Oct. 1850)↩

7. Letter 214 to Paillottet (Rome, 8 Nov. 1850)↩

Early Writings: The Bayonne and Mugron Years, 1819-1844↩

Section Introduction↩

1. T.296 (before 1830) "On the Romans as Plundering Villains"↩

2. T.297 (before 1830) "On the Romans and Self-sacrifice"↩

3. T.289 "The Poetry of Civilization" (c. 1830)↩

4. T.104 "Letter to M. Saulnier, Editor of La Revue britannique , (on the cost of government in the U.S. and France)" (c. 1831)↩

5. T.318 "Election Manifesto" (c. 1832)↩

6. T.285 "On Certainty" (c. 1833)↩

7. T.4 "On a Petition in Support of Polish Refugees" (c. 1834)↩

8. T.6 "A Letter to "Charles" in Support of a Polish Refugee" (Mugron, 1 Sept. 1835)↩

9. T.7 Five Articles on "The Canal beside the Adour" (18 June 1837, La Chalosse )↩

10. T.286 "Proposals for an Association of Wine Producers" (15 Jan. 1841)↩

11. T.298 (1843) "On the Cost of Being Governed"↩

12. T.17 "On the Allocation of the Land Tax in the Department of Les Landes" (July 1844)↩

13. T.18 "Two Articles on Postal Reform I" (3-6 Aug. 1844, Sentinelle des Pyrénées )↩

The "Paris" Writings I: Bastiat and the Free Trade Movement (Oct. 1844 - Feb. 1848)↩

1. T.23 "Letter from an Economist to M. de Lamartine. On the occasion of his article entitled: The Right to a Job" (Feb. 1845, JDE)↩

2. T.317 "Introduction and Post Script to Economic Sophisms" (March 1845)↩

3. T.20 "On the Book by M. Dunoyer. On The Liberty of Working" (May, 1845)↩

4. T.47 "Thoughts on Sharecropping" (15 Feb. 1846, JDE)↩

5. T.51 "The Theory of Profit" (26 Feb. 1846, Mem. bord. )↩

6. T.58 & T.49 "Two Articles on Postal Reform II" (April 1846, Mem. bord .)↩

7. T.64 "On Competition" (JDE, May 1846)↩

8. T.68 " On the Redistribution of Wealth by M. Vidal" (15 June 1846, JDE)↩

9. T.288 "A Light-Hearted Look at Free Trade" (mid or late 1846)↩

10. T.80 "Second Letter to M. de Lamartine (on price controls on food)" (Oct. 1846, JDE)↩

11. T.81 "On Population" (JDE, 15 Oct. 1846)↩

12. T.105 "To M. de Noailles in the Chamber of Peers (on Perfidious Albion)" (24 Jan. 1847, LE)↩

13. T.111 "A Curious Economic Phenomenon. Financial Reform in England" (21 Feb. 1847, LE)↩

14. T.118 "Two Methods of Equalizing Taxes" (4 April 1847, LE)↩

15. T.136 "The Salt Tax" (20 June 1847, LE)↩

16. T.139 "Mr. Ewart's Proposal for a Single Tax in England" (LE, 27 June, 1847)↩

17. T.143 "On Mignet's Eulogy of M. Charles Comte" (11 July 1847, LE)↩

18. T.151 "A Letter (to Hippolyte Castille) (on intellectual property)" (9 Sept. 1847, Travail Intel.)↩

19. T.299 (late 1847) "The Difference between doing Business and an Act of Charity"↩

20. T.300 (1847.11.28) "On the Difference between Illegal and Immoral Acts" (LE, 28 Nov. 1847)↩

21. T.161 "On the Export of Gold Bullion" (LE, 12 Dec. 1847)↩

22. T.163 "A Speech on intellectual property given to the Publishers Circle" (16 Dec. 1847, Travail int.)↩

23. T.167 "Barataria" (c. 1848)↩

24. T.176 "Natural and Artificial Organisation" (JDE, 15 Jan., 1848)↩

25. T.177 "Laziness and Trade Restrictions" (16 Jan. 1848, LE)↩

26. T.178 "Letter to M. Jobard (on intellectual property)" (22 Jan. 1848, Ec. belge )↩

The "Paris" Writings II: Bastiat the Politician, Anti-Socialist, and Economist (Feb. 1848 - Dec. 1850)↩

Section Introduction↩

1. T.293 (post-1848) "On Experience and Responsibility"↩

2. T.295 (c. 1848) "Why our Finances are in a Mess"↩

3. T.186 "A Few Words about the Title of our Journal: La République française" (26 Feb. 1848, RF)↩

4. T.302 "Speaks in a Discussion in the Assembly on the Formation of Committees" (13 May 1848)↩

5. T.303 "Speaks in a Discussion of Randoing 's Proposal to increase Export Subsidies on Woollen Cloth" (9 June 1848)↩

6. T.216 "A Hoax" (15 June 1848, JB)↩

7. T.217 "Taking Five and Returning (giving back) Four is not Giving" (15 June 1848, JB)↩

8. T.218 "A Dreadful Escalation" (20 June 1848, JB)↩

9. T.304 "Speaks in a Discussion on the Decree concerning the Regulation of the Political Clubs" (26 July 1848)↩

10. T.203 (1848.07.28) "A Complaint made by M. Considerant and F. Bastiat's Reply."↩

11. T.305 "Report to the Assembly from the Finance Committee concerning a Grant to assist needy citizens in the Department of la Seine" (9 August 1848)↩

12. T.306 "Additional Comments in the Assembly on the Report from the Finance Committee concerning a Grant to assist needy citizens in the Department of la Seine" (10 August 1848)↩

13. T.307 "Speech in the Assembly on Postal Reform" (24 August 1848)↩

14. T.223 "Economic Harmonies: I, II, and III. The Needs of Man" (1 Sept., 1848, JDE)↩

15. T.224 Bastiat's Letter to Garnier on the Right to a Job (Oct, 1848)↩

16. T.273 "Comments at a Meeting of the Political Economy Society on Income Tax" (10 Oct., 1848)↩

17. T.308 "Speaks in a Discussion in the Assembly on the Election of the President of the Republic" (27 Oct. 1848)↩

18. T.274 "Comments at a Meeting of the Political Economy Society on the Emancipation of the Colonies" (10 Dec. 1848)↩

19. T.225 "Economic Harmonies IV" (JDE, 15 Dec. 1848)↩

20. T.294 "On the Value of Services" (c.1849-50)↩

21. T.316 "Money and the Mutuality of Services" (c. 1849)↩

22. "The Consequences of the Reduction in the Salt Tax" (JDD, 1 Jan. 1849)↩

23. T.309 "Speaks in a Discussion in the Assembly on a Proposal to change the Tariff on imported Salt" (11 Jan. 1849)↩

24. T.234 Capital and Rent (Feb. 1849)↩

25. T.275 "Comments at a Meeting of the Political Economy Society on Financial Reform" (10 Feb. 1849)↩