Concluding remarks

Weulersse dated the decline of the “physiocratic movement”^[82] from the 1770s up to the French Revolution; Schumpeter set a similar milestone in the 1780s. This decline was marked by a drying up of intellectual creativity and a difficulty for the less numerous disciples to deepen or renew the master’s work - it could be pushed back to the beginning of the nineteenth century if we want to take into account the rear-guard battles led by Du Pont.

Physiocracy had a noticeable intellectual impact in eighteenth-century Europe, where agriculture held a dominant position and where enlightened despotism appeared as a relevant form of political organisation (Delmas et al. 1995). However, much debated at the time of its appearance in France, this political doctrine very quickly faded from the intellectual horizon. Adam Smith did not mention it, only James Mill examined this point of physiocratic doctrine (Demals and Hyard 2007). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the jurist Jean-Etienne Portalis (1808, 33-4) questioned this vision of the legal despotic sovereign, “superior and universal owner of the territory” who would have a right of eminent domain to dispose of private properties for the general good and to levy taxes on these properties. The reception of the physiocratic eco­nomic theory brings to light two questions: that of the method and that of the Tableau Economique.

Smith did not doubt that the Physiocrats were, like him, ardent defenders of complete freedom of trade, on the other hand, he doubted the method chosen by Quesnay - a “very speculative physician” (Smith 1776, 674) - to extend this freedom, that is to say, by the top of society, without thinking that this extension could be the result of the action of individuals themselves at the bottom of soci­ety, whatever the form of the constitution. For Jean-Baptiste Say, the principal vice of physiocracy was methodological: he reproached the Physiocrats for con­sidering economic facts from the point of view of the law, while he claimed a method that started from the facts themselves: “Instead of observing the nature of thing first, sorting their observations and deducing general truths from them, they [Physiocrats] begun with abstract general statements...

What the nineteenth century will remember of physiocracy is a paradox: the promotion of economic freedom in a despotic regime sacrificing political free­dom (Alexis de Tocqueville). It is for this reason that the reissue of L’ordre naturel et essentiel des societes politiques by Le Mercier de la Riviere in the collection of major economists published by Guillaumin in 1846 would be shortened, the politi­cal part having been judged unworthy of this reissue.

The second question is that of the reception for the Tableau Economique. The Tableau was little commented on and little understood. There was scarcely only Franςois Veron de Forbonnais (1722-1800) - and Jean-Joseph Louis Graslin (1728-1790), to a lesser extent - who calls it the “hieroglyphic table” - who dis­cussed it. When Forbonnais examined the Zigzag, it was to dispute the sterility hypothesis, show that the balance was not disturbed by a disproportionate expendi­ture by the landowners in favour of luxuries or, more generally, dispute the very method of the Tableau, which does not describe the actual economy but an imagi­nary one built on by unverified hypotheses. The disciples, except Baudeau, did not set out to decipher or improve it. Smith commented on it only briefly in his chapter on the agricultural system (Smith 1776, 672).

Amongst the rare commentators of the nineteenth century, we find the Saint- Simonian Prosper Enfantin (1796-1864), who saw in the Tableau an illustration of the philosophy of social organisation, of a natural and preconceived order, not resulting from the gradual progress of humanity, an illustration that was however defective since the social organisation was entrusted to the landowners, that is to say the idlers, not to the producers.