Gustave de Molinari was born in Liege, at that time a part of the Low Countries, on 3 March 1819.
He went to Paris at the beginning of the 1840s where he became a journalist specializing in economic matters. He wrote especially in La Nation, Le Courrier franςais and La Reforme.
In 1846 he was the co-founder of the Association pour la liberte des echanges, of which Frederic Bastiat was the general secretary. During the 1848 Revolution he was a republican and opposed both monarchists and socialists. His first book, Les soirees de la rue Saint-Lazare was published in 1849. An opponent to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, he returned to Belgium after the 2 December 1851 coup d’etat. He acted as a professor of political economy at the Musee royal de l’industrie belge and at the Institut de commerce in Antwerp. He came back to France in 1867 and in 1871 became the chief editor of the Journal des debats. He remained in Paris during the siege of Paris and the Paris Commune, analysing the question of subsistence and the relevance of the rationing measures. From 1881, after the death of Joseph Garnier, until 1909 he served as the chief editor of the Journal des economistes. He died in Adinkerque, in Belgium, on 28 January 1912.Molinari thought that “human societies organize themselves, develop and progress by themselves, in accordance with laws inherent in their nature” (1861, I: v) and that “it is sufficient... to ensure each member of the society the free usage of his activity and the ownership of the fruits of this free activity, to reach the maximum possible wealth and justice” (ibid.: xxx, original emphasis). He does not limit himself to stating that competition is efficient in economic matters, but he maintains that this is also true in politics and that “no government should have the right to prevent another government to establish itself and compete with it” (1849b: 279). He thus appears as the founder of a liberal and anti-statist tradition (Hart 1979, 1981-82).