Jean-Baptiste Say was born in Lyon, on 5 January 1767, in a Protestant family.
At the age of 15, he started an apprenticeship in a trading house in Paris, then went to England and, in 1787, Etienne Claviere, a Swiss businessman, took him on in the insurance company he was managing.
Say took an active part in the Revolution. He worked at a newspaper, the Courrier de Provence, published by Gabriel-Honore de Mirabeau, and was close to the Girondins, to whom Claviere, who was for a time Minister of Finance in 1792, had introduced him. In 1794, Sebastien-Roch de Chamfort involved him in the foundation of the periodical La Decade philosophique, litteraire et politique, par une societe de republicans and as its managing editor. The incapacity of the Directoire to stabilize the Revolution led Say and his friends, the “Ideologues”, to support Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’etat on 18 Brumaire of Year VIII (9 November 1799). He became secretary of the Legislative Committee of the Conseil des Cinq-Cents and then, after the new Constitution of Year VIII, a member of the Tribunat. The first edition of his Traite d’economie politique was published in 1803. In March 1804, with some other members of this assembly, he was eliminated from the Tribunat because of his opposition to Bonaparte. “From the texts written during this period, Say appears... as an committed intellectual... who never betrayed his republicanism” (Steiner 1990: 176). He was and remained a Republican (Whatmore 2000: 12). In his Cours complet d’economiepolitique pratique (Say 1828-29 [2010], II: 954), he stated again the idea that “the representative government... is the necessary outcome of the economic progress of societies”, but was in the end disappointed by his experience and was led to reject the idea that political freedom is the condition of economic progress. “Wealth is independent of the nature of government, a State can thrive if it is well administrated... The forms of public administration have only an indirect and accidental influence on the formation of wealth, which is almost entirely the work of individuals” (Say 1803 [2006]: 2).The first edition of his Traite d’economiepolitique opens with this statement. A second, heavily revised edition was prepared quickly but, for political reasons, the publication had to wait until the fall of Napoleon in 1814. After the fall of the Empire, Say went again to England, where he met James Mill, David Ricardo and Jeremy Bentham. When back in Paris, he lectured at the Athenee, a private institution, which was a kind of political club for the liberal opposition to the policy of the Restoration. In 1819 a chair at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers was installed on his behalf: his lectures were published as the Cours complet in 1828-29. It is only after the 1830 Revolution that the government considered political economy as a field of science. A chair of political economy was created at the College de France; Say was the first to hold this chair until his death in Paris on 14 November 1832.