“Philosophic economique”, which was to radically change the way of thinking about economic matters during the French Enlightenment and give rise to modern political economy, was born at the end of the seventeenth century, in France, in the writings of Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert.

This happened in a very specific context dominated by continuous religious controversies, following the sixteenth­century Wars of Religion, and recurrent periods of political unrest which lasted until the reign of Louis XIV.

Pierre de Boisguilbert (1646-1714) was a contemporary of Louis XIV (1638­1715) and a member of an aristocratic family which obtained its rank from holding certain judicial or administrative positions. First educated by the Jesuits in Rouen, he then attended the Jansenist Petites Ecoles at Port-Royal near Paris. A lawyer, he held various positions in Normandy in the Ancien Regime administration ofjustice and police where he acquired the well-deserved reputation of being a passionate and bad-tempered person. Like many contemporaries, he was struck by the lasting economic and social distress characterising the second half of the reign of Louis XIV and, like so many pamphleteers of the age, he tried to remedy the situation and proposed his solutions to various finance ministers (Hecht 1966). However, his attempts were unsuccessful, as were those, for example, of Charles Hurault de l’Hopital de Belesbat (d. 1706) - whose Memoires presentes au Roi towards the end of the seventeenth century circulated as manuscripts (Schatz and Caillemer 1906) - or Marshal Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), whose Projet d'une Dixme royale (1707) caused his disgrace and eventually his death.

The precise dating of Boisguilbert’s writings is uncertain. While his Detail de la France was published anonymously in 1695 but probably composed some years earlier, his other main works - the Dissertation de la nature des richesses, de l'argent et des tributs, the Traite de la nature, culture, commerce et interet des grains, the first and the second Factum de la France - were published together in 1707 with a reprint of the Detail. To escape royal censorship, this two-volume edition was also published anonymously under various titles, one of which being particularly misleading: Testament politique de Monsieur de Vauban - thus gen­erating a lasting confusion between his ideas and those of Vauban published the same year. Some important unpublished manuscripts and correspondence were dis­covered later and included in the only reliable collection of Boisguilbert’s works

DOI: 10.4324/9780429202414-2

(Boisguilbert 1691-1714) edited by Jacqueline Hecht. However, Boisguilbert’s style and language do not facilitate the reader’s task and gave rise to divergent interpretations (Faccarello 1986).

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