Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert was born in Rouen (Normandy) on 17 February 1646, in a family of “noblesse de robe” - that is, an aristocratic family which got its rank from holding certain judicial or administrative positions - and died there on 10 October 1714.
A distant relative of the playwright Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) and of the homme de lettres Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757), he was first educated by the Jesuits in Rouen and then in the Jansenist Petites Ecoles de Port-Royal near Paris.
After studying law in Paris, he held various “charges” or “offices” in Normandy in the Ancien Regime administration of justice and police where he acquired the deserved reputation of being a passionate and bad-tempered person. Like many contemporaries he was struck by the deep and lasting economic and social distress which prevailed in France during the second half of the reign of Louis XIV (1638-1715). Also like many other “men of system” and pamphleteers of the age, he tried to remedy the situation and he proposed, with a remarkable insistence, his solution to the various Controleurs generaux des finances (Ministers of the economy and finance), L. Phelypeaux de Pontchartrain (from 1689 to 1699), M. Chamillart (from 1699 to 1708) and N. Desmarets (from 1708 onwards). He remained however unsuccessful in spite of the support of some influential persons like J.-B. Desmarets de Vaubourg - a nephew of Colbert - and the Duke of Saint-Simon (see Hecht 1966b).The precise dating of most of Boisguilbert’s writings is uncertain. While his Le Detail de la France was published anonymously in 1695, probably some years after its composition, the greatest part of his works - for example, 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 all together, with a reprint of the Detail, in 1707, in two volumes, under various titles, one of which being particularly misleading: Testament politique de Monsieur de Vauban - this generated a lasting confusion between his ideas and those that Marshall Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707) published the same year in his Dixme Royale. Some works were republished in 1843 in the “Collection des principaux economistes”, with Guillaumin, in a volume dedicated to the Economistes financiers du XVIIIe siecle, but this is a faulty edition because Boisguilbert’s vocabulary was sometimes changed by the editor, Eugene Daire, in order to “update” it.
Some important unpublished manuscripts and correspondence were discovered later and published in the only complete and reliable collection of Boisguilbert’s works: the 1966 INED edition by Jacqueline Hecht (Hecht 1966a).The interpretation of Boisguilbert’s writings is an intricate undertaking. While his works have never ceased to attract attention, the various interpretations offered are conflicting. Boisguilbert was alternatively depicted as a liberal and as a protectionist; as a supporter of capitalism or of socialism; or, to put it briefly, as a “forerunner” of nearly every important economist who wrote after him (see, for example, Horn 1867; Van Dyke Roberts 1935; the studies included in Hecht 1966a, 1989; Faccarello 1986 [1999]). It is true that his style and language do not facilitate the reader’s task. Recent research, however, eventually produced a picture of Boisguilbert as a powerful thinker, who, out of a threefold tradition of Bodinian political thought, Cartesian physics and above all Jansenist moral philosophy, founded what is called today the free-trade approach to political economy. Directly or indirectly, his thought influenced the main political economists of the French Enlightenment - Quesnay and Turgot in particular.