The 1830s were a pivotal period for the development of liberal economic thought in France:
from this decade onwards, in the wake of Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), a group of intellectuals dealing with political economy established new institutions that spread the liberal ideas of individualism and economic freedom.
While not necessarily agreeing with each other on many points of economic theory and policy, these economists, especially during the 1840s, succeeded in institutionalising the discipline through new means of disseminating their ideas, notably a specialised journal, a learned society and a publishing house. After the episode of the Physiocracy during the eighteenth century, it was probably the second time that an apparently authentic “school of thought” developed in such a way in France. This school, however, did not have one undisputed leader (contrary to the physiocrats) and its members had heterogeneous profiles.Prior to the research initiated by Breton and Lutfalla in the 1980s, by Dockes et al. (2001) and Beraud, Gislain and Steiner (2004), French liberal thought after 1840 was relatively neglected and suffered from a certain discredit in the eyes of most historians of economic thought. Its contributions were long considered mediocre, since they could not be linked to either the prestigious French tradition of mathematicians and engineer-economists represented by Antoine-Augustin Cournot (1801-1877) and Jules Dupuit (1804-1866), or British political economy, particularly the Ricardian tradition.1 Yet the French authors were, in their time, regarded as their peers by British economists, notably Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, with whom they interacted on an equal footing. Recent developments in the history of thought have shown that the study of these authors is worthwhile for at least two reasons: the wealth of debates that enlivened the French liberals as a group, and the diversity and originality of their positions, which bring some singular figures to the fore. It was not economic theory but the art of economic policy - or “questions ofpot-au-feu” (beef stew), as Michel Chevalier (1806-1879) called them - that most interested these economists. And it is in this field that the most fertile debates can be identified, although they are far from the analytical complexity of English
1 Joseph Alois Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis (1954) is partly responsible for this reputation.
DOI: 10.4324/9780429202407-4 political economy. The aim of this chapter is thus to present the characteristics and diversity of these economists by studying their most salient controversies, which most often concerned concrete questions. In this perspective, the seminal works of Breton and Lutfalla (1991) and Le Van-Lemesle (2004) are valuable guides.
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