The circle of Vincent de Gournay

Vincent de Gournay and his circle make no mystery of their aim: to propel France to the rank of a major trading nation, equal or superior to Britain, and to direct its policy towards establishing an empire, not on land, but on sea.

The question of the compatibility of commerce and the monarchy is not new. Law (1715 [1934]: 18, 48) clearly supported this in relation to credit and banking, and Melon (1734a [1735]: 75) responded to this positively by trying to show that there was no close link between exclusive commerce and monarchical government, because the former was to be found just as much in republican governments. Vincent de Gournay thinks in the same way. Child had asserted that the French colonies of the Indies had not progressed as quickly as their English counterparts because they had been established by a government that was purely monarchical and originally not well versed in commerce and navigation. Vincent de Gournay conceded that the monarchs were certainly less susceptible to the spirit of commerce.

Veron de Forbonnais’s identical position is aimed more directly at Montesquieu. It is the circumstances, he writes (1753: 21), and not the constitutions of Holland and France themselves which make a success of such a branch of commerce in the first country and its failure in the second. A monarchy certainly inclines naturally towards luxury, but this commerce, limited by the size of its market, only employs a small part of the population. The supernumerary part turns necessarily towards the carrying and re-exporting trade, which it expects to be as profitable as the luxury goods trade (Veron de Forbonnais 1753: 111). Veron de Forbonnais interprets Montesquieu’s restrictive conception not only as a belittling of the monarchy which was supposed to tolerate only one form of commerce, but also a heightening of the English mixed constitution which tolerates both of them. Within Vincent de Gournay’s circle, Louis-Joseph Plumard de Dangeul (1722-1777) appears to be the strongest defender of the mixed constitution. Indeed, he devotes a whole chapter in his Remarques sur les avantages et les desavantages de la France et de l’Angleterre par rapport au commerce et aux autres sources de la puissance des Etats to show that the constitution of Great Britain is one of the reasons which explain the commercial advantage this nation has over France. Rather than entrusting the laws and administration of commerce to the “individual legislators”, he stresses, this nation has set up a legislative assembly which contributes to the public interest, and has thus managed private actions “through the principles of the common good”: “The nation... governs itself”, instead of the monarch dealing with everything (Plumard de Dangeul 1754: 150-1, 170).

The second above-mentioned question concerns the politics of freedom and protec­tion. To Vincent de Gournay, this politics comes directly from Child: freedom applies to the nation’s subjects in relation to domestic trade, protection to the nation’s subjects in relation to foreign trade. As regards protection, Vincent de Gournay initially supported the policy of the Navigation Act, considered to be the most efficient way of promoting shipments, but he replaced it later by a policy of encouragement and direction of exports, more pragmatic and more compatible with the idea of freedom of trade. The opinions of the members of the circle on this Act are mixed.

Like the British writers, the members of the circle thought in terms of balance (see, for example, Demals and Hyard 2015) and used expressions that are similar to the doctrine of foreign-paid incomes or the export of wrought products. For example, Forbonnais (Veron de Forbonnais 1754, 1: 51-2) summarises in the following way the principles established by the English science of commerce: export the surplus; export raw materi­als once they have been wrought; import raw materials with a view to reworking them rather than wrought products; exchange goods for goods; avoid imports of foreign goods that can be substituted for domestic goods; avoid imports of “pure luxury foreign goods”; avoid as far as possible imports of goods of absolute necessity; encourage the commerce of storage and re-export; carry goods for other nations. The policy of tariffs and restrictions must be moderate to avoid retaliations, and take account of the quan­tity of goods, as well as the quantity of labour (Veron de Forbonnais 1755a: 112-13). A reader of Tucker, Plumard de Dangeul takes up the “balance of labour” doctrine perhaps even more than Forbonnais, aiming at an increase in employment and national manufacturing.

Vincent de Gournay concludes his memorandum on smuggling with a well-known phrase: “These two expressions, laisser faire and laisser passer, being two continuous sources of action, would therefore be for us two continuous sources of wealth” (1993: 34). But the phrase “laissez-faire” is nothing else than the equivalent of “liberty and pro­tection” and had not yet acquired the meaning which can be found in Boisguilbert and inspired Quesnay and Turgot, that is, in “philosophie economique”.