The Controversies of the 1760s
The Marquise of Pompadour died on 15 April 1764 and Quesnay’s influence at court ceased. However, Quesnay’s school reached its zenith in the following few years. New members, Guillaume-Franςois Le Trosne (1728-1780), Jean-Nicolas Guerineau de Saint-Peravy (1732-1789) and Nicolas Baudeau (1730-1792) added their force to the Physiocrat project.
Two newspapers: the Journal d’agriculture, du commerce et des finances (1765-66) and then the Ephemerides du citoyen that the abbe Baudeau put at service of the school from 1767 enabled the Physiocrats’ ideas to reach a wider audience. It was in the former that Quesnay started the debate about the sterility of industry and trade in 1766. In the famous dialogues between Mr H and Mr N (the orthodox Physiocrat), Quesnay wanted to prove that industry creates only an “addition” not a “generation” of wealth, in other words that it could not be declared “productive”. Franςois Veron de Forbonnais (1722-1800) and Jean-Joseph-Louis Graslin (1727-1790) were unquestionably the authors who most opposed such a doctrine. In their works, they attempted to prove that all the sectors are productive and that the Tableau offered a biased vision of the object it was supposed to represent. For Graslin, the very logic of a representation of the circulation of wealth in society by “classes” and by “expenditures” was a nonsense since there were only consumers and producers who exchanged “assets” and “goods” in markets (see Orain 2012). Forbonnais was less categorical, but he criticized the incredible figures, the exaggerations, the errors of calculations, along with the problems of space and time in the circulation of money of the Tableau (Charles and Orain 2016). He concluded with a lapidary formula on the uselessness of this whole intellectual enterprise: “The metaphysical obscurity of the Tableau and the whole doctrine that surrounds it proves nothing more than the simple statement of its propositions” (Forbonnais 1767: 284 5). These attacks did not go unanswered. The Physiocrats defend the Tableau and the exclusive productivity of agriculture, in particular in the book review of d’Auxiron’s Principes de tout gouvernement by Baudeau in the Ephemerides (1767), where the Physiocrat criticized Forbonnais’ ideas at length (see also Baudeau and Graslin 1777). The debate was to continue and to expand upon the question of language in the Ephemerides (in October 1767) where Quesnay wrote the “Lettre de M. Alpha sur le langage de la science economique”. This was a letter especially opposed to Forbonnais who had signed articles under the penname of Mr A.B.C.D in the Journal de l’agriculture mocking the truisms developed by the sect behind their obscure language (Charles and Orain 2016).At that time, what should be noticed is that Quesnay was looking for a way to complete his system. With the “Observations sur le droit naturel des hommes reunis en societe” published in September 1767 in the Journal de l’agriculture and then with the title “Le droit naturel” in Dupont’s collection Physiocratie, ou constitution naturelle du gouvernement leplus avantageux au genre humain in 1767, Quesnay rejected the question of the form of government (monarchy, aristocracy and democracy) in order to insist upon the natural laws that should be discovered and transposed into positive rights by the sovereign: an absolute respect for property and the natural character of inequalities. In the “Maximes generales du gouvernement economique d’un royaume agricole” published also in Physiocratie, Quesnay put forward the concept of an “Agricultural government” which had to deploy these natural laws by fighting against mercantilism (the systeme des commerςants), imposing free competition and restoring agriculture. Finally, the “Despotisme de la Chine”, serialized in the Ephemerides in 1767 proposed a government of a monarch, subject to the laws of natural order (the “legal despotism”), with magistrates who popularized these laws among the population and a society organized around landlords and agricultural entrepreneurs. These views were then developed together with an extensive presentation of the political economy of the physiocratic school by Lemercier de la Riviere in L’ordre naturel et essentiel des societes politiques (1767).
The crucial points were the systematic presentation of a political view by which the politics of the agricultural kingdom were grounded on the hypothesis that there existed a common interest in the growth of the net product for all classes of society; accordingly, politics was no longer an issue of virtue or honour, but of (material) interest. Expertise in political economy became of prime importance since it was, on the one hand, necessary to have a deep knowledge of that science in order to enact laws relevant to the common interest - a task to be performed by the magistrates serving the monarch - and, on the other, the diffusion of the science in public opinion through education was central in their views (Faccarello and Steiner 2008). These political considerations would become the subject of major controversies as well. The abbe de Mably, in particular, in his Doutes sur l’ordre naturel et essentiel des societes politiques (1768), attacks “legal despotism” and defends the need for counter-forces in every political system. Mocking the notion of evidence, Mably does not believe in a natural order: in politics, passions and public opinion are other mistresses much more capricious and powerful than all the so-called “mathematical truths” of the Physiocrats (Ferrand and Orain 2016).However, at the very end of the 1760s and the beginning of the 1770s, the Physiocrats had to face a greater problem and fierce adversaries. Having promoted and contributed to the first liberalization of the grain trade since 1763-64, Quesnay, Mirabeau and their disciples came under attack during the terrible events that followed this new policy (shortage, riots and punishment). Tension was at its height with the publication of the Dialogues sur le commerce des bles of Galiani in the first days of 1770 and, then, Linguet’s Reponse aux docteurs modernes (1771). Galiani produced a devastating criticism of a policy based on abstract reasoning: having neglected time, geography, opinions, merchants, and so on, the Physiocrats had not understood that grain was not a commodity like others.
The subsistence of peoples should be controlled by the authorities (especially in regard to exports), who had to resort exceptionally to the raison d’etat (see Faccarello 1998; Kaplan 2016a, 2016b). Linguet made the same kinds of claims as Galiani, but insisted also on the consideration of the living body of the people, their pain and suffering, in every matter dealing with policy (Magnot 2015; Orain 2016). These attacks on physiocratic theories were accompanied by an intense campaign of mockery against the “sect”. Forbonnais, Galiani and Linguet were again active and joined by Frederic-Melchior Grimm (1723-1807), Louis-Sebastien Mercier (1740-1814), Voltaire and a wide range of anonymous authors of pamphlets, poems and songs. On the one side, the encyclopaedists tried to exclude the Physiocrats from the Enlightenment as a result of their devotion to a master, their jargon of Ancient priests, their trust in eternal truths; on the other side, the high aristocracy, the parlements or the craft guilds saw the philosophes and Physiocrats alike as dangerous revolutionaries, whose ideas and actions were at the root of a chaos, an inversion of values and a destruction of the social taxonomy (Orain 2015).