The End of the School

At the end of his life, Quesnay turned away from political economy and became interested in geometry (he was almost ignorant of algebra). He prepared two works on trisection of angles and squaring the circle in 1770 and 1771 and remodelled them in the Recherches philosophiques sur l’evidence des verites geometriques published in 1773.

The book was clearly insufficient and regarded by scientists as the ravings of an old man. “This is the sun that has become encrusted,” said Turgot. Dismissed from favour upon the accession of Louis XVI to the throne, Quesnay left the palace in the summer of 1774 and lived in the Grand-Commun, the building of housekeeping services of the Royal family, in Versailles. It is there that he learned of Turgot’s appointment to the General-Control of finances on 25 August, but suffering with gout, he became unable to do anything and finally died on 16 December. He was buried the next day in the church of Saint-Julien in the parish of Notre-Dame in Versailles. His inventory after death by the notary Thibaut, which contains the record of his library, is now conserved in the Archives departementales des Yvelines (see Cartelier and Longhitano 2012). A ceremony was organized in Quesnay’s honour in Mirabeau’s mansion on 20 December, where the Marquis delivered a glowing eulogy. In the first month of 1775 came a succession of academic tributes. It was to be the beginning of the legend surrounding this sage, credited with beginning a new science among the tumult of Versailles (see Charles and There 2007).

As for physiocracy as a movement, Turgot’s ministry could be considered a brief period of renewal. Dupont and Condorcet were the principal advisers to the GeneralController, Baudeau revived the movement’s periodical under the name of Nouvelles ephemerides economiques (December 1774-June 1776 and a single issue in 1788), while Mirabeau multiplied attempts to diffuse the physiocratic doctrines (in the form of catechisms). As the same causes led to the same effects, however, Turgot’s liberalization policy raised a wide challenge to the ideas of the Physiocrats and a new campaign against them (see Necker 1775).

The resignation of the General-Controller in the spring of 1776 marked the onset of decline of physiocracy as an organized group of scholars. The movement did not die immediately, however, and the works of Dupont, Mirabeau, Baudeau, Saint-Peravy and Lemercier de la Riviere in the 1770s-1780s contributed to the debates preceding and during the Revolution (see Weulersse 1950, 1985; Faccarello and Steiner 1990; Charles and Steiner 1999; Mergey 2010). Beyond the French monarchy, the physi- ocratic doctrine spread in many European countries, such as the German states, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland (Delmas et al. 1995).

Quesnay’s analytical approach to the functioning of the economy had a different and long lasting influence since it was a real tour deforce to set out the circulation process of a whole nation with three poles and fives arrows. Accordingly, Quesnay’s formule arithme- tique attracted the attention of some major theorists during the following centuries. Karl Marx explicitly referred to Quesnay’s “Tableau” and “Formule” when he was studying the circulation process and devising his schemes of reproduction of social capital (see Gehrke and Kurz 1995). Joseph Schumpeter praised Quesnay for having made the first attempt to set forth a general equilibrium approach - an approach he considered as the economists’ Magna Carta. Finally Wassily Leontief explained that he had Quesnay’s scheme in mind when he was modelling the American economy and elaborated his input-output table.

Arnaud Orain and Philippe Steiner

The End of the School

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