The first volume of this book identified the existence of a genuine French liberal tradition from the eighteenth century onwards.
Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert (1646-1714), Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781), Franςois Quesnay (16941774), M.J.A.N. Caritat de Condorcet (1743-1794) and other authors contributed in a substantial way to this tradition, which proved to be distinct from the British liberal approach.
The passage to the nineteenth century was indeed complex (see Vol. I, Chapters 8 and 9) but, after the 1789 Revolution and the First Empire, French liberal thought - while sometimes heavily contested - consolidated and gradually became institutionalised: a process which is reflected in the progressive but slow triumph of liberal democracy during the last decades of the nineteenth century.From the perspective of the history of economic thought, the economists of the nineteenth century appear as direct or indirect heirs of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. They were struggling for freedom, both economically and socially, and shared a strong distrust of the regulations and arbitrariness of the Ancient Regime and of some episodes of the Revolution - especially the 1793-94 Terror. The authoritarianism of the First Empire further increased their rejection of any form of absolutism. Nineteenth-century French political economy would long bear these markers and a majority of French economists adhered to a form of uncompromising liberalism. Moreover, to them, the advent of industrialisation and free trade should have enabled a lasting improvement in the material living conditions of all social classes, whereas their critiques (below, Part II) expressed fears about its consequences.
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