The Geneva formative years
Sismondi’s family[202] belonged to the middle class of the aristocratic Geneva Republic. From a well-to-do small business family, her mother had some means notably the family estate in the Geneva countryside.
His father, a clergyman, was a member of the Conseil des Deux-Cents, the legislative body particularly in charge of electing the government. Sismondi benefited from an excellent private education to which was soon added the benefit of family reading sessions. Jacques Necker, Hugh Blair’s sermons, David Hume’s History of England and, of course, Rousseau were the favourites of these family gatherings. Within the family circle, one should mention Pierre Prevost and the Pictet brothers. Translator of Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population into French, the former is Sismondi’s first professor of political economy; the latter are cofounders in 1796 of the Bibliotheque britannique, a journal offering its readers 4,000 pages of annual translations of British articles on sciences, literature and agronomy.The French Revolution struck financially the Sismondi family quite brutally. A substantial part of the family wealth had been invested in French Treasury bonds (the so-called Necker bonds) that got wiped out by the collapse of the French monarchy. Moreover, Sismondi’s father having taken side with the counter-revolutionary government during the Geneva 1782 troubles, the family was hounded by the 1792 Geneva revolutionaries. Frightened by the revolutionary unrest, the family decided to leave in February 1793 for England.
For a Geneva family, the choice of England is easy to understand: through its religion and institutions, the Genevese intelligentsia felt very close to England. Striking example of this proximity, one of the most able contemporary analysts of the British constitution was Jean-Louis Delolme, a long-time Genevese emigre to England.
Sismondi himself wrote somewhat later that Geneva is “an English town on the Continent, an advanced post for political and religious enlightenment... a town where people think and feel in English but speak and write in French” (1814, 4 and 7). During this year-long stay in England, Sismondi bought a copy of the Wealth of Nations, read James Harrington and studied constitutional issues with the help of Delolme, William Blackstone and Richard Wooddeson. His reading notes bear testimony of his assiduous efforts the fruits of which are his Recherches sur les constitutions des peuples libres (Sismondi 1798 [1965]). These simultaneous ventures into constitutional studies and political economy are the first testimony that both are the two main branches of the “science of government”, or, in other words that the “principles of legislation” are inseparable from their “rules of applications”.In 1794, back from England, the Sismondi family discovers a much worst political situation than expected. The Genevese terreur (daughter of that of Paris) is at its peak: wealth and fortunes are impounded, aristocrats imprisoned and some even sent to the guillotine. Father and son (barely 20) are briefly detained. The decision is taken to leave Geneva again this time to seek refuge in Tuscany. It is only five years later, in 1800, that Sismondi returns to his beloved home town. And Geneva had profoundly changed. In fact, since 1798, Geneva was occupied and annexed to France. The economy was on the verge of collapse. The bankruptcy of the Ancien Regime together with the revolutionary wars and the Continental blockade induced a severe contraction of the international trade from which Geneva obtained a very large part of its income. Eventually, by exciting one part of the population against the other, the terreur left deep wounds endangering the unity of the city.
This second return to Geneva is crucial in Sismondi’s life. In December 1802, a few months before the publication of De la richesse commerciale in 1803 and thanks to Germaine de Stael (Necker’s daughter), he becomes a member of the Cercle de Coppet, a bastion of liberal thought opposed to Napoleon.
He takes care of family properties, tries unsuccessfully to start a business as a printer with his future editor Paschoud and even plans in vain to get married.During the years following his return, and by way of his involvement in various committees trying to find remedies to the sorry state of the Geneva economy, Sismondi starts in earnest to study political economy. Reading most of the burgeoning economic literature in French and in English, he plans to devise a book mainly addressed at demonstrating the ineptitude of the French economic policy, and in particular its tariff component. While Sismondi was busy writing his De la richesse commerciale, the Continental blockade was not yet effective but the Con- sulat was following with greater rigour the policies prohibiting the so-called “English trade” started against Britain by the Convention and the Directoire. Moreover, the Napoleonic tariff policy was disrupting regional exchanges (Alpine area, Rhine valley and Switzerland) so vital to Geneva external trade.
The origins of Sismondi’s strong free trade creed and his violent critique of government interventions are no doubt closely linked to these early Geneva years (Bridel 2022). As often with Sismondi, he started his inquiries with a real-world problem to move on rapidly to a more theoretical approach. Started as a tract for the time, Richesse commerciale ended up as his first analytical contribution displaying also his trademark methodology. However, Richesse commerciale should not be read in isolation.
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