The institutionalisation of French political economy after Jean-Baptiste Say

Jean-Baptiste Say’s multifaceted legacy

French liberal economists were first of all the heirs of the eighteenth-century free trade approach, especially through the Ideologues who helped to circulate the lib­eral tradition of Turgot, Condillac and Quesnay (Picavet 1891, Nemo 2006, Leter 2006).

Nonetheless, for the French liberals, the main reference was undoubtedly Jean­Baptiste Say. His influence, both intellectually and institutionally, was decisive. Say’s intellectual legacy was first developed by his son-in-law Charles Comte (1782-1837), his son Horace Say (1794-1860) and his long-time friend Adolphe- Jerome Blanqui (1798-1854). Other prominent economists supported and relayed Say’s thought: Barthelemy-Charles Dunoyer de Segonzac^[18] (1786-1862), Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) and Antoine-Elisee Cherbuliez (1797-1869), while others, such as Pellegrino Rossi (1787-1848) and, later, Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912), distanced themselves somewhat from his thinking. Say’s influence can first be seen in the adoption by most liberal economists of the idea that political economy should be spread among the public through teaching and books in order to fight against the obscurantism of the Ancient Regime. Secondly, many of these economists took up Say’s analysis of market, crises, and the role of entrepreneur, his definition of production as a production of utility and his criticism of protectionism inter alia, while deviating from it on other respects, such as value and distribution.

But Say’s legacy is not only intellectual: it also took on more material forms for the dissemination of liberal thought. The circle of friends which formed around him during the 1820s became the core of the liberal group. Some important figures belonged to it: his son Horace, who used his network of manufacturers and acted as a sponsor himself, and Adolphe-Jerome Blanqui, who made the link with the publisher Gilbert-Urbain Guillaumin (1801-1864), whose role proved central in the creation of the Journal des economistes (below).

It is worth noting that the constitution and expansion of the liberal group was made possible by a change in the relationship with the political authorities (Breton 1985a). During the First Empire and the Restoration, the Liberals were in the opposition, their activities were under close surveillance and censorship was not uncommon (Charles Dunoyer was imprisoned, others had to go into exile). After the July Revolution in 1830, the political context changed until the Second Empire and the relations between economists and the government became, if not closer, at least less conflictual - those who were close to the Orleanists even occu­pied official positions.

The liberals and their institutions

The institutionalisation of (liberal) political economy in France occurred in three main ways: teaching, publishing and participation in learned societies. Le Van- Lemesle’s (2004) meticulous study reveals the central role of a small circle of friends from Jean-Baptiste Say’s entourage in this multifaceted process, which gradually became structured and gained more and more sympathisers.

A first notable aspect is the teaching of political economy and the creation of academic chairs. Before 1830, only two chairs^[19] of political economy existed in France: that of the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, founded in 1820 (to which Adolphe Blanqui succeeded after Say’s death in 1832) and that of the College de France, established in 1830 - a chair specifically created for Jean-Baptiste Say, then successively held from 1833 by the Italian jurist Pellegrino Rossi and from 1840 by the former Saint-Simonian engineer Michel Chevalier.

From the 1840s onwards, new chairs in political economy were occupied by liberals, who used them as arenas for the dissemination of their ideas. These included the chair of economics at the Ecole Royale des Ponts et Chaussees, established in 1846, where Joseph Garnier delivered a course for future engi­neers. Later, economics courses were also established at the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques - which subsequently became the Institut d’Etudes Politiques - founded in 1872 by the liberal Emile Boutmy (1835-1906): Anatole Dunoyer (1829-1908) (Charles’s son), Clement Juglar (1819-1905) and Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (1843-1916) delivered lectures with a strong liberal flavour to students who were destined to become the administrative elite of the nation. This expansion of the teaching of political economy was to the advantage of the liberal economists until 1877, when the government decided to open a chair of politi­cal economy in each Faculty of Law. The expansion of economics courses went pari passu with the proliferation of textbooks that popularised and disseminated liberal ideas (Steiner 2012). The most widely circulated textbooks were those of Joseph Garnier (his Elements de l’economie politique was first published in 1846, went through three editions and then became the Traite d’economie poli­tique, sociale ou industrielle, the tenth and last edition of which was published in 1907) and Henri Baudrillart (1821-1892) - Michel Chevalier’s successor at the College de France - whose Manuel d'economiepolitique went through five editions between 1857 and 1883.

In parallel, from the July monarchy onwards, liberal economists began to create and structure their own network of institutions. One person played a singular role in this regard: Gilbert-Urbain Guillaumin, a bookseller most interested in economics, who founded a publishing house in 1835 with the support of the Say family. From the 1840s, his publishing house became a central organ for the dissemination of lib­eral ideas, reissuing the greatest French and British classics of political economy in a series titled Collection desprincipaux economistes and publishing most of the works and handbooks of contemporary liberal economists. The Guillaumin house also pub­lished a masterpiece, the Dictionnaire de l’economie politique - the two volumes of which came out in 1852 and 1853, respectively - edited by the lawyer and economist Charles Coquelin (1802-1852) and Guillaumin himself. By bringing together the most prestigious personalities of the liberal group, this handbook became a reference in the field. Each entry established, as it were, the stance of the liberal doctrine in the main theoretical controversies of the time. It remained unmatched until the publica­tion of R. H. Inglis Palgrave’s Dictionary of Political Economy in 1894.

Guillaumin was also involved in the founding of the Journal des economistes (1841) and the Societe d'economie politique de Paris (1842), both of which played a decisive role. The periodical was edited by - among others - Adolphe Blanqui (1842), Joseph Garnier (1845-1855, 1866-1881) and Gustave de Molinari (1881-1909). It offered a content characteristic of the specialised jour­nals which blossomed from the French Revolution to the 1840s:^[21] in-depth articles on economic theory were published alongside opinion columns, descriptive arti­cles presenting current economic, financial or social problems, statistical data, book reviews and reports of discussions held at the Societe d’economie politique on a monthly basis. The contributors had varied profiles: the most prolific authors were mainly well-known economists,^[22] but the journal was also open to contri­butions from more modest authors, sometimes little known and sometimes from scholars not even from the liberal ranks - Leon Walras (1834-1910) or Emile de Laveleye (1822-1892), for instance.

In the midst of this still general tendency for governments to be driven by the most powerful interests,... it is with great joy that we observe a circle of readers gathering around us in ever greater numbers.... United in a common purpose, these men [the contributors] may have followed different political lines but they came together for science... with the noble aim of helping their fellow citizens to drop their old mistakes and ancient prejudices.

(Journal des economistes, 1845, December, 2-3).

The success of the journal was undeniable until the 1870s, when its influence started to decline along with that of the liberal economists themselves (Laurent and Marco 1996). Because of the frequency of its publications, the breadth of its contributors and its longevity (publication continued until 1940), the Journal des economistes was undoubtedly the most influential liberal review. But other journals also wel­comed the writings of liberal economists: the generalist Revue des Deux-Mondes, founded in 1829, had a large readership and regularly published articles on political economy, alongside papers on literature, geography, history and the arts. More­over, other specialised journals were published in the wake of the Journal des economistes. The Annuaire de l'economie politique et de la statistique, founded by Joseph Garnier in 1844, provided financial, demographic, military, commercial and industrial data once a year. The weekly review Le libre-echange (initially sub­titled Journal du travail agricole, industriel et commercial), backed by Bastiat’s Association pour la liberte des echanges, was issued by Guillaumin between 1846 and 1848. Later, the Journal de la societe statistique de Paris, a quarterly founded in 1860 and directed by Michel Chevalier and Louis Wolowski, among others, also provided a forum for liberals. Among the periodicals close to the liberal school, we should add the Revue de Paris, founded in 1851, L'economiste franςais, created in 1861 by Jules Duval, and Le Moniteur des finances, de l'industrie et du com­merce, founded in 1869.

Some prominent figures

Yet the members of the school showed a great diversity of profiles, professions and involvement in its activities. Its core was made up of those who held the above­mentioned teaching positions: besides Jean-Baptiste Say himself, it included Pellegrino Rossi, Henri Baudrillart, Michel Chevalier and Joseph Garnier. It should be noted that Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), who is the best known of the French liberal thinkers, is not included in this chapter, since he was not part of the intellectual group referred to here.^[23] Gustave de Molinari, a Belgian economist, professor of political economy in Brussels and Antwerp, was also very active in France. Some other members were publicists, that is, authors whose main activity was the publication of articles and books - for instance Frederic Bastiat, Ambroise Clement (1805-1886), Charles Coquelin or Frederic Passy (1822-1912). The Societe d’economie politique and the Journal des economistes also provided a forum for a number of statesmen and senior civil servants. The latter were mainly influential through their political support and the spread of the liberal cause, but not necessarily through their writings: the statesmen Leon Faucher, Felix Esquirou de Parieu (1815-1893) and Eugene Rouher (1814-1884), and the senator and then Governor of the Banque de France Gustave Rouland (1806-1878) belonged to this category.^[24] Some other members were also engineers by training (at the Ecole Poly­technique) or by profession - such as Jules Dupuit,^[25] Michel Chevalier, Roger de Fontenay (1809-1891), Jules Du Mesnil-Marigny (1810-1885) and Ernest Lame- Fleury (1823-1903) - or mathematicians such as Gustave Fauveau (1834-1895) and Mathieu Wolkoff (1802-1875), whose contributions were more sporadic. Finally, depending on the topics discussed, manufacturers, financiers and bankers completed this picture. Among all these names, however, a few stand out in par­ticular, and a closer examination of their profile is in order at this point.

The first is certainly Pellegrino Rossi, an Italian constitutionalist and economist who arrived in France as the successor to Jean-Baptiste Say at the chair of political economy of the College de France. Guizot had Rossi appointed to the College de France, who defended different ideas from those of Say and Charles Comte, who was the other candidate for the position (Beraud 2018). In the lectures he gave there from 1834 to 1840 (Cours d’economiepolitique, 1840-41), Rossi achieved a form of eclectic synthesis^{[26] [27] between British political economy (especially Malthus and Ricardo) and Say’s political economy (Marco 1988; Vatin 2003; Ravix 2017). After a first difficult period - he was blamed as much for being overly biased towards Ricardian ideas as for his closeness to the Doctrinaires11 - he finally imposed himself as one of the most influential liberal leaders (Beraud 2018) and was particularly appreciated by Jules Dupuit. His political career was also remark­able: after his naturalisation, he was called by Louis-Philippe to the Chambre des Pairs in 1839. He was assassinated in Rome in 1848, two months after having accepted to form the government of Pope Pius IX.}

Next, the most central figure of the liberal group was certainly Joseph Garnier. His meeting, in his youth, with Blanqui and Guillaumin, enabled him to partici­pate actively in all the liberal institutions: he took part in the establishment of the Societe d’economie politique and the creation of the Journal des economistes. He held the Chair of Political Economy at the Ecole des ponts et chaussees from 1846 onwards and he was a prolific contributor to the Dictionnaire de l’economie poli­tique. His political economy was marked by a striving for conciliation and syn­thesis, although not devoid of iconoclastic positions. As he stated in his textbook, based on his teaching at the Ponts et Chaussees:

I have endeavoured to situate myself within the scientific orthodoxy.... As I have sought to elucidate rather than innovate, I have sometimes taken sen­tences verbatim from my models, and sometimes I have analysed, compared and commented on numerous passages from various writings, in order to adapt them to my framework........................................... The writings that mainly served as my

guides are those of Quesnay, Turgot, Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, J.-B. Say, and M. Rossi.

(Garnier 1846, vii)

He thus tried to build a theoretical compromise or consensus on issues that divided his liberal contemporaries: on value, for example, he followed both the utility approach of Say and Rossi’s approach based on production costs; on the question of population, he took up Malthus’s theses but distanced himself from the prin­ciple of population. In the end, if Joseph Garnier can be considered as an ortho­dox economist (Arena 1991), it is probably less because of the radicalness of his

Liberal economists after Say 47 analyses than because his ideas were often representative of what other French liberals thought (Etner and Silvant 2017).

Another key figure of the liberal school was Frederic Bastiat, characterised by his activism in favour of free trade. In his youth, he acquired a wide range of experience in agriculture, business and local politics, and he intensively read classical and revolutionary authors, which strengthened his individualistic con­victions. It was not until 1844 that he wrote his first article for the Journal des economistes - the first of a long series. In 1846, he founded the Association pour la liberte des echanges (Association for the Freedom of Trade), modelled on the Cobden League in Britain. The association fought against mercantilist and pro­tectionist tendencies and promoted the benefits of free trade, which would have allowed goods produced abroad to be purchased at a lower cost, to the benefit of both retailers and consumers. Bastiat’s activism as a lobbyist also included the publication of numerous pamphlets and letters addressed to his opponents, in particular socialists. In his Harmonies economiques, published in 1850, he dis­tanced himself from the classical views of Ricardo or Say and developed original views not really accepted by other liberals:^[28] in his opinion, there were increasing returns in agriculture as well as manufacturing, and both the classical theory of value and the Malthusian laws of population were erroneous. Bastiat had only a few heirs: Prosper Paillottet and Roger de Fontenay, who published his collected works in 1864.

Apart from Bastiat and Garnier, three other authors defended an uncompro­mising liberalism: Charles Dunoyer, Jean-Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil (1813-1892) and Gustave de Molinari. Each in their own way, they developed what can be described as liberal orthodoxy in its purest form: rejection of public intervention, glorification of self-interested action and an unwavering commitment to individual freedom.

Charles Dunoyer first supported the “most absolute liberalism” (Penin 1991, 37) and, with Charles Comte, edited two important journals during the very end of the First Empire and the first years of the Restoration: Le censeur (1814-15) and Le censeur europeen (1817-19). He then embarked on an administrative career, firstly as prefect and then as Conseiller d’Etat. Elected to the Academie des Sci­ences morales et politiques as early as 1832, he participated in the creation of the

Societe d’economie politique and the Journal des economistes, defending a theo­retical and moral conservatism and fighting against novel ideas. His main work, La liberte du travail (1845), is a masterpiece of liberal orthodoxy, in which he intended to show that competition is superior in every respect to economic systems based on limitations to the individual freedom of work - whether serfdom and slavery or statism.

Jean-Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil also embodied this liberal orthodoxy. His pro­file is rather singular: he was part of the first circle of liberals (he wrote in the Journal des economistes, collaborated in the Dictionnaire de l’economie politique and published books with Guillaumin) but he did not have a university chair in France; he left for Chile to become professor of political economy at the University of Santiago (1855-63). During his Chilean period, he consolidated his expertise on banking, became what is today called a “money doctor” and an adviser to the Chilean Minister of Finance and wrote his Traite theorique etpratique d’economie politique (1858). While his main area of specialisation was banking, financial eco­nomics and business economics, his aim was to build a multidisciplinary science around political economy.

The Belgian economist and journalist Gustave de Molinari was the last repre­sentative of this uncompromising liberalism and anti-statism. Molinari’s longev­ity was exceptional: in 1846, he co-founded with Bastiat the Association pour la liberte des echanges, and in 1881 he succeeded Joseph Garnier as the editor of the Journal des economistes, a position he held until 1909. The concept of free competition was at the centre of his developments: he even proposed a competitive “production of security” aimed at replacing the public police or army.

Louis Wolowski was another singular figure of the liberal group. Born in War­saw, he studied in France and Germany before his family settled in France in 1831 after the defeat of the Polish uprising against Russia. He had a brilliant career and founded major journals in the field of law (especially civil law). In 1839, Hippolyte Passy noticed his talents as a publicist and entrusted him with a teaching chair at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. From then onwards, he became one of the pillars of the liberal group, being part of all its coteries. He took singular positions on the question of money and banking and distinguished himself from his fellow liberals as regards methodology and social policy.

Finally, the last notable author, with yet another profile, was the engineer Michel Chevalier. His personal trajectory was unique: trained at the Ecole Poly­technique and then at the Ecole des Mines, he worked as an engineer and, in his youth, adhered to the Saint-Simonian doctrine (Chapter 10). He distanced himself from it in 1833 and, on behalf of Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877), undertook a mis­sion of observation in the United States of America, which was the origin of his admiration for the American model of economic development. An outcome of this mission was the publication in 1836 of his Lettres sur l’Amerique du Nord. After having succeeded Rossi at the College de France and published his three-volume Cours d’economiepolitique (1842-50), Chevalier sided with the liberals, becom­ing an indispensable reference on many subjects. He then embarked on a successful political career and became an economic adviser to Napoleon III. His ideas were characterised by a total faith in free trade, the promotion of a voluntarist industrial policy, productivism, and a particular attention to communication networks, which bears the traces of his Saint-Simonian past.

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