Voltaire wrote in 1738,

For the last twenty years we have understood commerce in France better than we have from Pharamond to Louis XIV.... [T]he principles of commerce are now known to all; we are starting to have good books on the subject.

What Voltaire was describing was the beginnings of a French-language “sci­ence of trade” launched by l'Essai politique sur le commerce by Jean-Franςois Melon (1675-1738) and Reflexions politiques sur les finances et le commerce by Nicolas Du Tot (1684-1741), which was continued by the works of Richard Cantillon (post 1680-1734), Charles Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu (1689­1755), Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759) and Franςois Veron Duverger de Forbonnais (1722-1800). These authors, and a few others, dealt explicitly with “commerce en general”, not with commerce in particular, which Forbonnais (1754 I, 6) summarised under the expression “commerce poli­tique” or “in its relation to a political body”.^[51] The expression confirmed a clear demarcation: “Knowing how to run a trade or knowing how to conduct trade are two very different things...... The science of the trader is that of the details with

which he deals. The science of politics is the advantage that can be drawn from these details” (1754 I, 84-5).

Drawing inspiration from the English science of trade, these authors sought to establish, not so much a practical knowledge leading to pleas in favour of a par­ticular trade or a particular separate interest, as a science whose conclusions were applicable to different sectors and to different nations and which were likely to be placed in the service of a government. Most of the propagators of this science concluded, more or less convincingly, that there were good and bad trades from the point of view of the interest of the nation, or that the particular interests of the traders did not contribute to the interest of the nation equally. Thus, they called on these traders to be educated and to train themselves in the knowledge of the aforementioned national interest, just as they urged the sovereign or the legislator to be better acquainted with the principles of “commerce in general”, because it was in the knowledge of these principles that their power lay.

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