The French Liberal School

 The College de France, perch of the liberals

The "French Liberal School" is how we shall term the 19th Century French economists which followed the tradition, both in politics and economics, set by the theorist Jean-Baptiste Say.  In economics, this meant pursuing a loose sort of Classical School economics while maintaining a prominent role for utility and demand.  They also eschewed most of the Classicals' pessimistic stories about the iron law of wages, the inexorable rise of rents, the wage-profit trade-off, unemployment by mechanization, general gluts, etc., preferring instead to emphasize the happier "harmonies" between the classes and the infallibility of a self-regulating system of markets.  Politically, that meant upholding a radical laissez-faire line.  In sum, they can be considered the French counterparts of the British "Manchester School" with a dash of better theory and a good deal of optimism.  Karl Marx would later deride them as the "vulgar" economists.

French liberalism can trace its roots to the Enlightenment philosophers and economists, notably the Physiocrats, Turgot and Condillac.  After the French Revolution of 1789, a group of philosophers and economists tried to re-launch the liberal spirit of the Enlightenment in a republican France that was still suspicious of any intellectual relics of the Ancien regime.  These were known as the the idéologues.  Leading the fray was Destutt de Tracy and Jean-Baptiste Say.  The journal La Décade philosophique was their principal organ. 

The rise of the imperial regime of Napoleon Bonaparte, who sought to create a "war economy" buffeted by protectionism and regulation, led to the suppression of the idéologues.  However, after 1815, the restored Bourbon rulers showered the remnants of the liberals with honors and dignities, initiating the long tradition of deep intimacy between liberals and the establishment.  However, many liberals (such as Charles Dunoyer and Charles Comte) were discontented with the absolutist tendencies of the Bourbons and supported the 1830 July Revolution.  Their liberals' greatest competitors were Sismondi and the French socialists.  The amorphous doctrines of Saint-Simon hovered between the two camps.  

Around the mid-19th Century, the French liberal banner was carried by a group of academic and writers which we shall refer to as the journalistes (they were also known as the laissez-faire ultras or the Paris Group).  The central figures in this movement include Michel Chevalier, Jean-Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil and Gustave de Molinari. Their advocacy of laissez-faire economic policy was even more extreme than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts and their influence on government policy was unmatched anywhere else.  Only in the battle for the hearts and minds of the French population did their socialist rivals register any success, but even that quickly waned after the debacle of 1848 and the formation of the Second Empire under Napoleon III. .  It was during this time that popular laissez-faire satirist Frédéric Bastiat had his greatest hits.

In order to ensure that economics of any other persuasion could not take root in France, the orthodox liberals exercised an iron grip over the economics profession. In 1842, they founded the Société d'Économie Politique and the highly-influential Journal des économistes.  They also controlled the publishing house of Guillaumin, which produced Coquelin's famous Dictionnaire d'économie politique (1852), restating economic debates from a liberal slant.   

Throughout the Second Empire, most positions in French universities were filled by orthodox liberals.  The prestigious research perch at the Collège de France remained in their hands from its creation in 1831 until the next century -- passing from J.B. Say to Rossi to Chevalier to Leroy-Beaulieu.  They also controlled the economics section of the all-powerful Institut de France, the academy of sciences that looms over so much of French intellectual life. 

We should also note that already by the 1830s, the French Liberal School had jettisoned serious economic theory.  Most of the journalistes focused on the art of economic policy, allowing a loose sort "supply-and-demand" logic to guide their thinking without adhering to any specific foundations.  Serious economic theory -- especially of the mathematical kind -- was pursued by lone figures such as Augustin Cournot and Auguste Walras and engineers like Jules Dupuit.  But the liberal school could not tolerate this on methodological grounds.  Their concerted assault on Cournot and Walras (père and fils) crushed these men and drove their works into the underground.  The engineers were spared only because they were safely sheltered by the grandes écoles, the only academic institutions not controlled by the orthodox liberals.  

The liberals' fall from grace came slowly after 1878, when chairs in political economy were established in law faculties throughout France. These were filled mostly by members of the French Historical School.  Thereafter, France veered in an empirical direction in its economics and a corporatist direction in its policy proposals.   The Journal des economistes's monopoly was broken in 1887 by the considerably more pluralist Revue d'économie politique. 

The Philosophes: Liberals of the French Enlightenment  

The Idéologues: Republican Liberals 

Restoration Liberals

The Journalistes: Enthroned Liberals of the Second Empire

Other Continental Liberals

Resources on the French Liberal School

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