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New and Unpublished Material Regarding French Classical Liberalism BENOÎT MALBRANQUE New and unpublished material regarding French classical liberalism Institut Coppet 1 ŒUVRES DE MOLINARI BENOÎT MALBRANQUE New and unpublished material regarding French classical liberalism Texts in French with English translation on verso Paris, 2021 Institut Coppet CONTENTS INTRODUCTION — Common misconceptions about the French classical liberal tradition, by Benoît Malbranque. 7 PART 1: INSIDE THE WORLD OF THE PHYSIOCRATS (1766-1777) 29 1766 — The physiocrats and their publication conditions. Letter from Dupont (de Nemours) to G.-F. Le Trosne (Eleuthe- rian Mills Historical Library). 29 1767 — The debate about ‘legal depostism’. Morellet’s critical observations on Mercier de la Rivière (Bibliothèque muni- cipale de Lyon). 39 1768 — The internal disputes within the so-called school. Letter from Dupont (de Nemours) to L.-P. Abeille (Eleutherian Mills Historical Library). 49 1777 — The poor knowledge of Quesnay’s Tableau économique among fellow physiocrats. Letter from Mirabeau to C. R. de Butré (Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal). 55 PART 2: FRENCH CLASSICAL LIBERALISM THROUGH ITS INSTITUTIONS AND MEN (1819-1853) 67 1819 — Jean-Baptiste Say on the possibility of a society without government. Extract from the lessons of political economy given in the Athénée royale (Archives nationales). 67 1839 — The close monitoring of Joseph Garnier’s lessons on political economy. Minutes of two meetings of the council of the École des Ponts et Chaussées (Archives de l’École des Ponts et Chaussées). 69 1846 — The business ethos of Guillaumin. Letter from Gilbert Guillaumin to P.-J. Proudhon (Bibliothèque municipale de Besançon). 77 1847 — Lamartine, a singular partner in the free trade movement. Two letters from Frédéric Bastiat to A. de Lamartine (Archives du château de Saint-Point). 81 1853 — A request for information by Guillaumin in the prospect of the Dictionnaire de l’économie politique. Letter from Gilbert Guillaumin to P.-J. Proudhon (Bibliothèque muni- cipale de Besançon). 87 PART 3: A WIDE RANGE OF COMPETING VIEWS (1879- 1887) 91 1879 — Yves Guyot on women’s suffrage. Speech before the electoral commission of the Cercle des Familles (Archives de Paris). 91 1885 — The exact meaning of Molinari’s anarcho-capitalism. Letter from Gustave de Molinari to A. Mangin (Private col- lection). 99 Annex: Charles Benoist’s recollections. 99 1887 — Moderates against radicals on the issue of free trade. Letter from Ernest Martineau to Y. Guyot (Archives de Paris). 101 7 ŒUVRES DE MOLINARI Introduction COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT THE FRENCH CLASSICAL LIBERAL TRADITION by Benoît Malbranque French classical liberalism is commonly recognized as one of the greatest traditions of promoters of human freedom in its various forms. Authors such as Turgot, Benjamin Constant, Frédéric Bas- tiat, Alexis de Tocqueville, Gustave de Molinari, continue to inspire new generations of liberty-minded individuals and to shape their understanding of the principles of a free and prosperous society. Unfortunately, this recognition and the help those authors pro- vide is limited by a great number of misconceptions. These miscon- ceptions are a necessary, but maybe only temporary result of the present state of knowledge regarding the history of classical liberal- ism in France. Up to this day, although there have been numerous attempts to provide an account of the lives, ideas and writings of these authors, a thorough and scholarly examination is a long time coming. Historians and commentators, having relied upon scattered and limited sources, have failed to portray correctly French classical liberalism. Certainly, the amount of data is intimidating; but limited sources are the root cause for unfaithful historic accounts. If we, as classical liberals, want to know who we are and where we come from, it is necessary that in each country, or at least in each major country, one devoted historian engage in the comprehensive study of his national classical liberal literature. As regards the French tradition, this has only been sketched. For example, I have never seen a single histori- an make use of anything from the 40 linear metres (43.7 yards) of the papers of Yves Guyot in the Archives de Paris, or from the pri- vate correspondence of major figures such as Gustave de Molinari (more than 60 letters), or the publisher Guillaumin (including the very useful letters between himself and the socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon), among others. Similarly, the Mirabeau papers, stored in the Bibliothèque Paul Arbaud in Aix-en-Provence, and the Dupont de Nemours papers, kept in the United States, are too often disre- garded and ignored by good-intentioned but overhasty liberty-min- ded scholars. Incomplete data has created unfaithful accounts, for reasons that are easy to grasp. Clarifications, corrections, or bold statements, 8 INTRODUCTION which appeared in minor works, are completely overlooked. Less renowned authors, who were frequently celebrities at their time and who sometimes defined the intellectual trend, when our famous ones failed, continue to go unmentioned. However, manuscripts, private documents and correspondence alter even more deeply the historical narrative. There only is a writer really himself, freed that he is from the pressure of readership and sometimes censorship. Only in con- versations and letters, for instance, could Molinari, allegedly con- verted in his latter years to the more moderate views of his col- leagues, have indicated his lasting faith in the privatization of every- thing. 1 Likewise, it is in a manuscript, never published until a few years ago, that Dupont de Nemours confessed that if the physiocrats were quick to embrace “legal despotism” (despotisme légal), it was in part for tactical reasons: because they originated in the back room of the King’s favorite and lacked the freedom to speak and write. (Les économistes y ont été vite, et en partie par politique. Ils sont nés dans l’arrière cabinet de la maîtresse du Roi ; et il leur fallait liberté de parler et d’écrire. 2) Undeserved punishments Some misconceptions, however, originate only in unfairness. Two major authors, who have been and should still be classics among advocates of freedom, will help me to illustrate my point: René Descartes and Michel de Montaigne. René Descartes (1596-1650) has been portrayed by F. A. Hayek as a great villain, the ultimate foundation of a deeply flawed French tradition of liberty which conveyed “flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason”3, led up to the building of uto- pias on moving sand and paved the way toward totalitarianism. Yet, a careful examination of Descartes’ writings indicates that his ambi- tious scientific program went hand in hand with a clear-sighted acknowledgment of the limits of human reason. This particular idea was articulated by Descartes on several occasions, and in the last words of his famous Meditations on First Philosophy (Méditations méta- 1 See the letter from Gustave de Molinari to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, February 14, 1859, in Proudhon’s archives, Besançon, Ms 2950, f°109; and the testimony of Charles Benoist in his memoirs (« Mes débuts littéraires », Revue bleue, politique et littéraire, 1932, p. 329; Souvenirs, t. I (1883-1893), 1933, p. 28). 2 Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, Remarques sur les observations qu’a faites M. de Mirabeau au sujet de la déclaration des droits publiée par l’État de Virginie ; Dialogues physiocratiques sur l’Amérique, Garnier, 2015, p. 168. 3 Friedrich A. Hayek, “Freedom, Reason, and Tradition”, Ethics, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Jul., 1958), p. 229. INTRODUCTION 9 physiques, 1647), he made again reference to it, claiming that it is necessary to recognize the infirmity and weakness of our nature (il faut reconnaître l’infirmité et la faiblesse de notre nature1). Descartes fre- quently laid out this idea when considering free will (libre arbitre or franc arbitre), as well as when studying what is called “divine free- dom” (liberté divine). Was God free when creating the world? Could he have abstained from making it, could he have made it differently, could he have made, for example, that two plus two do not make four? Descartes answered these by upholding the notion of divine freedom; this freedom, according to him, while deriving from ra- tional arguments, cannot be proved, for those issues are beyond the capacity of the human intellect (il y a une infinité de choses en sa puis- sance desquelles les causes surpassent la portée de mon esprit2). On other occasions, Descartes studied again this “reduced capacity of our intellects” (la petite capacité de nos esprits3), making it one of the foun- dation of his philosophy. He gave a clear example of its significance when referring to the chiliogon, a polygon of one thousand sides: although I can very well imagine in my mind a triangle, with its three sides, I cannot imagine the thousand sides of a chiliogone. 4 That is because the power of human reason is limited, and this fact, Descartes claimed, must always be recognized in scientific or philo- sophical endeavors. I will comment later on how this powerful but forgotten argu- ment, overlooked by Hayek, was used by the physiocrats around 1760 to undermine the statist and interventionist conceptions pre- vailing at their time. But before that let us turn our attention to Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), another disregarded giant of human liberty, whose Essays (Essais, 1590), although immensely influential, are commonly regarded, among free-market enthusiasts, as a sort of memorial to the mercantilist fashion. In Human Action (1959), Ludwig von Mises, studying the popular idea that trade is a zero-sum game, states bold- ly that “among modern writers Montaigne was the first to restate it; we may fairly call it the Montaigne dogma”5. However, the small chapter in which Montaigne addressed this particular issue tells us a 1 René Descartes, Méditations métaphysiques; Œuvres et Lettres de Descartes, Pléiade, p.
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