The Physiocrats

The Physiocrats  were a group of French Enlightenment  thinkers of  the 1760s that surrounded the French court physician, François Quesnay.  The founding document of Physiocratic school was Quesnay's Tableau Économique (1759).  The inner circle included the Marquis de Mirabeau Mercier de la Riviere,Dupont de Nemours, Le Trosne, the Abbe Baudeau and a handful of others.  To contemporaries, they were often referred to simply as les économistes.  

The cornerstone of the Physiocratic doctrine was François Quesney's  (1759, 1766) axiom that only agriculture yielded a surplus -- what he called a produit net (net product).  Manufacturing and commerce, the Physiocrats argued, took up as much value as inputs into production as it created in output, and consequently created no net product.  Like many Enlightenment  thinkers, and contrary to the Mercantilists, the Physiocrats believed that the wealth of a nation lay not in its stocks of gold and silver, but rather in the size of its net product.  But it was the identification of that net product solely with agriculture that the Physiocrats were distinct.

The Physiocrats argued that the old Colbertiste policies of encouraging commercial and industrial corporations was wrong-headed.   It is not that commerce and manufacturing should  be discouraged, they said, but rather that it is not worthwhile for the government to distort the whole economy with monopolistic charters, controls and protective tariffs to prop up sectors which produced no net product and thus added no wealth to a nation.Government policy, if any, should be geared to maximizing the value and output of the agricultural sector.

But how?  French agriculture at the time was still trapped in Medieval regulations which shackled enterprising farmers.  Latter-day feudal obligations -- such as the corvée, the yearly labor farmers owed to the state -- were still in force.   The monopoly power of the merchant guilds in towns did not permit farmers to sell their output to the highest bidder and buy their inputs from cheapest source.    An even bigger obstacle were the internal tariffs on the movement of grains between regions, which seriously hampered agricultural commerce. Public works essential for the agricultural sector, such as roads and drainage, remained in a deplorable state. Restrictions on the migration of agricultural laborers meant that a nation-wide labor market could not take shape.  Farmers in productive areas of the country faced labor shortages and inflated wage costs, thus forcing them to scale down their activities. In unproductive areas, in contrast, masses of unemployed workers wallowing in penury kept wages too low and thus local farmers were not encouraged to implement any more productive agricultural techniques.   

It is at this point that the Physiocrats jumped into their laissez-faire attitude. They called for the removal of restrictions on internal trade and labor migration, the abolition of the corvée, the removal of state-sponsored monopolies and trading privileges, the dismantling of the guild system, etc.  

On fiscal matters, the Physiocrats famously pushed for their "single tax" on land rents -- l'impôt unique.  The Physiocrats argued that as land is the only source of wealth, then the burden of all taxes ultimately bears down on the landowner.  So instead of levying a complicated collection of scattered taxes (which are difficult to administer and can cause temporary distortions), it is most efficient to just go to the root and tax land rents directly.

However practical many of the Physiocrats' policy measures were, they wrapped their arguments in metaphysical clouds.  They differentiated between the ordre naturel (natural order, or the social order dictated by nature's laws) and the ordre positif (positive order, or the social order dictated by human ideals).  They charged that social philosophers  had gotten both of these mixed up.  The ordre positif was wholly about man-made conventions, about how society should be organized to conform to some human-constructed ideal.  This, they argued, was what the "natural law" and "social contract" philosophers, like Locke and Rousseau, were concerned with.  However, there was, the Physiocrats argued, nothing "natural" in them at all -- and so these theories ought to be dumped.  In contrast, the ordre naturel were the laws of nature, which were God-given and unalterable by human construct.   The believed that the only choice humans had was either to structure their polity, economy and society in conformity with the ordre naturel or to go against it. 

The Physiocrats felt that they had figured out what the ordre naturel actually was.  They believed that the policies they prescribed would bring it about.  The term "Physiocracy" itself (introduced byDupont de Nemours  (1767)) literally translates to "the rule of nature". 

So what was this ordre naturel?  The economics of it are simple.  The Physiocrats identified three classes of the economy: the "productive" class (agricultural laborers and farmers), the "sterile" class (industrial laborers, artisans and merchants) and the "proprietor" class (who appropriated the net product as rents).  Incomes flowed from sector to sector, and thus class to class.  A "natural state" of the economy emerged when these income flows were in a state of "balance", i.e. where no sector expanded and none contracted.  Once the "natural state" was achieved, the economy just continued humming along, reproducing itself indefinitely. The Physiocrats explained their system in the famous Tableau Économique (1758) of François Quesnay.

It has been argued that Quesnay developed this idea because, as a physician, he drew an analogy with the circulation of blood and the "homeostasis" of a body.  But, in truth, the idea of a natural balance of income flows had already been expounded in the economic theories of Pierre de Boisguilbert and Richard Cantillon.  Indeed, the Physiocrats also owed to Cantillon their "land theory of value". 

It is interesting to note that the Physiocrats defended their laissez-faire policy conclusions not merely by pragmatic arguments about improving agricultural production, but more often by mystical views about the role of the government in their ordre naturel.  The Physiocrats, unlike some of their comtemporaries,  continued to view the State as a parasitical entity.  It lives off the economy and society, but it is not part of it.  Government has no prescribed place in the ordre naturel.  Its only role is to set the laws of men in a way that permits the God-given laws of nature to bring the natural order about.  Any attempt by the government to influence the economy against these natural forces leads to imbalances which postpone the arrival of the natural state and keep the net product below what it would otherwise be. A general laissez-faire policy and the "single tax" were the speediest, least distortionary and least costly ways of arriving at the natural state.

The Physiocrats believed that net product of the natural state was the maximum net product sustainable over the long-run.  Unlike the Mercantilists, the Physiocrats did not really spend too much time thinking about whether maximizing the net product was a "good" idea (e.g. did it enhance the power of the sovereign? did it produce general happiness? did improve general morality?, etc.).  Following up on Cantillon, the "friend of mankind", Mirabeau (1756) mumbled something about the true wealth of a nation being its population, ergo the greater the net product, the greater the population sustainable.  But most of term focused on the fact that it was the "natural" thing to do.  And anything that is "natural", according to the spirit of the age, was the "good" thing to do.

The policy measures advocated by the Physiocrats were sometimes identified with the interests of the nobility and the landed gentry, despite their single tax falling entirely upon them. They earned much opposition from the Neo-Colbertistes  of the age, who felt France must continue to endeavor to become a commercial and industrial power, like the Netherlands or England. Because Quesnay was the private physician to Madame de Pomapadour, the mistress of Louis XV, the Physiocratic clique enjoyed a good degree of protection in the French court.

However, after Pompadour's death in 1764, the Physiocrats influence diminished somewhat at Court.  However, it was precisely around this time that the Physiocrats decided to expand their influence and take their message to the population at large.  The Marquis de Mirabeau launched his celebrated "Tuesday dinners" at his home in Paris.  Quesnay did not attend, but the Physiocratic sect made it their "public" headquarters to recruit new members. Dupont de Nemours  took charge of disseminating the doctrine in print.  In 1765-7, the Physiocrats were publishing furiously in the Journal d' agriculture, du commerce et des finances,  which DuPont was then editing with a dogmatic zeal.  Some of Quesnay's own early economic writing were barred from publication by DuPont for not being "Physiocratic" enough!  After DuPont was removed in 1767, the Physiocrats switched to the Ephemerides du Citoyen run by the Abbe Baudeau. In 1767, DuPont de Nemours published his Physiocratie,  the definitive statement of the school doctrine.  

The Physiocrats' own style did not help their case.  Their dogmatism, their pompousness, their mysticism about the ordre naturel, their "rituals" at Mirabeau's Tuesday dinners, the affected, flowery way in which they wrote their tracts, their petty "cliquishness", their unrestrained adulation and worship of Quesnay -- whom they referred to as the "Confucius of Europe", the "modern Socrates" -- irked just about everybody around them.  Even those who ought to be their natural allies, such as Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and de Mably.  despised the Physiocrats with a passion. In a letter to Morellet regarding his upcoming Dictionnaire, the otherwise good-natured David Hume expressed his disdain for them thus:

"I hope that in your work you will thunder them, and crush them, and pound them, and reduce them to dust and ashes!  They are, indeed, the set of men the most chimerical and most arrogant that now exist, since the annihilation of the Sorbonne."   (Hume, Letter to Morellet, July 10, 1769)

Adam Smith killed them with faint praise, arguing that the Physiocratic system "never has done, and probably never will do any harm in any part of the world" (Smith, 1776). Ferdinando Galiani  saw them as anything but harmless.  For him, the Physiocrats were a dangerous group of impractical men with wrong ideas. In 1768, as France collapsed in a near-famine, the Physiocrats still called for "non-action", muttering on about their ordre naturel and the glorious wisdom of Quesnay.  This galvanized Galiani and his followers into making their own remarkable contributions in opposition.  

Opposition to the Physiocrats also energized the Neo- Cilbertistes.  François Veron de Forbonnais  and Jean Graslin  sharpened and modernized Mercantilists doctrines, bringing them in touch with the Enlightenment spirit partly in order to combat the Physiocrats' appeal.   

As a contemporary writer has noted, although the Physiocratic system was accused of being "mysticism parading as science", the truth was perhaps quite the opposite. Physiocracy was more "science parading as mysticism".  For this reason, the Physiocrats still exerted a considerable amount of influence on the development of economics. Of particular interest are the modifications introduced by Jacques Turgot and his followers, which we might call a distinctive "Turgotian"  sect.  They moved away from Physiocratic dogmatism by arguing that industry, and not only agriculture, could also produce a net product.  The modified Turgotian system, when channeled into the hands of  Adam Smith, would yield up the  "labor theory of value" of  the Classical School.

Still, for a brief period, the Physiocrats and their ideas were sought everywhere.  The rulers of Baden, Sweden, Tuscany, Poland, Russia, Austria and even the United States, consulted the Physiocrats.  The high-water mark of their influence was Jacques Turgot's  brief tenure as contrôleur général of France from 1774 to 1776.  Under Turgot,  many of the Physiocratic policy propositions -- e.g. the lifting of internal tariffs, the abolition of the corvée, the single tax -- were instituted.  During this period, the Physiocrats exploded into print again with the short-lived Nouvelles Ephemerides Economiques  (1774-1776).  However, with the fall of Turgot in 1776, his reforms were reversed and the Physiocrats were tossed, once again, out of the limelight.

I: Rise of the School.

The Physiocrats have been the subjects of so many and such divergent appreciations by historians, philosophers, economists, and students of political science, that hardly a single general proposition of importance has been advanced with regard to them by one writer which has not been contradicted by another. To de Tocqueville they were doctrinaire advocates of absolute equality. To Rousseau they were the supporters of an odious, if “legal,” despotism. To Professor Cohn they are, in their main proposals, “thoroughly socialistic.” To Louis Blanc they were tainted with a bourgeois individualism. To Linguet their mystic jargon was charlatanical nonsense, not to be understood even by themselves. To Voltaire it was so clear as to be made easily comprehensible (and ridiculous) to the meanest intelligence. To Taine, as to many others, they made powerfully for revolution. To Carlyle, who speaks ironically of “victorious analysis” and scornfully of “rose-pink sentimentalism,” they seem to have been a mere literary ripple on the surface of the great flood. Rossi praised them for conceiving a vast synthesis of social organisation; certain writers, like Mably, have blamed them for a narrow materialism; while there are judges who pronounce them markedly deistic. To Proudhon their system of taxation was a rare Utopia; to others they lack an ideal of any kind. They were to de Loménie a bundle of contradictions— at once monarchical and democratic, half-socialist and highly conservative. To Adam Smith their “system, with all its imperfections, is perhaps the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been published upon the subject of political economy, and is, upon that account, well worth the consideration of every man who wishes to examine with attention the principles of that very important science.” To many compilers of little text-books, who know better than Adam Smith, they are merely people who lived in the dark ages before 1776, and held some absurd opinions about land. To some they appear to have had a transitory success followed by complete and lasting reaction. To Léon Say their principles, after suffering reverses in the eighteenth century, have dominated the nineteenth. Of many serious writers these, anxious for precedent, have appealed to their authority in support of their own views; those, striving after originality, have been eager to prove that the point which they seek to emphasise was really missed by the Physiocrats; and the great majority of authors have been content to follow the well-worn phrases of one predecessor or another without direct reference” to the writings of the old economists themselves. Probably no man alive has read the whole published works of, say, the Marquis of Mirabeau—to mention only a single member of the school. And happily no one is obliged to do so. When we have once mastered their doctrines we are dispensed from following the prolix repetitions and tedious amplifications which make up nine-tenths of their literary activity. Yet this mastery is essential to a due acquaintance with the history of economic theory. For the Physiocrats were the first scientific school of political economy.

The Mercantilists, it is true, come first in order of time, but they are not in any proper sense of the term “a school” at all. There is no personal link between the different writers who, for more than a century, support what is called “the mercantile system”—an indiscriminate phrase covering proposals so different that their authors can only be said to have had a common tendency and not a common doctrine any more than a common acquaintance. But in the Physiocrats we see an alliance of persons, a community of ideas, an acknowledged authority, and a combination in purpose, which banded them into a society apart. To this personal tie, Turgot, the great lover of individual liberty in thought and deed, took grave objection. “It is the sectarian spirit,” he says, “which arouses against useful truths enemies and persecutions. When an isolated person modestly proposes what he believes to be the truth, he is listened to if he is right, and forgotten if he is wrong. But when even learned men have once formed themselves into a body, and say we, and think they can impose laws upon public opinion, then public opinion revolts against them, and with justice, for it ought to receive laws from truth alone and not from any authority. Every society soon sees its badge worn by the stupid, the crack-brained, and the ignorant, proud in joining themselves to it to give themselves airs. These people are guilty of stupidities and absurdities, and then their excited opponents fail not to impute folly to all their colleagues.” Turgot refused to wear their intellectual badge, but, as we shall see, he shared many of their ideas.

The Physiocrats were not merely a school of economic thought; they were a school of political action. Kings and princes were among their pupils. The great French Revolution itself was influenced by their writings. And the force of their work is still not wholly spent. But before the origin and significance of their writings can be appreciated it is necessary briefly to sketch the circumstances of their time in relation to which their ideas must be considered. The economic and financial condition of France at the beginning of the eighteenth century was truly pitiable. In spite of her great natural resources, the variety of her favourable climates, the fertility of her well-watered soil, and the thrift, industry, and intelligence of her people, the efforts of able ministers like Mazarin and Colbert to increase her national wealth had been rendered nugatory by the senseless politics of the Great Monarch. Costly campaigns abroad, ruinous extravagance at home, left the kingdom at his death, in 1715, with a debt of 3460 million francs, of which over 3300 had been contracted since the death of Colbert in 1683. His murderous wars, reducing the birth-rate, increasing the mortality, and “an act of religious intolerance, disavowed by religion”— the expulsion of the Protestants—had reduced the population by four millions, or 20 per cent, since 1660. Agricultural products had fallen off by one-third since he ascended the throne. Burdens increased while they were diminished who bore them. And competent judges computed that two-thirds of the taxes themselves were eaten up by the cost of collection.  The contemptible creatures who succeeded Louis XIV, Philip, Duke of Orleans (the Regent), and Louis XV, squandered the national revenues in vice and frivolities with shameless prodigality. The system of Law (1718–1720), which is generally held responsible for a large share of the subsequent financial trouble of France, had, it might be shown, little or no ill effect as a whole upon the royal treasury either immediately or in the long-run, for it taught useful lessons of the power as well as the dangers of credit, and proved by bitter experience to masses of men the folly of striving after fortune by gambling instead of by honest work. The Court maintained its outward brilliance, and the seigneurs who surrounded the king at Versailles vied with one another in splendour and extravagance, while their country houses were abandoned, and young labourers fled from the gloomy farms and the hated militia to the glitter of the cities and the security of domestic service with the great. An economic drain of wealth from the fields to the town thus intensified the contrast between luxury and misery, and a vicious financial system pressed with increasing weight upon the already crushed industries of the nation. The taille or direct tax (said to be etymologically related to our words tallage and tallies) was imposed only upon the goods and persons of the common people, and not on the nobles or clergy, who by a relic of feudal fiction owed the king their personal service and not their money, so that subjection to taille was synonymous with and incidental to degradation from nobility. A man who could afford to buy a patent of nobility obtained with it the privilege of exemption from taille; and the inequality with which the tax was levied, as between place and place, man and man, constituted an additional aggravation. The gabelle, an indirect tax which had come eventually to stand simply for the tax upon salt, was collected at the rate of 62 francs a quintal in some provinces, at 33 francs 12 sous in others, at 21 francs 12 sous in others, while certain districts had either redeemed it or been exempted from its operation. Except in these favoured districts every person over eight years of age was compelled to pay on at least a certain quantity of salt (sel de devoir); and the tax was collected with revolting harshness at a cost of about 50 per cent. The indirect taxes were leased out to a body of financiers, the farmers-general, who paid a fixed sum in advance year by year and purchased thereby the taxes they collected. Armed with stringent powers they paid domiciliary visits, seized goods suspected to be smuggled, and in their efforts to capture smugglers (whose fate was the galleys or the gibbet) they frequently provoked strife and bloodshed. “Those who consider the blood of the people as nothing,” says Adam Smith, “in comparison with the revenue of the prince, may, perhaps, approve of this method of levying taxes.” 

 The corvée, an obligation upon the peasant to supply the state with labour or services without payment,— e.g., to work so many days in the year on repairing the roads,—was extended to the whole country in 1737, and was estimated in 1758 to yield 1,200,000 livres’ worth of forced labour, though its cost to the peasants greatly exceeded this sum, and was stated by Necker to amount to 624,000 livres a year in Berry alone. It included also the billeting and the transport of soldiers. The regular army was, it is true, recruited by enlistment and not by conscription; but each district was compelled to provide its quota for the militia ; and this service was so distasteful that the men whose names were drawn often fled to the woods or the mountains, and were pursued by their neighbours in arms who had no relish for serving in their stead. Voluntary substitutes were not accepted lest recruiting should suffer. Apart from these and other national vexations there were the tithes of the clergy and numerous troublesome local dues. Minute regulations fettered industry and commerce ; tolls had been lightened and simplified by Colbert in 1664,[6] but Forbonnais still mentions twenty-eight on the Loire alone. Until 1754 corn could not be freely “exported” even from one part of France to another, much less to foreign countries. And at the peasant’s own door were the innumerable fees, often for absurdly trifling amounts, but none the less irritating, due to his feudal lord. Financial deficit was chronic. 

The capital of the nation, its industrial life-blood, ebbed away and left it weaker and weaker. Even the seed-corn was often lacking. In the first half of the century large territories lay waste, and over great tracts of country the poor were reduced to live on grass and water, like the beastsof the field. When the king asked the Bishop of Chartres how his flock fared he was answered that they ate grass like sheep and starved like flies. The Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand described his people— without beds or furniture, and lacking half their time the barley-bread or oaten cakes which constituted their sole food—as infinitely less fortunate than the negro slaves of the colonies, who had at least food and raiment. The government intendant of Bourges reported that whole families passed two days without food, and that in several parishes the starving lay abed most of the day to diminish their suffering. His colleague of Orleans refers to poor widows burning their wooden beds and their fruit-trees for lack of fuel. Beggars abounded. Bread riots were frequent, and so desperate that they were only quelled by lead and cold steel. Young men and maidens refused to marry, asking why they should add to the misery around them. And all the while taxes were ruthlessly wrung from the poorest families. The collectors forced doors, seized furniture and clothing, and even the last measure of meal, and sold the very materials of the building, often for ridiculously small sums, barely sufficient to pay the expenses of distraint. The duties levied upon land were so onerous that some proprietors preferred to abandon their property, and more would have done so if the law had not confiscated the whole local property of an owner who left his land derelict. “The people,” says Taine, “is like a man walking in a pond with water up to his chin; the least dip in the ground, the least ripple, and he loses footing, goes under, and suffocates. In vain ancient charity and new humanity strive to succour him; the water is too high. Its level must abate, and the pond find some great outlet. Till then the miserable man can breathe only at intervals, and at every moment will run the risk of drowning.” Here and there, no doubt, the people hoarded a little money and enjoyed some surreptitious comfort; but they either bought parcels of land, which brought home to increasing numbers the tyranny of taxation, or they hid their money in secret hoards; for a man was assessed according to his apparent wealth, and there was no inducement to stock a farm well or work it to greater advantage when the rapacity of the tax-gatherer might confiscate more than the whole of the increased profit. Payment of taxes was wilfully delayed, law costs were deliberately incurred, and sheriffs officers were housed and fed for days together lest a readier payment should provoke suspicion of greater wealth, and lead to increased assessments the following year. The nobles, indeed, stood between the people and the crown, but it was only, in the bitter words of Chamfort, as the hounds are between the hunter and the hare; and the fierceness of popular indignation, which was directed first against the agents of the royal treasury, vented itself upon the privileged classes before it spread to the throne in that “general upset” which the elder Mirabeau clearly foresaw, and his son was to be instrumental in bringing to completion.

Such in barest outline were the economic woes of the ancien régime. So deplorable a condition of things could not fail to evoke the criticism and suggestion of thinking men. Passing by La Bruyère and Fénélon, we come, at the end of the seventeenth century, to a courageous, outspoken, and well-informed writer in Boisguillebert (1646–1714), a state official of Normandy, who mercilessly exposed the blunders of administration, the misery of the people, and the connection of one with the other. He urged upon successive ministers plans of reform, the consolidation and reduction of taxes, and, convinced that agriculture, the allimportant business of the country, was being stifled, he pressed for the abolition of fetters upon internal and export trade, until he was disgraced and exiled to Auvergne as a warning against meddling importunity. In 1707 the great soldier, Marshal Vauban, in his seventy-fourth year, printed anonymously, for private circulation, his Dixme Royale or proposal to substitute for a host of other taxes a general tithe upon all classes of men and all kinds of revenue, and died the same year, chagrined at the king’s severe disfavour, and the suppression of his book as a social danger. ) The army of financiers and functionaries found their occupations menaced by this hardy plan for the simplification of taxation. The anger of the privileged classes was easily roused by proposals to tax them equally with others. The amour propre of the king himself could not fail to be wounded by the rude simplicity with which Vauban proved him to be, as St. Simon wrote in the security of his closet, not the greatest monarch in Europe, but “a king of tatterdemalions.” In my forty years’ wanderings, says Vauban in effect, I have carefully noted the state of the people. Boisguillebert is perfectly right. Taxation has reached a pitch of absurdity. Naked, starving mendicants swarm the streets and roads. “Of every ten men one is a beggar, five are too poor to give him alms, three more are ill at ease, embarrassed by debts and lawsuits, and the tenth does not represent 190,000 families. I believe not 10,000 great or little are really well-to-do, and these include rich merchants, officials, and the favoured of the king. Take them away and hardly any remain.” He stigmatised luxury, privilege, public debts, and the farming of taxes; extolled labour, agriculture, and equality before the law; and reiterated in capital letters the warning that kings have a real and most essential interest in not overburdening their people to the point of depriving them of the necessaries of life. Half a century was to pass before Vauban’s ideas reappeared, in a modified form, with the Physiocrats, and then their spokesman was clapped into prison for using similar language.

Such was the encouragement afforded to these early writers on taxation. After Vauban they kept long silence, and the intellect of the nation seemed to lie fallow. “The government,” says Buckle, “had broken the spirit of the country.” Writings on paper money raged round the system of Law; and Melon, a former secretary of Law, published in 1734 his overrated Essai politique sur le commerce. The Abbe Alary had indeed founded a little club, the Club de I’Entresol, in 1724, which counted Bolingbroke, D’Argenson, and the Abbe de SaintPierre among its members, and met in the Abbe Alary’s rooms, in the Place Vendôme at Paris, to discuss political economy. But the club was closed in 1731, because the Cardinal de Fleury, then minister, disliked its debating Government affairs. Saint-Pierre, who had been expelled from the Academy for denying to Louis XIV. the title of Grand, turned his prolific pen from one project to another; from spelling- reform to utilising horse-chestnuts, from the advantage of a census to the disadvantage of debasing the coinage, and dreamed a dream of Universal Peace. But his writings, though some of them are not without economic importance, need not detain us. And D’Argenson’s economic reflections appeared only in 1764. During the whole of the first half of the eighteenth century the Government underwent little public criticism. It was the calm before a storm. After the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 began a veritable renaissance in every department of thought,—in religion, in politics, in philosophy, and in science,—largely under the impulse of English writers, and especially of Locke. The old crystallised forms of thought and action were broken up by the solvent of free criticism and fearless inquiry. Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois appeared in 1748. The Encyclopedie of Diderot and D’Alembert was started in 1751. Voltaire and Rousseau were sharpening their pens, and had even begun to write. Gournay, appointed intendant of commerce in 1751, devoted his attention to the English economists, translated Child and Culpeper, and directed into the same channel the mental activity of Turgot, whom he persuaded to translate a volume of Tucker.

The original and suggestive essays of Hume appeared in a French translation (1756). The efforts of Du Pin,15 Gournay, Trudaine, Fourqueux, and Machault had assisted in wringing from the Government an edict in 1754 permitting free trade in corn between one part of France and another; and Herbert had argued (Essai sur la police des grains, 1755) in favour of free export. But the work which heralded in the era of active and original thought in French economics was Cantillon’s Essai sur la nature du commerce en general, 1755, a little volume of 430 pages duodecimo, immeasurably superior to anything which had preceded it, and profoundly important by the influence which it exercised over the minds of leading writers. Cantillon, who died in 1734, was an English banker of Irish extraction. He had houses in all the principal countries of Europe, made a great fortune out of sagacious operations at Paris during the “system” of Law, and studied with great penetration the general principles which regulate the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth. His original English writings are unfortunately lost; but his Essay was handed about in manuscript, and a translation of part of the Essay which he made for a French friend is all that we have remaining of him. The Mercantilists seem always to have propounded to themselves the problem, How can Government make this nation prosperous? Nationalism, state-regulation, and particularism are the essence of their policy. But a man of much travel is less prone to be trammelled by narrow views of local circumstance, as had already been shown by Dudley North in his tract of 1691, the Discourse of Trade, and especially by Nicholas Barbon in his book of the same title a year before. In Cantillon and his successors we find broader and more philosophical views of the fundamental principles which govern the Science of Wealth at all times and in all places, though time and place are not without their modifying effect. The words en général which figure in his title are significant of much.

They mark a change from works like Mun’s England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (published 1664), Malynes’s Canker of England’s Commonwealth (1601), Fortrey’s England’s Interest and Improvement (1663), Britannia Languens (1680), Yarranton’s England’s Improvement by Sea and Land (1677, 1681), and others, to the cosmopolitan spirit which Adam Smith was to show in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)— of nations in general and not of England in particular. Cantillon sets himself to answer the questions, What is wealth? How does it originate? What are the causes which regulate its distribution among the different classes of society, and determine its circulation not only within the country but between one country and another? “Land,” he begins (and this is the keynote of physiocracy), “is the source or material from which Wealth is extracted”; but he continues,” human labour is the form which produces it; and Wealth in itself is no other than the sustenance, the conveniences, and the comforts of life.” He sketches the growth of human societies, beginning with the nomadic stage, and concludes that in all forms of society the ownership of land necessarily belongs to a small number; that in modern societies, after satisfying the claims of farmers and labourers, the surplus product is at the disposition of the landowners, and that their mode of consuming this surplus will determine the nature of national production. After dwelling upon the formation of villages, hamlets, towns, and cities, he passes to a consideration of labour, shows why the work of an agricultural labourer cannot command such high wages as that of an artisan, and distinguishes between the causes which regulate the difference of wages in different industries. The supply of labour of all kinds is determined by the demand for it; and, generally, the normal price of all services and commodities is regulated by the cost of Production. Without pursuing his analysis further, or dwelling upon his masterly account of foreign exchanges, it will be seen that this manner of attacking the problem at once raises economic discussion to the highest plane.

It has been mentioned that Cantillon’s manuscript had been handed about before its publication. Postlethwayt plagiarised large portions of it verbatim in his Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce as early as 1751.19 But the French translation, subsequently published, had been for many years in the hands of the Marquis of Mirabeau, father of the great orator and tribune of the French Revolution. Mirabeau seems at one time to have meditated publishing this fragment as his own work; but he eventually set himself to write a commentary upon it, and after the Essai itself had been reclaimed from him and given to the world in 1755 he expanded and published his commentary under the title of L’Ami des Hommes, Avignon, 1756, which took the public by storm. The anonymous author was soon revealed. He became the lion of the hour. The people flocked to see him when he showed himself in public. Tradesmen set up the sign-board of L’Ami des Hommes, and Mirabeau himself was so designated to the day of his death. His book ran, it is said, through forty editions, and was widely translated. Its peculiarities of style accounted for part of its success. The Marquis’s first work was a plea for decentralisation of local government published in 1750, the Mémoire concernant l’utilité des états provinciaux. The country was divided into two groups—pays d’état and pays d’élection, in the first of which (consisting mainly of the frontier provinces) the inhabitants themselves decided how to raise the money demanded from them by royal precept, in the second, the officials of the Government (the intendants) allotted its share of burden to each parish. Mirabeau pleaded for a general extension of the system of the pays d’état. His Memoire had been attributed by D’Argenson, no mean judge, to Montesquieu. The Ami des Homines now reminded readers of the naive prattle of Montaigne. Here it glowed with the fire of eloquence, there it glittered with wit and humour, elsewhere it exhibited shrewd observation, sober judgment, and able, though often inconsecutive, discussion. Its success owed something to its style, where quaint archaisms jostled with words freshminted by the author, and provoked Quesnay to write Où diable avez- vous pris ce style marotique? Je ne connais pas Marot, was the answer, mais apparemment j’ai bu de la même eau que lui. Victor Hugo finds in him the style of Molière and SaintSimon, the beau style-grand-seigneur du temps de Louis XIV. The sub-title of the book was Traité de la Population, and its central purpose was to show that a large population was desirable as conducive to the wealth of the country. It was a time of peace, and the population was already recovering from the set-back it had experienced during half a century. But it was seen that for a long time there had been, side by side with a diminution of population, a reduction in national wealth; and in Mirabeau’s view the problem of the statesman was to remove the economic causes which kept down the numbers of the people. “Men multiply,” he says, borrowing from Cantillon, “like rats in a barn, if they have the means of subsistence.” “The means of subsistence are the measure of population.” The production of food should therefore be assisted. The burdens of agriculture should be alleviated. The small cultivator was to be encouraged and held in honour; the idle consumer viewed with reprobation. Luxury he defined as the abuse of wealth. An unequal distribution of wealth is prejudicial to production, for the very rich are “like pikes in a pond” who devour their smaller neighbours. Great landowners should live upon their estates and stimulate their development,—not lead an absentee life of pleasure in the metropolis. Interest should be reduced, public debts extinguished, and a ministry of agriculture created to bring to agriculture the succour of applied science, to facilitate the development of canals, communications, drainage, and so forth. The state is a tree, agriculture its roots,20 population its trunk, arts and commerce its leaves. From the roots come the vivifying sap drawn up by multitudinous fibres from the soil. The leaves, the most brilliant part of the tree, are the least enduring. A storm may destroy them. But the sap will soon renew them if the roots maintain their vigour. If, however, some unfriendly insect attack the roots, then in vain do we wait for the sun and the dew to reanimate the withered trunk. To the roots must the remedy go, to let them expand and recover. If not, the tree will perish. 

Such was the burden of the book which fell into the hands of Quesnay, a doctor at the court, in attendance on Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of the king. Quesnay, the son of an advocate,21 had early distinguished himself as a surgeon and physician, and had come to court as the Abbé de Saint-Pierre had done before, and perhaps from the same motive. This is how the Abbé had expressed himself in a letter to a friend: “I have taken a little opera-box to get a better view of the principal actors on the stage of the world. I see our Government at its headquarters, and already I perceive that it would be easy to make it much more honourable to the king, much more convenient to his ministers, and much more useful to the people.”

If these, too, were Quesnay’s motives, he purchased his advantages dearly; for, as will be found, his official position fettered his freedom of action very considerably. He was now over sixty- three years of age, had written nothing on economic subjects except two recent articles, “Fermiers” (1756) and “Grains” (1757), in the Encyclopédie of Diderot, and the courtiers by whom he was surrounded seem to have regarded him as a harmless eccentric with a mania for agricultural science. But there was much in Mirabeau’s book of which he approved. “The child,” he wrote on the margin, “has been nursed on bad milk: the strength of his constitution often sets him right in the end, but he has no knowledge of principles.” He expressed a desire to meet the author, and they had an interview, of which Mirabeau, many years later, wrote a graphic and perhaps somewhat fanciful account to Rousseau. Quesnay, he says, showed him that Cantillon had set the plough before the oxen,—that population was not a means to national wealth, but vice versa. Quesnay sketched his own ideas to the Ami des Homines, who confesses that, much as he had written, his mind was still swimming in an ocean of uncertainties. He thought the doctor mad, and quitted him. But he came back the same night, renewed the discussion, and was converted into a life-long disciple and friend. Each found in the other the qualities lacking in himself. Quesnay, aged, sententious, oracular, personally retiring, timorous in action, but a hard thinker, who had carved out for himself a consistent theory,—the marquis, young (for all his forty-two years), garrulous, diffuse, egotistic, daring, and imaginative, but unsystematic and incapable of sustained connected thought. As an example of his boldness take the following extract from L’Ami des Hommes, in which the preface declares that he personifies la voix de I’humanité qui réclame ses droits. Sire, he says to the king, regard that class of your subjects which is “the most useful of all, those who see beneath them nothing but their nurse and yours —mother-earth; who stoop unceasingly beneath the weight of the most toilsome labours; who bless you every day, and ask nothing from you but peace and protection. It is with their sweat and (you know it not!) their very blood that you gratify that heap of useless people who are ever telling you that the greatness of a prince consists in the value, and above all, the number of favours he divides among his courtiers, nobility, and companions. I have seen a tax-gathering bailiff cut off the wrist of a poor woman who clung to her saucepan, the last utensil of her household, which she was defending from distraint. What would you have said, great Prince?” etc. This fiery spirit was never quite kept in check by Quesnay’s influence, but the energy which lay behind it soon raised up a band of followers for the solitary thinker of Versailles. The school of the Physiocrats dates from this interview in July 1757.

One overwhelming fact was obvious to all contemporary observers at the end of the ancien régime: in this large and fundamentally rural kingdom of France, the economic weight of agriculture could not be ignored. "All the authors of the period, Utopists, exiled Huguenots, Economists (...) valued the cultivation of land" and, for Vauban and Boisguibert especially, "agricultural activity has a primacy that is both historical (in the development of humanity) and logical (in the causal explanation of the productive process)", notes Jean-Claude Perrotf1). A third reason can be added: land's symbolic value, since the acquisition of land was the key to gaining titles of nobility for the bourgeoisie of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is therefore appropriate to relate ideas on population to the thinking about agriculture. Physiocracy — the "rule of nature" — presents a twofold originality in relation to the other intellectual currents of the period. It holds agriculture to be the exclusive source of wealth, and on this conviction it bases the first theoretical account of the relations between the rural economy and population. Following Adam Smith, who believed that no one had come closer to the truth in the field of political economy than the Physiocrats, they are generally acknowledged as the first to have developed a coherent economic theory. They achieved a major theoretical advance by creating a model of demo-economic growth based on the income of landed capital — they called it "the net product" — which inspired Marx to develop the concept of surplus valued. For the Physiocrats, agricultural production regulates population; more specifically, the number of men, their geographical distribution, and their living conditions, are determined by the land rent. Classical political economy (in the work of Smith and later of Malthus and Ricardo) took up this idea, but extended it to all sectors of economic activity. The level of production regulates the size of the population, and the adjustment takes place in the labour market through the wage rate.

The "Physiocratic movement" developed under its leader, François Quesnay (1694-1774)(3). He had few disciples. Marquis Victor Riqueti de Mirabeau (1715-1789), father of the famous revolutionary, publishes L'Ami des hommes ou Traité de la population, which will be widely distributed and read, in 1756. Less well known are Pierre Mercier de La Rivière (1720-1793), Guillaume-François Le Trosne (1728-1780), the Abbé Nicolas Baudeau (1730-1792), and Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours (1739-1817). Their loyalty to the master's thought, or rather their rigid orthodoxy, means that the essence of Physiocratic thought is in fact contained in the writings of Quesnay, particularly the articles published in the Encyclopédie^. For the diffusion of their doctrines, the Physiocrats rely on several periodicals, and in particular the Ephémérides du citoyen published between 1765 and 1772. They make followers among rulers in Europe and beyond — the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Margrave of Baden, Catherine II of Russia who invites Mercier de La Rivière, Joseph II, and Jefferson with whom Dupont de Nemours corresponds regularly^5). Their theories are put into practice at a political level. Free trade in grain, nationally and even internationally, is instituted between 1763 and 1770 by the reforms of comptroller general of finance Bertin and his successor L'Averdy, and then under the ministry of Turgot (edict of 13 September 1774). The Physiocrats thus witness the triumph of their ideas. But this success will prove short-lived: seven years of free trade between 1763 and 1770, and two years under Turgot between 1774 and 1776. With Turgot's fall in 1776, France returns to the old protectionist legislation. 

The fact is that the Physiocrats' social base was extremely narrow. According to the American historian Norman J. Ware,

 "The Physiocratic theory, then, arose out of the special needs of a new landowning class under a bankrupt monarchy and a fiscal system inherited from the past. The problem of these new landowners was to rid themselves of the innumerable taxes of the ancien régime which fell of necessity upon the land and made profitable farming impossible. Thus the single fixed tax on the net product of the land and freedom of trade in grain were their basic economic reforms. Out of these and the class interest of the Physiocrats came the reinterpretation of wealth, money and value, and, as an extreme form of this class interest, the doctrine of the sterility of trade and industry"

Talking of "class" is inaccurate here. Within a largely static and stagnant agricultural sector, Physiocratic ideas won over a number of producers, noblemen or wealthy farmers, who were keen on efficiency, open to technical innovations and equipped with a capitalist mentality for managing their land. This simplified representation of French society of the period also fails to allow for the power of corporatist interests. These were so strong that the demand of merchants and manufacturers for free trade was transformed into outright hostility as soon as their own activities needed protection.

The detailed survey of groups favourable or hostile to the Physiocrats drawn up by Weulersse (1910) appears closer to reality. They are supported by some Agricultural Societies of which they are also members (Paris, Orléans, Soissons, Rennes and Limoges), by Academies (Caen), by five of the Parlements (Toulouse, Aix, Grenoble, Rouen, Rennes) though only the first three will remain loyal to free trade in grain when its implementation produces increasing opposition. Some newspapers are well disposed toward them, and the Physiocrats recruit a number of supporters among young noblemen in certain salons. Relations with the Encyclopedists were initially good though they deteriorated progressively through the years. Their opponents are the corporate bodies protected by various monopolies, and the traders, merchants and manufacturers who do not understand that industry must be sacrificed to agriculture. Predictably, they meet with the suspicion or open hostility of all who benefit from the numerous duties and taxes and of those who, in the name of the King, are responsible for collecting them (farmers-general and fiscal agents in general). The intendants généraux^ and the police authorities are also opposed, because they fear the disorders that measures relating to a product like bread could cause, as will indeed be the case.

Two apparently separate questions need to be answered. At the theoretical level, why is population a variable dependent on agricultural production? And why was the Physiocratic movement a political and doctrinal failure? Our view is that these two questions are in fact inextricably linked and must be answered together, precisely because Physiocratic doctrine, whether political or economic, is based on a theoretical construct of which the demographic component is merely an expression. In other words, our analysis will constantly take place upstream from the ideas on population. The importance given to agriculture, which the Physiocrats consider the sole generator of wealth (I) is the key to understanding their theory of population (II). The historical causes of their failure (III) are economic and political in nature: they too must be analysed in terms of both theory and doctrine. 

I. Agriculture and prosperity

 The sterility of industry and trade

For the Physiocrats — and this is a central tenet of their theory of production — neither industry nor commerce generates wealth. How can this be explained? According to Joseph J. Spengler, this conception is a distant legacy of the Middle Ages when work and land were the only sources of wealth). The merits of that argument are hard to evaluate at such a general level. A more plausible explanation is that the Physiocrats developed their theory in the light of the actual situation of the French economy, about which they were well informed thanks to the Agricultural Societies and a well-developed network of correspondents, as Jean-Claude Perrot has shown. Some features of that situation are worth recalling. Agriculture employs the great majority of the population and contributes four-fifths of the country's wealth, not counting the significant share of socalled industrial production of consumer goods and equipment (textiles, small metallurgy for example) that is in fact carried on in cottage industry conditions as an activity complementary to agricultural work. The landowning class as understood by the Physiocrats (the king, the receivers of tithe, and the landed proprietors, all of them non-manual and nonpeasant), represents 6% to 8% of the kingdom's population, owns 50% of the landed capital, and receives the totality of rents from tenanted and sharecropped holdings, and of taxes(The mass of the peasant population, organized in small family farms, practises a subsistence agriculture that produces the essential minimum, with virtually all income being absorbed by food requirements. Finally, exports as a source of revenue concern principally foodstuffs or processed commodities such as wine. In these conditions, the Physiocrats find it hard to conceive that industrial production, which was still of marginal economic importance, could generate wealth in France.

A second explanation, not incompatible with the first, refers back to the quotation from Norman Ware. The Physiocrats elaborated their doctrine in almost natural opposition to the mercantilists. But as the Physiocrats observe the industrial and commercial wealth of England and Holland, they have to recognize that two other models of economic development are possible: international trade and industrialization. Quesnay, who argues for an efficient and highly productive agriculture, therefore has to prove that the two other sectors do not constitute satisfactory alternatives for ensuring the prosperity of the kingdom. At several points, he mentions the example of trading nations. Commerce has indeed been a source of prosperity for Holland, Hamburg, Genoa, but it is important to ensure that the nation exports essential goods first and foremost (Quesnay is in fact thinking of grain). The political argument recurs again and again: that the nation can do this proves that its independence is guaranteed. Similarly, when despotism ruins agriculture, only trade is possible, because wealth can be concealed or transported. Such is the fate of the Barbary Coast and of Turkey. In any case, commerce is an inadequate basis for the prosperity of a great nation. 

As for industry, Quesnay contrasts two alternative models to prove that it is a less beneficial source of prosperity for the nation than agriculture. If labour is employed in industry, its will be at the expense of agricultural production, and because industry is "sterile" national income will be much lower. If on the contrary agriculture is prosperous, the country can cumulate several sources of wealth. In addition to exporting its agricultural surplus, it can even benefit from an immigration of manufacturers and craftsmen, which will stimulate demand for agricultural products on the national market and allow it to increase the export of manufactured products. In fact, Quesnay puts forward a macro-economic model of development based on agriculture and strengthens his case by using political arguments, as illustrated by his insistent refutation of international trade. By taking labour away from agriculture, international trade harms the country's population and wealth and hence its political strength. This is the exact opposite of the mercantilist standpoint. 

2. The net product

Agriculture alone can generate wealth. This idea is formalized in the Tableau économique of 1758, with its central concept of produit net or "net product". Society is divided into three classes: the productive class (farmers and those working in the sectors categorized with agriculture: fishing and mining); the proprietary class (the king, the tithe holders, and the other landed proprietors); and finally the sterile class, composed of craftsmen, industrial workers and "bribed workers" (this is the tertiary sector: merchants, functionaries and domestic servants). The latter class is defined as sterile because it does not contribute to the creation of agricultural wealth; it only transforms it into consumer goods other than food or capital goods. Each year, agricultural production will give rise to a circulation of produce and consequently to monetary flows. For example, farmers will buy tools and goods from artisans of the sterile class while paying a rent to the landlords, etc. From these monetary exchanges, the proprietors derive a revenue, the net product, which will allow them, at the start of the next year, to buy agricultural produce from farmers and objects from the sterile classes. The functioning of the system is therefore based on the profit generated in agriculture, because the other classes, it will be remembered, live from the net product and are "sterile". The only way to increase the nation's prosperity is to maximize the net product by making agriculture as efficient as possible). This is precisely the purpose of the discussions devoted to English agriculture, which Quesnay admired as did all his contemporaries. 

3. The English example

Agriculture could be a source of prosperity for the kingdom, on condition that it be organized rationally. The technical and economic superiority of the English model is a recurring theme and the argument is based on a concrete analysis of the modes of production. In France it is desirable to substitute horses for oxen as a source of animal traction, extend artificial pastures in order to keep more livestock, especially sheep, improve the soil, develop agricultural implements and more generally, carry out investments). At the micro-economic level, the verdict is unambiguous: Quesnay contrasts the poor cultivator with the rich farmer, a genuine entrepreneur who invests "to increase profits". The argument continues at the macro-economic level. Regarding the balance between production and population, the superiority of large-scale agriculture is incontrovertible. For Quesnay, large-scale agriculture is the most productive and even in a densely populated kingdom small-scale agriculture is undesirable. The chief justification for the latter — the possibility of using abundant labour — is, he claims, fallacious: men are inefficient producers, and they constitute a mass of consumers to feed. Large-scale agriculture, by contrast, which generates a marketable surplus, is able to meet the demand for food An important reasoning follows from the analysis of the conditions of production.

Quesnay insists that it is not arms that are in short supply, as "city dwellers naively believe", but capital, an opinion widely shared by his contemporaries. Mirabeau, for his part, suggests "pouring back" foundlings into the countryside to increase labour and improve the network of roads. Competition between the labour needs of the countryside and of the cities will increase in the nineteenth century, with a constantly growing rural exodus against a background of declining birth rate. But this is not the context in which Quesnay is writing. He is primarily concerned with making agriculture the motor of economic growth. His entire argument centres on two players, the wealthy farmer and the proprietor, who incarnate economic rationality. Their individual activity has positive consequences at the macro-economic level, as is logical in a system where collective interest is the sum of individual interests. But it also has political advantages which, as is often the case with Quesnay, are inseparable. By creating rural employment, farmers help to sustain the rural population and, in the final analysis, the power of the state:  

"It is their wealth which fertilizes the land and multiplies the livestock, which attracts and settles the inhabitants of the countryside, and which makes for the strength and prosperity of the nation"

Let us conclude for the time being with three epistemological observations concerning Quesnay 's main theoretical contribution, the Tableau économique and the concept of net product. The idea of circulation and flow can be linked first to the state of knowledge in the eighteenth century. Just as the natural social order echoed the Newtonian physical order, so Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood, which revolutionized the understanding of the human body in the previous century, undoubtedly gave Quesnay, a trained surgeon, the idea for the circulation of wealth depicted in the Tableau économique. But it would be wrong to see this as evidence of a close relationship between curative medicine and political economy. What is significant is not the notion of healing, but the interpretation in terms of organic functioning. 

Joseph Schumpeter suggests a different analysis of the flow symbolism. According to him, Quesnay sees the notion of the circuit as a demonstration of the complementarity and even solidarity between the social classes, whereas Adam Smith, far more realistic, believes rather in the profound rifts that divide them, his sympathy being with the poor day labourers(20\ Gino Longhitano argues that in less than ten years, between the first editions of the Tableau économique in 1756-1757 and the first articles ("Fermiers", "Grains") published in the Encyclopédie, and those on the Natural Order of 1765-1766 and the work by Mercier de La Rivière, the Physiocrats moved from political economy to the "construction of a social philosophy". The three classes of expenditure became the social classes (proprietor, productive, sterile). Mercier's theoretical contribution is decisive because he shows that this new element participates in the order of nature and he bridges the gap between economic themes and natural order: "The existence of these three classes arose from the basic natural order that governs the formation of political societies. The zigzags of the Tableau must now be considered as the key to this order". And accordingly, "the science which we believe we have discovered within the economic sphere will become the science of politics in general"

Finally, quantitative information has a twofold nature for Quesnay. On the one hand, in keeping with his contemporaries' enthusiasm for agriculture, and like the thinkers of the agronomic school, he bases his analysis on solid empirical evidence supplied by a network of correspondents. On the other hand, the diagram of the Tableau économique contains purely theoretical numbers, which purport to illustrate the annual flows of exchanges between social groups. This is why Jean Molinier analysed the Tableau économique as a tentative exercise in national accounting). If Quesnay did not use the real numbers which were available, it was because his main concern was to demonstrate dynamics rather than to portray reality. Philippe Steiner is therefore correct to see a contrast between medicine and the new science of political economy that Quesnay wants to establish. But he is wrong to write that if for the former clinical experience is indispensable, for the latter "objective data" have to be integrated in a theoretical operation which alone gives them meaning, for arbitrary numbers cannot provide the basis for inductive reasoning. One point, however, is common to both disciplines: for Quesnay, knowledge originates in the senses, but by the exercise of reason it is possible to avoid the traps of sensualism. 

The ideas on population lead to a similar conclusion: they refer to an analysis in terms of classes and social behaviour (for example, luxury). The political implications of economic choices are ever present (taxation, the army); finally and above all, even if Quesnay is aware, for example, of the concrete problems of labour in agriculture, the effort to think in terms of theory is undeniable. 

II. On population

The principal consequence of the belief in a natural order is a shift away from doctrinal positions like those developed by the mercantilists, and towards a theoretical analysis of the relationship between agriculture and population presented as conforming to a universal scientific truth. In no sense does this preclude using the question of population for ideological purposes. Rousseau, Montesquieu, Herbert and many others (in England the controversy opposes Wallace and Hume) see depopulation as the sign of bad government. Quesnay is convinced that the population of France has declined, and for Mirabeau who shares this opinion, the cause lies not in clerical celibacy, wars, overly large armies, or emigration, but in the decay of agriculture and in luxury. Nor does he believe, contrary to Hume, that cities are "an enormous abyss for the population": on the contrary, they benefit from foreign immigration). More generally, the Physiocrats have been influenced by some authors and in turn have influenced others, for example, Cantillon and Lavoisier(Some of these influences will be evoked in the following pages. The case of Mirabeau is special. In the first three parts of L'Ami des hommes, Mirabeau draws heavily on Cantillon. These pages were written before Quesnay "converted" him to Physiocracy after a stormy and memorable discussion. In contrast, the next three parts, published later, were read over and corrected by Quesnay. They are a faithful statement of Physiocratic orthodoxy.

1. Population, a dependent variable

Since the agricultural sector alone is productive, the growth of population depends on an increase in the net product of landed property. Industry cannot induce demographic growth; it can even "be injurious to population" if it deprives agriculture of labour and thereby leads to a reduction in the net product. In any case, and this is a key point, the number of people is a dependent variable. On this subject, the position of Charles Stangeland in his exploration of the origins of Malthus' thought is simplistic when he asserts that the Physiocrats "had stated with considerable clearness the dependence of population on subsistence''^26). In fact, what is involved is not at all a straightforward relationship between population and subsistence. What matters for the Physiocrats is the occurrence of a prior growth in agricultural output. For example, the transition from a pastoral or hunting economy to agriculture makes the growth of population possible. For Dupont de Nemours, if population has been observed to double in the north-American colonies every twenty-five years, this is "because cultivation is constantly making new progress there" The main features of Malthusian demo-economic analysis and of classical analysis in general are sketched out here. In the introduction we recalled that demand for labour (agricultural production for the Physiocrats) regulates supply (which for them, as for the classical economists, is population). Let us have another look at this mechanism that will be formalized by the classical economists. When economic conditions are favourable, employers seek to employ more labour to satisfy the demand for produce. Because the demand for labour (production) faces a population whose size is fixed in the short term, the law of supply and demand on the labour market will cause wages to rise. Workers are encouraged to marry earlier, and if they are married, to increase their fertility in order to benefit from the extra wages their children can earn. This is true for the rural world but also for industry, since in the early stages of capitalism — the theories of Smith, Malthus and Ricardo are based on their firsthand observation — children are put to work very early. Population thus increases in response to production. Conversely, if the economic situation deteriorates, the demand for labour decreases and population growth is  checked (thanks to a rise in age at marriage and resort to contraception within marriage). Mortality may even strike the social groups that are at the margin of subsistence.

Quesnay's theoretical contribution is less sophisticated but the essential features are present. Population growth, he writes, "depends entirely on the increase of wealth, on the employment of men and the use of wealth..." The same applies to one of the modes of demographic growth, immigration (or emigration), which depends on the course of economic activity and on the degree of "religious tolerance" of the state. Like many of his contemporaries and in particular Voltaire, Quesnay has in mind the exodus of the Protestants. On the other hand, he does not develop as precise an analysis as Cantillon, for whom nuptiality and fertility are responding to the increase of wealth initiated by the "proprietors of land"

But if Quesnay, like the classical economists, considers from a dynamic point of view that production governs population through the demand for labour, the empirical evidence about the working of French agriculture leads him to a concern, at a purely static level, for the outlets of production. According to him, the population was large enough in relation to the size and fertility of the territory, lest internal demand be insufficient to absorb agricultural production). Considerations of this kind have fostered uncertainty about Quesnay's ideas on population and given the impression that he is at times populationist.

The cultivation of vineyards provides an opportunity to develop an analysis of intersectorial relations (between agriculture and trade in this case) and an approach to the optimum allocation, this time within agriculture, of two of the three factors of production, labour and land. He sees vineyards as especially worthy of attention because they allow the maximization of population and net product — today we would refer to the demographic growth induced by employment and the distribution of income. It requires an abundant labour force and consequently, "population will increase in proportion to the increase in annual wealth resulting from the increase in the cultivation of vineyards". In addition, "the most wealthy branch of cultivation in the French kingdom" offers the advantage of earning revenue through exports. Pursuing the theme of the optimum use of land as a factor of production, Quesnay extends his reflection to the entire agricultural sector and advocates the use of less fertile land for other uses (pasture, mulberry trees, minor cereals, etc.), which would strengthen livestock farming, improve human diet, and thus increase the population. 

The theory of the wage also follows from that of the net product. Both move in the same direction. The argument runs thus. When the net product is high, landed proprietors can distribute higher nominal wages provided they do not hoard but reinvest their profits, which Quesnay believes they will because their behaviour is rational^31). It should be noted that if the net product were not reinvested it would turn into a sterile "nest egg" which would slow down economic growth. In this Quesnay anticipates the analysis of effective demand made by Malthus in his Principles of Political Economy and more especially, as Schumpeter notes, that by Keynes^32). Let us assume that the net product is indeed reintroduced into the circuit. Then, even if the price of wheat increases, real wages will increase anyway, because the consumption of food products does not absorb the entire wage(33). The very concrete nature of the argument in favour of agriculture thus makes a theoretical advance possible thanks to a more detailed analysis of the demand for labour: the nature and sectorial distribution of the demand for labour are as important as its total volume.

2. Decorative luxury and subsistence luxury

The question of the uses of wealth — in modern terms, the structure of consumption — underpins Quesnay's position on a theme that runs through the literature on population in the eighteenth century — luxury). In all the passages where Quesnay discusses luxury, the direct demographic implications of luxury, as a factor of depopulation, are rare. In "Questions intéressantes sur la population, l'agriculture et le commerce, etc.", he denounces "the dominant luxury" produced by "luxury manufactures". They are responsible for spreading consumption habits which are almost "obligatory", so that to satisfy them the individual is induced "to save on propagation or to avoid marriage" . Another ground for the criticism of luxury is hostility to the lifestyle imposed by the Court. Louis XIV had been deeply marked by the Fronde, and his political objectives are known to have included forcing the aristocracy to dissipate itself through lavish spending of its revenue at the Court. The allusion is barely concealed: 

"Does not this dominant decorative luxury, which forces men into expenditures on clothes and decoration out of proportion to their resources, prevent the proprietor from repairing and improving his possessions? (...) Do not the decorative expenses, which lead to other ostentatious expenditures, constitute a kind of intemperate and destructive luxury? (...) Does it not inspire vain men to all manner of intrigues and irregular expedients to meet the expenses of display?" 

But this severe and moralizing description should not mislead. Quesnay was less concerned about the political stakes than about the economic implications of luxury. A few lines later the argument focuses on the problem of wealth creation and he deplores the "concentration of men in the manufactories of luxury to the detriment of agriculture''

Thus we are brought back to agriculture and to the indirect demographic implications of luxury, through an analysis of the distribution of the work force. Men are wrongly directed into sterile sectors that are often hostile to free trade and protectionist in the tradition of Colbert, and this leads to a shortage of arms in agriculture and, as a consequence, to the impoverishment of the kingdom. And as the demand for labour is insufficient, demographic growth is depressed:  "The manufactories and trade fostered by the disorder of luxury accumulate men and wealth in the cities, prevent the improvement of property, devastate the countryside, engender contempt for agriculture, increase personal expenditures excessively, undermine family support, thwart human propagation and weaken the state". 

From this demo-economic perspective, it is understandable that Quesnay's hostility to luxury turns to approval when "luxe de subsistance" (luxury of subsistence) is involved, that is, a qualitative improvement in food consumption. In contrast to the "luxe de décoration" (decorative luxury), the latter raises the net product of agriculture. On this point, Quesnay differs from Cantillon who is more favourable to the products of luxury manufactories because he is not defending the same interests. 

3. Economic freedom and population

For the Physiocrats, a failure to respect natural laws means that the wealth of the state will not be maximized. In the economic field, the state should therefore restrict its intervention to protecting private property and free trade, which implies a rejection of Colbertism. In this sense, the Physiocrats are at one with the bourgeois opposition which criticizes the inefficiency of the regulations inspired by mercantilism. In their view one of the natural laws most decisive for the kingdom's prosperity is free trade in grain within France, which, it must be remembered, does not exist between the provinces in the eighteenth century. For example, although Languedoc is richer than Brittany, Maine or Poitou, what today would be termed its comparative advantage is nullified because it is prevented from selling its wheat. 

Since free trade in grain guarantees them a "good price", proprietors are willing to increase production by reducing fallows, renewing tenancies, making larger advances, notes Dupont de Nemours about the progress of agriculture in Provence, Brittany, and the Orléans region, which has been achieved, according to him, since the establishment of free trade in grain in 1763. The increase in net product thus enables proprietors to pay higher wages to the "lower orders". Mercier de La Rivière even sees this as the only justification for foreign trade: 

"The interest of trade is therefore [for an agricultural nation] the interest of cultivation (...) it is the only and true objective that it should set for its foreign trade if it wants it to contribute to the growth of wealth and population.

To continue the analysis: the good price has two mutually reinforcing advantages. Higher wages obviously produce a rise in living standards for the wage earners because the additional revenue is not absorbed by the increase in the price of subsistence (today we would say that inflation does not cancel out the increase in nominal wages). At the macro-economic level, the revenues that are paid out reinforce consumption, in turn inducing an increase in production and, at the end of the process, economic growth for the nation. The model was forcefully summarized in 1767: 

"That people do not believe that cheapness of produce is profitable to the lower classes. For the low price of produce causes a fall in the wages of ordinary people, reduces their well-being, makes less work or remunerative occupations available to them, and wipes out the nation's revenue."

Nor is there any reason to fear the export of grain. It is justified theoretically by two separate but converging arguments. It earns revenues that stimulate consumption, and the resulting demand for labour induces demographic growth. In addition, since manufactured goods incorporate only labour and not wealth, it is better to export grain. The net product thus provides the decisive theoretical argument in favour of free trade in grain. It remains to justify the export policy. Quesnay, who knows that France has an exportable surplus, hammers out four arguments: exports do not create a risk of famine; they can always be balanced by imports; the production of grain in America is not to be feared given the higher quality of grain produced in France; and, above all, foreign sales "support the price of foodstuffs", for they prevent a fall in market prices and consequently allow the net product to be maximized. The export of grain has another dimension for the Physiocrats. A capacity to export is proof of true political independence because exports imply self-sufficiency in food, as we would say today. Clearly advocated here is a commercial policy radically opposed to that of Colbert, which consisted in protecting national industries against imports. This can be seen in a text of 1766, "Remarques sur l'opinion de l'auteur de l'Esprit des lois concernant les colonies", where he opposes Montesquieu's assertion contained in chapter XVII of book XXI of L'Esprit des lois, that the home country would have the exclusive right to negotiate with a colony if the latter was founded uniquely for the purposes of increasing trade. Quesnay considered that granting such a monopoly to various trading companies was to ill serve the interests of the state. His target here was the colonial compact. 

4. Taxes and population

Under the ancien régime, taxation is inefficient, for it is not directly based on the real producers of wealth and it is a source of scandalous profits. But Louis XV's attempts at reform, notably in 1749, ran up against strong opposition from the clergy and the nobility. Quesnay, well aware of the true situation, considers taxation to be one of the obstacles to the growth of the population. For example, the taille^42\ often vexatious and arbitrary in its application, drives the children of husbandmen to the cities, with harmful consequences for agricultural production. As for the corvées(43\ they reduce the peasants to misery by preventing them from using their labour to ensure the survival of their farm; in the long run this leads to an impoverishment of the country and indirectly sets an obstacle to population growth because the number of men depends on the production of wealth. Thus there is a clear continuity between the micro-economic analysis and the macro-economic level. Quesnay condemns all taxes that impede trade, including international trade: trade should be "straightforward and secure". The note in which the second of these adjectives is explained combines a plea for the natural order with a criticism of fiscal predators and Colbertism: 

"[secure] from all fiscal, manorial, etc. impositions, from monopolies, emoluments, inspectors and other needless officers. Tradelike agriculture must have no other government than the natural order (...). Monopoly in trade and in agriculture has all too often found defenders (...) and the natural order has been perverted by particular interests that were always concealed and always petitioning behind the mask of the general good". 

Demographic considerations are clearly not important in themselves; they are inseparable from a crucial issue linked to efficient taxation — the wealth and hence the power of the kingdom. The wealth of the kingdom? If Quesnay and Mercier de La Rivière want a single tax on the rent of proprietors, it is firstly for reasons of efficiency. All other forms of taxes are "redundant" and in the end fall on the proprietors. The argument is addressed to the king in his role as a great proprietor of land; it is clearly in his own interest that tax be collected on the land rent. One might add: so much the better if the kingdom's population lives better as a result). The power of the kingdom? As often with the Physiocrats, economic theory is in fact inseparable from political philosophy, and the link is particularly strong with respect to taxation. In a text of 1767, "Despotisme de la Chine", Quesnay develops a political model, legal despotism, which Mercier de La Rivière systematized in U ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques, published the same year.

This model is organized around two fundamental points). The first derives from their economic theory: because wealth is generated by land alone, tax must be levied on agriculture. The second is part of their political philosophy: because property is the foundation of the social order, the government's duty is to defend and protect it so that society can function. The demonstration of the necessity of legal despotism involves a reflection on the nature and role of taxation. In a large kingdom, the domain lands of the sovereign are insufficient to provide adequate resources for the maintenance of order, so the king has to levy taxes. Thus these benefit from a kind of fundamental legitimacy, because they ensure the "security" of property. Since tax is necessarily collected on the revenue of property it can in fact be analysed, to use Weulersee's expression, as a "kind of indispensable joint use by the state of the revenue from its domain". Taking up the legal theory of the eminent domain developed over the previous two hundred years, the Physiocrats hold that since the king is historically the original owner of the soil, he may legitimately subject the proprietors of the land to a tax based on its revenue. As Mercier de La Rivière writes: "in his capacity as sovereign, he is the joint owner of the net product of the land over which he reigns'). This is why, with respect to taxes, the question of wealth is inseparable from that of the kingdom's power. But the latter also has a military dimension.

5. The question of armies

The contrast with the mercantilists for whom the power of the kingdom was measured by the number of its subjects, needs to be stressed from the outset: 

 "Those who see the advantages of a large population only in maintaining large armies misjudge the force of a state (...). Large armies exhaust it"

If the population does not exist to provide soldiers for the Prince, how can the defence of the kingdom be assured? The argument reflects the conditions of the period and is perfectly consistent with the economic theory of the Physiocrats. In the eighteenth century, armies are almost entirely composed of mercenaries and artillery units, even if in France the militia system also provides men. To have large numbers of soldiers, money matters far more than men. So the issue is one of financial resources required to recruit and arm the troops, as Quesnay clearly saw 

"Large armies are not enough to provide a powerful defence. The soldier must be well paid if he is to be well disciplined, well trained, energetic, happy, and fearless. War on land and sea employs other resources besides men's strength, and demands other expenditure much greater than that necessary for the soldiers' subsistence. Thus it is much less men than wealth which sustains a war"

Mention must be made here of a specific historical factor. Publication of the Tableau économique in 1758 was directly linked to the disastrous Seven Years War (1756-1763) which proved a financial catastrophe due to the military operations in the colonies and the decisive role played by a costly navy. Aware of the seriousness of the financial crisis, Quesnay judges the time right to present the principles of a system intended to restore the kingdom's strength and publishes the Tableau économique on which he has been working for a year. This context gives added significance to the fact that the king appears in the Tableau économique in the second class, that of proprietors. As a proprietor he has little interest in losing on the battlefield the only population that ensures the production of his wealth.

The question remains, however, of where to find the men who will ensure the defence of the kingdom? The answer follows logically from the theory of production: in the sterile classes. If this is the case, wealth and military power are perfectly compatible because the king can pay his troops with the net product:

"So as not to lack good soldiers and good sailors, it is enough to pay them well, and to procure an abundance of resources for this expenditure through a rich cultivation, and through a foreign trade which increases the revenue of the landed property of the kingdom"

In the article "Impôts", Quesnay explicitly links political and economic arguments. In the end, the number of men is not at all decisive for the power of the state. Here we see a complete break from mercantilism: the number of subjects is not in itself a factor of power for the Prince. 

III. A failure and its causes

Physiocracy produced a theory of population and an economic doctrine for agriculture, but no doctrine or policy of population. In our view the fundamental reason for this lies with the treatment of population as a dependent variable. Hence it is not surprising that at the level of doctrine, the Physiocrats are concerned primarily with economic measures for agriculture and that in respect to population they are neither populationists nor anti-populationists. For example, they favour a high price of grain because it translates into an increase of the net product. The latter is the motor of economic growth and indirectly of demographic growth through the demand for labour. It was noted above that in the field of population the Physiocrats reach positions opposite to those of the mercantilists. But why did the Physiocrats, who elaborated a coherent and empirically-based theoretical construct from which a clear economic doctrine followed, only manage to obtain a short-lived implementation of their ideas as policy (between 1763 and 1770 and then from 1774 to 1776), whereas mercantilist doctrines and policies dominated the European scene for over one hundred and fifty years? The reason for their failure is to be sought at the economic and political levels. 

1. An unconvincing strategy for development

In terms of a strategy for development, the Physiocrats were right to think that an efficient agriculture was a precondition for general economic growth in France). For example, their idea of a single tax on the rent of land appears a sensible measure in the light of what we now know today about the economic history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Agricultural prices experienced a long upward movement over the period 1716-1789, albeit marked by strong short-term fluctuations, and the land rent rose much more quickly between 1730 and 1789 than prices and taxes( Of this the Physiocrats were fully aware. Hence it was logical to concentrate the fiscal burden on this single revenue, which would have yielded far more than the multiple taxes of the ancien régime). Unfortunately for them, French agriculture, unlike that of England, was only exceptionally organized along the lines of their principles. Duhamel du Monceau 's Traité sur la culture des terres, which founded the French agronomic movement, was published in 1750, but although the agronomists were read, and English agriculture admired, the Physiocrats lacked empirical evidence from within France that would have given a resounding demonstration of the validity of their doctrine. In other words, while their analysis of the English model allowed them to achieve a theoretical advance, it was inapplicable at the level of doctrine, because these intellectuals were too remote from the reality of French agriculture. 

Probably more damaging to their chances of exercising greater influence were the industrialization and flourishing commercial activity of England which was an ever-present demonstration of the accuracy of the analyses of the Wealth of Nations and the classical school. Contemporaries could see clearly that industry was not at all sterile and that it did create value; and it was obvious that trade generated the capital necessary for England's industrialization, thus weakening the Physiocratic arguments on two fronts). It is worth pausing to consider the English context in the middle of the eighteenth century and evoke the state of mind of contemporaries. Between 1700 and 1780, foreign trade has doubled and the colonies overtake Europe in mercantile exchanges, in particular thanks to the slave trade(55>. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, could thus write in 1726 that "trade in England neither is or ought to be levelled with what it is in other countries; or the tradesmen depreciated as they are abroad"; as for the Duke of Newcastle, he affirmed that he had been "bred up in to think that the trade of this nation is the sole support of it" and that he had always attempted "to contribute all that was in my power to the encouragement and extension of the trade and commerce of these kingdoms'').

In France itself, the prosperity of Nantes, Bordeaux and Saint Malo was striking. Between 1716 and 1788, imports from the American Islands rose from 16.7 to 185 million livres and exports from 9 to 78 million. And in the kingdom as a whole, while European trade quadruples, colonial trade grows tenfold). Much larger profits could therefore be made from the colonies and from international trade, a point that was well understood by neo-mercantilists like Melon and Véron de Forbonnais, but also by the monarchy and its agents, and among them men like Graslin, general collector of taxes in Nantes. It is understandable that Quesnay should attempt to refute the argument. While he is completely lucid about England's prosperity ("the slave trade, which is the principal object of this nation's trade"), he can merely affirm but not actually prove that the revenue derived from this sector is appreciably lower than that from livestock and from the grain trade. On the other hand, chapter 7 of Philosophie rurale, published in 1763 from the pen of Quesnay, contains a mass of quantitative information about England's agriculture and about the circulation of wealth, on the lines of the Tableau économique. But it does not make the comparison with profits from colonial trade. Quesnay applies a similar reasoning to France: 

"The profit from the trade of our colonies is estimated at 15 million; it is a profitable matter for the traders, but a small resource for a great kingdom that is losing thousands of millions through the deterioration of its agriculture''

2. The fear of famine, a political trap

The failure of Physiocracy also has a political explanation. Mercier de La Rivière begins the introductory statement of L'ordre naturel with these words:

 "We recognize in Kings three principal subjects of ambition: great wealth, great power, great authority: I write therefore in the interest of kings; because I deal with the means by which their wealth, power, authority can raise it to the highest possible degree". 

And yet, the relationship of the Physiocrats with political power is, to say the least, complex. Quesnay, who as physician to Madame de Pompadour has the favour of the court, does not publish the article "Hommes" at the time when the question of censorship is raised about the Encyclopédie. And using the same technique as Montesquieu in the Lettres persanes, he uses China as a stand-in for France. According to FoxGenovese, this accounts for the identification with Confucius and the reference to the sage. But although social and political positions are veiled, the economic criticism is fierce and specific: the articles "Grains" and "Hommes" draw a sharp contrast between Colbert and Sully. The first is openly criticized, the second praised at length. 

The theory of the net product led logically to an economic policy: modernize agriculture to make the state stronger, by favouring the liberalization of internal and international trade in what would be described today as a politically sensitive product, namely grain. The political context supplies the key to understanding why it was impossible to achieve free trade in grain in the last three decades of the ancien régime(60\ Between 1760 and 1775, the question was inseparable from many other crucial issues, including political arbitrariness, fiscal inequality, the financial crisis and the debts of the monarchy. A confusion of issues was to be expected. Hostility to this form of commercial liberalism was based on fear of hunger, and famine was in fact only one dysfunction among others. Although the opposition was deeply divided and as yet had no coherent political agenda, this gave it a political weapon with which to weaken the monarchy. The Physiocrats under-estimated their opponents, being too concerned with establishing a new orthodoxy against a Colbertian mercantilism that remained influential, and even more absorbed by demonstrating the sterility of all non-agricultural activities. They were in fact hostages to the conflict, sometimes hidden, sometimes open, of the Parlements against the crown, although they had originally had the support of five of them.

It is useful to recall the stages of implementation of the free trade in grain). Act one. Under the influence of Gournay, who died in 1759, and of Quesnay, comptroller general of finance Henri Bertin authorizes on 27 May 1763 the free circulation of "grain, flour, and vegetables throughout the kingdom", while buying and selling operations are rendered practically free. A royal edict of 19 July 1764 removes all obstacles to the trade in grain and flour except in Paris and its hinterland. Exports and imports are also partially authorized. The preamble to the edict, written partly by Dupont de Nemours who at that time was working with Turgot, is a pure declaration of Physiocratic principles). In May 1763 the Parlement of Paris reluctantly registers the royal proclamation: "if experience proves the disadvantages of this new legislation, we will return to the former laws". This pointed to the general state of opinion. Since consumers no longer felt protected by price controls on bread, they saw it as a factor of price increase). There was even talk of a "famine pact", of speculations in which the king himself was believed to be involved. The Parlements blocked the application of the measures freeing trade and attacked their architects, the Physiocrats, and particularly Baudeau. In 1767, a bad harvest intensified the attacks against the Physiocrats, who were accused of wanting to starve the people, and Véron de Forbonnais published a rebuttal of Quesnay's Tableau économique. Between 1765 and 1768, three of the Physiocrats, Le Trosne, Mercier de La Rivière and Baudeau, published works defending the group's views, for the hostility of the Parlements was strong. The Parlement of Paris accused the Physiocrats of wanting to deprive the people of bread; Rouen re-established controls on the trade in grain on 15 April 1769, and Paris and Dijon followed suit in the summer of 1770. The account by Dupont de Nemours gives a measure of the situation). L'Averdy, who succeeded Bertin as comptroller general and who was responsible for the edict of 19 July 1764, is dismissed at the end of 1768. After bad harvests in 1769 and 1770, the price of wheat remains high. The regulation of 1764 is finally abolished on 23 December 1770. Only Turgot, the intendant of Limousin, maintains freedom of grain in his province.

Act two. Right after coming to power on 24 August 1774, Turgot initiates a programme of reforms, and considers others of astonishing boldness: reduction of Court expenditure and ministerial salaries, suppression of some aristocratic privileges and unnecessary offices, abolition of the corvées, and naturally, re-establishment of free trade in grain. Over a period of two short years (he was dismissed on 13 May 1776) he will again run up against a coalition of interests. The edict of 13 September 1774, complemented by other measures in the same year, guaranteed complete free trade in grain. But bad harvests in 1774 and 1775 trigger a "guerre des farines" ("flour war"). Rumours again begin to circulate that hoarders are withholding grain to force up prices; riots break out during April in Reims and Dijon, and also in Picardy, Brie, and Beauce. On 2 May 1775, some people assemble in front of the gates of the Versailles palace; on the next day, demonstrators take to the streets in Paris, and two days later the Parlement of Paris requests the king to take the necessary steps to bring down the price of bread. The crown employs a mixture of repression and pardon, and the crisis subsides. But in early 1776 it has to face opposition from the corporations, hostile to any form of competition, and from the Parlement which in March remonstrates the king on the question of the suppression of the corvée and of various privileges, denouncing, in the name of the social order on which the monarchy is based, the dangers of equality in the face of taxation. Finally, Turgot is dismissed on 13 May 1776. Such were the turmoils in which the Physiocrats were caught.

3. Economics and policy: fundamental contradictions

At least three fundamental contradictions account for their political failure. First of all, they call insistently for a minimal policing role for the state in the grain trade — and in this connection they invent the famous formula "laissez-faire" — yet they also want the political power to curtail and closely oversee the exercise of property rights. We have alluded to the boldness of Turgot's reforms. Concerning these, and on the subject of fiscal reform or the economic policies of the Physiocrats, Samuels is correct to speak of "an utilitarian understanding of the social function of private property (...) necessarily involving the state in the continuing reconstitution of private rights''^66). This far from liberal conception was the logical outcome of what has to be considered an authentic programme of economic development based on the modernization of agriculture, which, as we have shown at some length, was the fundamental condition for restoring the kingdom's power. In other words, the Physiocrats sought "the substitution of their own program of agriculturalism for that of Colbertism". Adam Smith, while acknowledging their contribution to the development of the science of economics, did not fail to point out that Physiocracy was a system, just as mercantilism had been one. 

Furthermore, Fox-Genovese is correct to stress that advocating free trade in grain to a government that traditionally held stocks was tantamount to forgetting that the King, father of the nation, had an obligation to be concerned about his subjects' subsistence needs and that behind this moral duty lay a political calculation: hunger is a cause of social instability(68) xhe Physiocrats are limited in their support to a minority of innovative agriculturists, since outside of certain circles most of French agriculture in the eighteenth century remains largely static^69). With such a narrow social base they depend on the good will of the monarch for getting their ideas accepted, while he is torn between opposing interest groups. But because they also criticize the taxes and the privileges granted by the crown, they cannot count on its unconditional support. In fact, in the name of a truth based on the economic science they had discovered, they want nothing less than to force the King, despite his own stakes as a great landowner, to abandon any room to manoeuvre and adopt the Physiocratic solution. It is a denial of politics in the name of technocratic knowledge. 

Let us return briefly to their political model, legal despotism, and to its political implications. It is based, as we know, on an analysis of property: property and sovereignty are inseparable in the person of the King who is — and this is a crucial point for their demonstration — the largest landowner in the kingdom. Hence his legitimacy is no longer solely by divine right; it has an economic or rather a landed origin. The King is therefore a despot in the literal sense of the term, that is to say, he is "master and owner by patrimonial entitlement" of the soil. But he is a legal despot who must above all respect the law. He is thus radically different from the "personal" or "arbitrary" despot who uses force to oppress. His role is to defend property and natural laws, and through these the natural order, against anything that threatens them: the selfishness of monopoly holders, the insubordination of the lower administration, the riots provoked by the high price of grain. 

In the face of these dangers, the tutelary authority must be "unique and impartial''^70). Hence their natural preference for hereditary monarchy, which combines economic and political legitimacy. They believe it is much more effective than the separation of powers advocated by Montesquieu, which rests upon too delicate a balance, or than aristocratic government, which can "by confederation form a power above the law"(71). As for democracy, where legislative power lays with the nation, it has two drawbacks. Its very principle, the political representation of the nation, is at odds with the necessary economic inequality of property. The voting of laws intended to protect this inequality cannot be entrusted to an assembly elected according to the principle of equality between citizens. Most serious, however, "the ignorance and prejudice that predominate in the lower orders, and the uncontrolled passions and moments of fury they fall prey to, expose the state to disorder, revolt and appalling disasters''

The consequences of such a position in the closing stages of the ancien régime are not hard to imagine. The Physiocrats were close to the Encyclopedists in requesting a minimum role for the state at the economic level — limited to guaranteeing freedom of grain— but they differed from them by wanting to do this under a régime of legal despotism. Advocating an authoritarian intervention of the political power to ensure economic liberty was, to say the least, contradictory. Thus, the model of legal despotism could only raise the hackles of the Encyclopedists, and it earned the Physiocrats the hostility of Galiani, Diderot, Rousseau, Mably and Grimm. It contributed to their isolation and hastened their failure. 

Overall, it is indeed the interaction between politics and economics that explains the failure of the Physiocrats. Although their theory was based on good quality empirical observations, the model they developed had little chance of convincing their contemporaries at the doctrinal level, and especially not in the political context of the late ancien régime. This has important methodological implications for the study of ideas on population. That these ideas were a marginal concern to the Physiocrats, for whom the essential issue was free trade in grain and the development of agriculture, matters little. In the very century when demography acquired a theoretical formulation, they cannot be analysed independently of the political reality, as we have argued^74). Our discussion has drawn on various disciplines and has been conducted at several analytical levels, but the last word belongs to history. The "long" history of economic structures and ideas made possible the theoretical and doctrinal genesis of Physiocracy, centred on agriculture and as a consequence on population, whereas the "short" history of the economic and political events brought about its failure. But Physiocracy's fundamental theoretical contribution — that population was economically determined — was to have a lasting success.