française and Jacques Bonhomme during two of the most tumultuous and violent periods of the 1848 Revolution reveal a man who was not merely an armchair economic and political theorist. He saw at first hand the anger and determination of the people to change French society, and he also saw how the government was prepared to defend itself by calling out the troops to shoot down the protesters. In a couple of subdued and understated letters to friends he describes being on or near the barricades when these events took place and even taking steps to use his influence as a deputy to call the troops off long enough to drag people to safety in the side streets. The following two brief
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quotations, one from February and the other from June, should be sufficient to show how close Bastiat was to events:
27 February 1848, Paris
As you will see in the newspapers, on the 23rd everything seemed to be over. Paris had a festive air; everything was illuminated. A huge gathering moved along the boulevards singing. Flags were adorned with flowers and ribbons. When they reached the Hôtel des Capucines, the soldiers blocked their path and fired a round of musket fire at point-blank range into the crowd. I leave you to imagine the sight offered by a crowd of thirty thousand men, women, and children fleeing from the bullets, the shots, and those who fell.
An instinctive feeling prevented me from fleeing as well, and when it was all over I was on the site of a massacre with five or six workmen, facing about sixty dead and dying people. The soldiers appeared stupefied. I begged the officer to have the corpses and wounded moved in order to have the latter cared for and to avoid having the former used as flags by the people when they returned, but he had lost his head.
The workers and I then began to move the unfortunate victims onto the pavement, as doors refused to open. At last, seeing the fruitlessness of our efforts, I withdrew. But the people returned and carried the corpses to the outlying districts, and a hue and cry was heard all through the night. The following morning, as though by magic, two thousand barricades made the insurrection fearsome. Fortunately, as the troop did not wish to fire on the National Guard, the day was not as bloody as might have been expected.
All is now over. The Republic has been proclaimed. You know that this is good news for me. The people will govern themselves.47
29 June 1848, Paris
Cables and newspapers will have told you [Julie Marsan] all about the triumph of the republican order after four days of bitter struggle.
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I shall not give you any detail, even about me, because a single letter would not suffice.
I shall just tell you that I have done my duty without ostentation or temerity. My only role was to enter the Faubourg Saint-Antoine after the fall of the first barricade, in order to disarm the fighters. As we went on, we managed to save several insurgents whom the militia wanted to kill. One of my colleagues displayed a truly admirable energy in this situation, which he did not boast about from the rostrum.48
Eleven months after these events Bastiat was reelected to the Chamber, this time the newly created Legislative Assembly in which he sat from 28 May 1849 until he took a leave of absence on the grounds of ill health sometime in mid-1850. During this period he continued to work as vice president of the Finance Committee, but his activities in the Assembly were reduced because his deteriorating health meant that he was less able to speak in the Chamber. Nevertheless, he was able to write articles and pamphlets on matters before the Chamber which he distributed as pamphlets such as “Protectionism and Communism,” “Peace and Freedom,” “Damned Money!,” “Plunder and the Law,” “The Law,”49 and his last pamphlet, which appears in this volume: What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen. All the while, he continued to work on his magnum opus on economic theory, Economic Harmonies. Although he gave fewer speeches in the Assembly, he was present to vote for the abolition of the tax on alcohol, for the right to form and join unions, for free trade in the wine industry, and against the power of the National University to set the curriculum for all schools. On 9 February 1850 Bastiat made his last appearance in the Chamber, speaking on behalf of the Finance Committee. He later sought a leave of absence on the grounds of ill health and spent his time writing, most notably What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen and the second part of Economic Harmonies. On the advice of his doctor he decided to travel to Italy, and on 10 September he bade farewell to his friends in the Political Economy Society (Société d’économie politique) before heading to Rome, where he died on Christmas Eve 1850.
Economic Sophisms and the other writings in this volume show Bastiat at his creative and journalistic best: his skill at mixing serious and amusing ways of making his arguments is unsurpassed; the quality of his insights into
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profound economic issues is often exceptional and sometimes well ahead of his time; his ability to combine his political lobbying for the Free Trade Movement, his journalism, his political activities during the 1848 Revolution, and his scholarly activities is most unusual; and his humor, wit, and literary knowledge, which he scatters throughout his writings, demonstrate that he deserves his reputation as one of the most gifted writers on economic matters who still deserves our close attention today.
David M. Hart
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A Note on the Publishing History of Economic Sophisms and What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen
Establishing the publishing history of what was to become Economic Sophisms is somewhat difficult because the work appeared in three different formats during Bastiat’s lifetime and after his death (possibly four if one counts later editions and translations).
Economic Sophisms first appeared as short articles in various journals and newspapers which published Bastiat’s material, such as his free-trade journal, Le Libre-échange,1 and the main organ of the Parisian free-market political economists, Le Journal des économistes. In the second phase, some of the material was also published as stand-alone books or pamphlets, such as Economic Sophisms First and Second Series, which appeared in book form in early 1846 and 1848, respectively, in slightly reworked form. The third phase came after Bastiat’s death, in 1850, when his friend and literary executor, Prosper Paillottet, had access to Bastiat’s papers and from this and the previously mentioned published sources was able to edit and publish the first edition of Bastiat’s Œuvres complètes (1854).
In most cases Paillottet indicated in footnotes the place and date of the original publication of the essays, but in some cases he did not. Sometimes he wrote that the piece was an “unpublished draft” (presumably one he found in Bastiat’s papers), and at other times he simply said nothing, thus complicating the task of the researcher, as we no longer have access to Bastiat’s original papers. We have taken Paillottet’s word in every case, as he is the best and sometimes only source we have for this information, although at all times it must be recognized that he was a close friend and strong supporter of Bastiat,
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which surely must have colored his judgment. That being said, we have not found any instance where Paillottet has been wrong (except that the journal Jacques Bonhomme was published in June–July 1848, not March 1848);2 our main frustration is that his information is not as complete as we would like it to be.
ECONOMIC SOPHISMS, FIRST SERIES
