as to give some economic advantage (protection) to French manufacturers. We have preserved Bastiat’s distinction wherever possible because it reveals the three-way split which existed in the French debate about tariffs between the free traders like Bastiat, the hard-core prohibitionists, and the protectionists.
Bastiat uses several terms for “money,” which can be confusing at times: numéraire (cash or gold coins), papier monnaie (paper money or notes), and argent (money). Bastiat makes a very clear distinction between paper money and cash (numéraire), as the European economies of his day were based upon the gold standard, and paper money was often viewed with suspicion as a result of the hyperinflation of the “assignat” paper currency during the Revolution.
There are also several different uses of the word prix (price) which need to be made clear. There is le prix d’achat (the purchase price), le prix de vente (the sale price), le prix courant (the market price), le prix de revient (the cost price), and le prix rémunérateur (the price which covers one’s costs). Very important for Bastiat is the idea of le prix débattu (the freely negotiated price), which is essential for the operation of the free market. This is a price which
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is agreed upon by two voluntary participants in an exchange who “debate” or negotiate a price which is acceptable to both parties. Both are equally free to accept or to refuse the price by concluding the bargain or walking away. Also crucial to his argument is the idea that there is a difference between real economic wealth and the accounting device (the money price) used to measure it, and thus the prix absolus (nominal or money price) of a good or service is not a true measure of the amount of wealth in a society.
Bastiat uses the terms droit, tarif, and taxe, sometimes interchangeably and sometimes reserving different meanings to each one. We have tried to be consistent in translating them as “duty” (droit), “tariff” (tarif), and “tax” (taxe) in order to preserve these sometimes subtle distinctions. It should also be kept in mind that Bastiat, like many free-market economists of the period, distinguished between a tarif protecteur (protectionist tariff) and a tarif des douanes (fiscal tariff or duty). The former, which he opposed, was designed to provide a competitive advantage to a favored manufacturer at the expense of consumers. The latter, which he supported if it was at a low rate, like 5 percent, was purely for revenue-raising purposes.
Bastiat’s References to Laissez-Faire
“The Economists,” as mid-nineteenth-century political economists like Bastiat called themselves, embraced the physiocrats’ policy prescription of laissez-faire, which requires no translation. Where the term appears in this sense, of a recommended government policy, we have left it in the French. Sometimes Bastiat uses the word laissez (leave me free to do something) as a normal French verb but often with the intention of alluding to the free-market policy prescription; for example, laissez-les faire (let them do these things), laissez-le entrer (let it freely enter), and laissez-passer (leave them free to move about). Such occurrences are indicated in the footnotes.
Industry versus Plunder: The Plundered Classes, the Plundering Class, and the People 12
The word classe is used sixy-five times by Bastiat in Economic Sophisms and What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen in at least four different senses, and the frequency of its use increases markedly during and after the 1848 Revolution,
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as Bastiat responded to the socialist critique of French society. Bastiat had his own theory of class, but he also used the word “class” in the socialists’ sense when he was engaged in rebutting their ideas. We have indicated in the footnotes the various meanings of the word “class” and Bastiat’s use of them in order to keep these distinctions clear.
Bastiat uses the word classe in four different ways in the sophisms. First, he uses it as a neutral term to mean any group which has some aspect in common, such as les classes riches (the rich classes), la classe moyenne (the middle class), or la classe des propriétaires (the landowning class). His second way of using the word is in the socialist sense of class warfare. Bastiat was fighting two intellectual battles in the late 1840s, the first against the established elites who controlled the Chamber and who benefited from agricultural and manufacturing protection and subsidies, and the second against the rising socialist movement. As the socialist movement became more influential he began to confront its supporters more directly in debate and used the same expressions they did, such as l’aristocratie (the aristocracy), la bourgeoisie (the bourgeoisie), and la classe des travailleurs or la classe ouvrière (the working class) or les prolétaires (the proletarian class). “The people” (le peuple) was also becoming a more common phrase in socialist critiques of the French political system, and Bastiat uses this on occasion as well. He uses the socialists’ language of class and turns it around in order to show the errors in their thinking about the nature of property rights and the free market and how they have mistaken the true nature of exploitation and class in French society.
Bastiat’s third use of the word “class” is a political one, as in the expressions la classe électorale (the electoral class) and la classe des protégés (the protected class). By la classe électorale, Bastiat means the very restricted group of people (who had an “electoral monopoly,” as he called it) who were entitled to vote during the July Monarchy. On the eve of the 1848 Revolution, which reintroduced universal male suffrage, the electoral class numbered about 240,000 taxpayers.13 By la classe des protégés Bastiat meant the class of favored people given special privileges by state legislation such as tariff protection, industrial subsidies, or monopolies of a particular market. Another example of the use of “class” in a political sense is his discussion of the struggle between the aristocratic class and democracy in Britain in “Anglomania, Anglophobia”
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(ES3 14), where he provides a lengthy analysis of the political power held by the English aristocracy.
The fourth use of the word is part of Bastiat’s own theory of class, which had its origins in the theory of “industrialism” developed by two thinkers who influenced Bastiat considerably in his intellectual development: Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. In their theory the terms l’industrie (productive economic activity), les industrieux, les classes d’industrieux, and l’industriel (those engaged in productive economic activity) had very specific meanings which are not the same as their modern meanings. It would be wrong therefore to translate them always in the more narrow modern meaning of “heavy industry” or “manufacturing” or “the result of some industrial process.” Bastiat sometimes does use these words in the modern sense, but he also uses them in the broader sense of Dunoyer’s theory of industrialism, and we have indicated when Bastiat does this in the footnotes.
According to the theory of industrialism, the class of industriels played a very important role in the economy because there were only two means of acquiring wealth: by productive activity and voluntary exchanges in the free market (i.e., l’industrie, which included agriculture, trade, and factory production, as well as services) or by coercive means, what Bastiat called la spoliation (plunder), which included conquest, slavery, theft, taxation, subsidies, protection, and transfer payments. Anybody who acquired wealth through voluntary exchange and productive activities belonged to a class of people collectively called les industrieux, in contrast to those individuals or groups who acquired their wealth by force, coercion, conquest, slavery, or government privileges, or what Bastiat called la classe spoliatrice or les spoliateurs (the plundering class or the plunderers). The latter group was seen as “parasites”
