Pierre le Pesant, Sieur de Boisguilbert, 1646-1714

Pierre le Pesant, Sieur de Boisguilbert (or Boisguillebert) was an early Enlightenment economist, the first of the great continental liberals. Boisguilbert was a radical opponent of Colbertisme, and an avid proponent of laissez-faire and minimalist government.  He has been  regarded as the father of the Physiocrats and grandfather of the French Liberal School. 

Boisguilbert was born in Rouen, Normandy, to a small noble family and was educated by Jesuits.  Although the eldest son, he was disinherited in favor of his younger brother, leaving him with meager means.  This situation was rectified in 1677 when Boisguilbert married a wealthy heiress.  He went to pursue a career as  magistrate, becoming a judge in Montivillier (near Le Havre) in 1678.  In 1690, he purchased the office of superintendant of the baillage of Rouen, and in 1699 the Lieutenant-General of the police of the city.  He was temporarily discharged and exiled to Brives, as his treatises displeased the controller-general of France.  He resumed his offices in 1707, and passed it on to his children at his death in 1714.

His professional duties brought him in contact with the poor in Normandy, an impoverished area of France.  Boisguilbert was naturally curious about what made certain regions wealthier and others poorer. His first work Detail de la France, first appeared anonymously in 1695, and went through several subsequent editions.  He examined the economic poverty of France and the dire straits of monarchical finances. He concluded that the France of Louis XIV was, basically, a mismanaged country. Its people, he argued, were miserable and only subdued by violence which, Boisguilbert predicted, was a state of affairs that could not last for very long.  The government, he argued, should withdraw as much as possible from the workings of the economy. In general, Colbertiste policies, however well-intentioned, were misguided.  Furthermore, when they unbalanced this natural order, they were pernicious.  He believed the situation could be recovered by lifting artificial restrictions on exchange, labor and production.  Among his more specific policy recommendations was an overhaul and equalization of the land-and-property tax (taille), the suppression of internal customs and tariffs (aides), the liberalization of the grain commerce inside France, the substitution of foreign export duties with import duties and abstention from Affaires extraordinaires.  

The Detail did not garner much reaction.  It is said that Boisguilbert (who had been in correspondence with the French ministries since 1691) at one point managed to secure a hearing with the French finance minister, Louis Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain,. In a prelude to his remarks, Boisguilbert warned that the minister might find him mad at first, but that he would soon realize he was right. Pontchartrain burst out laughing and replied he would stick with the first impression, and turned his back on him.  (It is possible this meeting was before the Detail).

Boisguilbert tried again in his 1705/06 Factum, reiterating his thesis and policy proposals more clearly, this time also promoting the abolition of all aides and customs duties, and the institutionalization of a dixieme (10% tax on revenues) to make up for shortfalls.  This time he caught public attention, and Boisguilbert was invited to an audience with Michel Chamillart, the controller-general of France, who listened to him favorably, but considered his proposals impractical given the ongoing urgencies of the War of Spanish Succession.

Sebastian de Vauban, who had a very similar ideas as Boisguilbert, put out his tract on the Dixime Royal in early 1707.  It met the immediate disfavor of the King Louis XIV, sinking any prospect of reform.  In response to the Vauban debacle and the impasse of his own ideas, Boisguilbert naively put out his hot-headed Supplement, savaging the French ministers for their cowardice.  This earned him a sharp but brief rebuke - the French government proscribed his books and exiled him for six months to Auvergne.  By the intervention of friends, Boisguilbert managed to return to Rouen and restored his offices in late 1707.

In the 1707 edition of the Détail de la France, Boisguilbert appended several unpublished tracts, notably his Traité de la nature, and the Causes de la rareté de l'argent and his theoretical masterpiece, the Dissertation. 

The Dissertation seeks to lay out a theoretical basis for the causes of wealth. As his measure of wealth, Boisguilbert took not cash nor the riches of the local aristocrats, but rather the "well-being" or "satisfaction" of all subjects.   This, he said, arises merely from production, giving each of the classes of society (farmers, artisans, merchants, etc.) a productive role in the creation of wealth.  In this respect, he seems closer to Adam Smith (1776) than the Physiocrats, although he does launch themes the latter would pick up: e.g. that agriculture is the most important kind of productive activity, that landlords form an important consumption base, etc.  He outlines on the importance of circulation - trade, income - notes that poverty can arise by the disruption or distortion of such flows.  He blames excessive, uneven taxation and distortionary prices as the principal causes of economic crisis. 

Boisguilbert was keen to show that "money" was not the source of wealth, but only circulated it.  Eager to knock it off its pedestal, Boisguilbert argued that money was not characterized by its "metal" content (gold and silver), but rather was a mere artifice of social convention, and thus its value rises and falls accordingly.  Consequently, the Mercantilist obsession with the accumulation of money was misplaced.  He advocated the substitution of metallic money with paper-money, partly because he felt that undermine the "tyranny" of money.

Boisguilbert was among the first to come up with analogy of the economy as an organism.  In Hobbesian fashion, he believed it was in the nature of men to always seek their own profit, even at the expense of others.  However, anticipating Montesquieu, he argued that their contrasting forces would ultimately end up in "natural harmony".  Nature alone, he argued, was a sufficient policeman of the social and economic order.  

Boisguilbert's works were a great influence upon Quesnay, the Physiocrats and other Enlightenment economists.  Interestingly, Karl Marx claimed a great intellectual debt to Boisguilbert.

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