Profile Major Works Resources

Claude Dupin, 1686-1769.

French tax-farmer and Neo-Colbertiste. 

Claude Dupin was of bourgeois background, the son of a tax-collector  (receveur des tailles) in the modest town of Châteauroux  (central Loire valley). Claude Dupin was educated in the royal college of Blois, and went on to enlist in the army, rising to the rank of captain.  In 1714, Dupin inherited his father's post as receveur of Châteauroux.  Through his association with the powerful Parisian banker Samuel Bernard, whom he met in 1721, Claude Dupin rose swiftly in the French financial community, becoming receveur général of taxes in Alsace and Metz in 1724 and then entered the upper echelons as fermier général in 1726 and secretaire du roi in 1728.  Dupin would be eventually ennobled in 1749.  

In 1722, still in the early days of his ascent, Claude Dupin married Samuel Bernard's illegitimate daughter, the storied Louise de Fontaine (Madame Dupin).  They soon purchased a fabulous estate at Chenonceaux on the Loire, where Madame Dupin regularly hosted some of the giants of the Enlightenment, including Montesquieu, Voltaire, Buffon, Diderot, Condillac and, most famously, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who was also engaged as her secretary and tutor to their son, from 1745 to 1751).  Dupin himself had courteous relationships with the philosophes, even being asked to author an article in the Encyclopedie on the salt industry.

Claude Dupin penned his first economics piece in 1742, a memoir on the liberalization of the grain trade for the minister Philibert Orry, inspired by Boisguilbert and, more importantly, his own observations.  But Dupin remained a Neo-Colbertiste, shying away from laissez-faire formula of his contemporaries Gournay and Herbert, advocating instead only a moderate and controlled liberalization. Dupin was persuaded to publish his memoir only in 1748.

In the meantime, Dupin expanded upon his reflections in his major work, Oeconomiques (1745).  Privately printed in Karlsruhe to be distributed among friends and family, only about a dozen or so copies of this massive three-volume work ever existed   Nonetheless the substance of these volumes were printed under the different titles in 1747.  Great chunks of the work also appeared as entries in the finance volumes of the Encyclopédie Méthodique, which appeared in 1783-87 - the editor Rousselot de Surgy admitting (p.10) he relied greatly on Dupin's volumes.

Dupin leapt into the public debate over Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, authoring two polemical treatises (1749, 1752) assaulting the work with particular violence.  Dupin was particularly incensed by Montesquieu's criticisms of the tax-farming system, of which Dupin himself was a leading specimen.   At the request of the Madame de Pompadour, Dupin suppressed the edition, with the result that only a few copies circulated.  Nonetheless, the loud debate over Montesqueieu's work in the Dupin household is said to have inspired Rousseau towards the development of his own system of political philosophy.


 

  

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Major Works of Claude Dupin

  • Memoire sur le bleds, avec un projet d'édit pour maintenir en tout tems la valeur des grains à un prix convenable au vendeur et à l'acheteur, wr. 1742, pub. 1748.
  • Oeconomiques, 1745, three vols [1913 ed. v.1, v.2]
  • Mémoires sur les domaines, le commerce, droits d'entrées et de sorties du royaume, droits de péages, les grands chemins, la banque de Law et le crédit public, sur les annuités our rentes tournantes, les blés, les mendiants et enfants troués, les décimes du clergé, le célibat, les rentes et redevances dues par les gens de mainmorte; sur le tabac, les aides et gabelles deFranec, avec un observation sur le royaume d'Angleterre et l'établlissement d'un bureau économique, Tome I. 1747 [same as 1745 Oeconomiques v.1]
  • Définition et idée générale de l'office avec un abrégé historique du gouvernement ecclésiastique, civil, militaire, finance et commerce de la province d'Alsace, Tome II, 1747 [same as 1745 Oeconomiques v.2]
  • Mémoire général sur la levée des impositions et autres droits, l'origine et les progrès de la taille et autres impositions sous les Romains, l'impôt sous le rois capétiens, celle imposée sous le règne des Valois, avec l'examen des différents moyens proposés pour réformer la taille, un état des revenus et la dépense du roi pendant l'année 1724, et une table du prix de matières d'or et d'argent pendant le règne de chaque roi, Tome III, 1747. [same as 1745 Oeconomiques v.2]
  • Réflexions sur l'Esprit des lois, 1749
  • Observations sur un intitulé de l'Esprit des lois, 1752, v.1, v.2, v.3
  • La manière de perfectionner les voitures, 1753 (sometimes attributed to his son).
  • [Attrib.] "Salines", 1765, in Diderot and d'Alembert, Encyclopedie, v.14  [bk]
 
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Resources on Claude Dupin

 
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