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Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, 1773-1842.
Swiss historian, early socialist and great rival of Jean-Baptiste Say and the French Liberal School.
Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi was born in Geneva, Switzerland, but history straddles the neighboring countries. The Sismondis were originally a patrician family in Medieval Pisa, Italy, but took refuge in France in the early 16th C. as a result of the Guelf-Ghibelline conflicts. They established themselves in the southern Dauphiné region, where their surname was gallicized to "Simonde". Won over to Protestant Calvinism, the Sismondes became just another family of French Huguenots. They had to flee again after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and established themselves in the Republic of Geneva, rising to a high position in the city's hierarchy. It was apparently Sismondi's father who, after a sojourn in Italy c.1785, decided to revive the Italian spelling of his noble ancestry, and created the double surname "Simonde de Sismondi".
After completing school by the age of sixteen, Sismondi was dispatched to Lyons to apprentice as a clerk in a commercial house. He was caught there by the French Revolution, and tumults in Lyons in 1792 forced him to return to Geneva. The outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars, and the spread of revolutionary sentiment overturned the Genevan government in December 1792, and the aristocratic Sismondis were arrested and their property seized by the new populist authorities. Upon their release in 1793, the Sismondis promptly emigrated to England. The next year, after selling their remaining family properties in Geneva, the Sismondis emigrated to Tuscany, setting up a family farm near Pescia. Sismondi's experiences here led to his first work (1801).
Sismondi returned to Geneva (now annexed to France) in 1800, and took up a job as secretary in the chamber of commerce . His first economics treatise on Richesse Commerciale (1803), compared the systems of the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. At this time, Sismondi was an enthusiast of Smith, and defended his economics and liberal policy recommendations. Sismondi's treatise competed with the simultaneous one of Jean-Baptiste Say in popularizing Adam Smith's ideas in France.
Sismondi's big project, begun in 1796 while in Italy, was a comparative examination of political constitutions (a work he never quite finished). It was in pursuit of this topic that Sismondi began to closely research the history of the Medieval Italian republics. The outcome was his monumental Histoire des republiques italiennes, the first and probably still unsurpassed history of the Medieval republics from the 11th C. communal era to the 16th C. renaissance. The first of its sixteen volumes came out in 1807, and would only be completed in 1818. He interrupted it in the middle to compose a set of essays on Italian and southern European literature (1813), the outcome of a set of lectures he gave in Geneva in 1811. During this period, Sismondi was a frequent guest in the household of Jacques Necker, and became a close friend of his daughter, the Madame de Staël, accompanying her on travels to Italy in 1805 and Germany in 1807. This raised a few eyebrows, but the attraction seemed merely intellectual. His exposition of southern European literature complemented her own work on northern German one. He also got involved in the agitation over slavery, writing two notable tracts against the slave trade in 1814, and another in 1817.
After the collapse of Napoleon's empire in 1814, Geneva recovered her independence, and Sismondi was elected a member of the sovereign council of the reborn republic. Sismondi happened to be in Paris in early 1815 when Napoleon's returned. Sismondi wrote a series of articles for the Moniteur, uncharacteristically defending the cause of the emperor he had previously despised.. But Benjamin Constant's "Acte Additionnel" seemed to be sufficient guarantee, and he vigorously defended it. A grateful Napoleon offered Sismondi the Legion of Honor, but he turned it down. (Sismondi would accept it from Louis Philippe in 1841).
In 1815, Simonde de Sismondi wrote his article "Political Economy" for Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopaedia. It is here that Sismondi first articulates his original thesis on economics, including labor problems and overproduction. His visit to England at the height of its post-war depression impressed him greatly. Upon his return, Sismondi elaborated on these ideas in his main economics work, Nouveaux principes (1819, and further expanded in the second edition 1827).
Simonde de Sismondi was no friend of the rising capitalist industrial system, which he viewed as being detrimental to the interests of the poor and particularly prone to crisis brought about by an insufficient general demand for goods. His underconsumption thesis was shared by Robert Malthus, and sparked off the General Glut Controversy of the 1820s where their theories were pitted against those of Say, Ricardo and the Classicals. Say and Sismondi squared off in 1824 in the pages of the Revue Encyclopédique.
Sismondi was only half-able to follow the debate, his attentions now divided.. He finally got married in 1819 , and thereafter began working on his new grand multi-volume historical work, on the history of the French, beginning with Clovis's Franks. The first volume was published in 1821, and continued for the next two decades. He turned down chairs in economics and history in France, preferring to focus on writing. He produced some derivative works, e.g. helping Lardner put out an abridgement of his Italian history in 1821 (and putting out a French version himself), he gave a series of lectures on early Medieval history in Geneva in 1821 (later published in 1835, in Lardner's Cyclopedia), he put out a historical novel (Julia Severa) in 1822.
In 1836, Sismondi finally put out his study on political constitutions begun four decades earlier. Shortly after, Sismondi put out a series of economic essay 1837-38, going over some of the details of his economic ideas. But the history of France was occupying most of his labors. Having taken it down to the end of 16th C., exhausted, Sismondi decided to wind up the work, and put out an abridgement in 1839, planning only to summarize the remaining two centuries. But he was pressed by his friends to continue in the same detail as he had before, so Sismondi returned to his pen and plodded on. He finished the 29th volume, which ended in 1789, only a few weeks before his death in 1842. The 30th volume, completing the history of France after 1789, was written by someone else.
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