Early French economics, my lecture notes

Early French moralists, some of them Jansenists:

Pierre Nicole, La Rochefoucauld, etc. Invisible hand, idea of “mechanism”

Pascal, Pensées, 1669, probability and expected value

17^th century mercantilism, Louis XIV, Colbert

18^th century, Galiani (Italian), French debates on bread and bread prices

1748, Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, analysis of commerce

Diderot, Voltaire, Encyclopedia, rationalism

Beccaria (Italian), law and economics

Physiocrats (they bore me)

Turgot, 1767, liberal principles, stresses accumulation

Condorcet – stresses growth and progress

1789 French Revolution, Napoleon

Much of French economic thought ends up libertarian, e.g., the Ideologues

J.B. Say, Say’s Law, 1803, passim

French pick up on different strands in Smith

Fourier, Proudhon, and Utopian Socialism

1830 — Bourbon Restoration

1838 – Augustin Cournot

1844 – Jules Dupuit, French engineering tradition

Bastiat and free market tradition

1860 — Anglo-French Free Trade Treaty

1873 — Leon Walras, marginalism and general equilibrium theory