Laissez-faire and the French Revolution

 

 

 

WU WEI/ LAISSEZ-FAIRE/ ACTING BY NOT ACTING: THE ROOT CAUSE OF THE 1789 FRENCH REVOLUTION?

By Owen Adams

The driving force of the French Revolution was the menu peuple – the ordinary people, mostly wage-earners, unemployed and women¹: driven by hunger² to take up arms against the pacte de famine³ in a leaderless, directionless l’anarchie spontanée⁴. Far from being a baseless conspiracy theory, the suspicion rich people were trying to starve the poor was based on the realities⁵ of seeing wagons filled with unaffordable supplies⁶. Really the menu peuple were pawns in a liberal utopian fantasy put into practice by a Palace de Versailles cabal known as the Physiocrats (“law of nature”)⁷, or simply Les Économistes. Their blue-skies thinking was aimed at bringing maximum benefit by the least effort, esoterically based around laissez faire, laissez passer (let it be, let it pass), the French translation of the Taoist concept wu-wei.⁸ But it did anything but.

The map-image above shows the swirl of influences surrounding the Physiocrats. Wu wei, in its original political context of c. 200BCE means “no personal prejudice [public or private will] interferes with the universal Tao [law of nature], and that no desires and obsessions lead the true course… astray,” seeped into France via Jesuit missionaries in Amsterdam and Antwerp, the 17^thcentury cradle of capitalism.¹

François Quesnay, Louis XV’s physician who became an economist in his sixties, concocted his doctrine of Physiocracy which his powerful friends signed up to in the 1750s². It was tailor-made for the “enlightened monarch”, just as Confucius applied wu-wei to “Oriental despotism”³ . Quesnay earned the epithet ‘Confucius of Europe’⁴, and proved a major influence on Adam Smith, who visited him in Paris in 1765 and would have dedicated Wealth of Nations to him had Quesnay not died in 1774⁵.

If trade was allowed to flow unimpeded by barriers, this “acting by not acting” reform would result in a harmonious flowering of society, Quesnay proposed⁶. But freeing trade didn’t result in universal happiness⁷, as the Physiocrats predicted in 1767⁸, Bernard Mandeville before 1732⁹, and Adam Smith in 1776¹⁰: instead it enriched merchants and speculators and caused exploitation and starvation when prices outstripped wages¹¹.

Narratives emerged that were more relative to the people: “The princes, linked in a common bond with the nobility, the clergy and all of the parlements… [have] bought up all the corn in the kingdom; their abominable intentions are to prevent the meeting of the Estates-General by spreading famine throughout France and to make part of the people die of hunger and the rest rise up against the king,” a typical pamphlet claimed in May 1789¹².

Laissez-faire capitalism was attempted three times before 1789 in France, curtailed each time after causing famine and unrest. The need for a money-making fix after the Seven Years War saw the Physiocrats first invited to put their ideas into practice. Two edicts deregulating grain in 1763 and 1764 were rescinded in 1770 following dearths and riots¹³. In 1771 Simon Linguet – whose horrific account of Bastille prison life helped provoke its storming¹⁴ – raged at physiocrat Nicolas Baudeau’s utopian overtures in the midst of the reforms: “Shut your magic lantern… What mortal is stupid enough to pride themselves on ever seeing such illusions come true?”¹⁵ Linguet described the grain merchant as a “vampire”¹⁶ while the ploughman “is increasingly pressured to sell himself at a discount.”¹⁷

In 1774, physiocrat sympathiser¹⁸ Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot was put in charge of finances when Louis XVI became king, and immediately pushed through laissez-faire deregulation, including dissolution of guilds and disbanding the grain police¹⁹. Turgot’s radical reforms culminated in the first mass disturbance that might be called revolutionary, due to its volume and longevity: the Flour War of spring 1775: 123 riots throughout the Paris Basin over 17 days, put down by 25,000 troops²⁰. Turgot was out of a job by the following year and the second laissez-faire experiment abandoned.²¹

Key physiocrat Dupont de Nemours, who went on to support the revolution, helped spendthrift finance chief Calonne²² in the third laissez-faire misadventure: the 1786 Anglo-French Eden Agreement, where Pitt the Younger seized his chance to debut Adam Smith’s theories²³. They worked well for Josiah Wedgwood and the Bordeaux wine trade, and ruinously for the French textiles²⁴ and manufacturing²⁵. This was on top of two disastrous harvests and a snowballing movement of rural wandering plunderers driven by hunger²⁶.

People torching châteaux, emptying bakers, wagons and grain stores and redistributing or selling bread at the taxation populaire²⁷ often declared they were doing so in the king’s name²⁸. They felt the king owed them, and their actions were just²⁹ – the argument of the “moral economy of the crowd” by E. P. Thompson, Margairaz and Minard³⁰ remains more persuasive than the opposite “political economy” or “rationalist” argument (that everyone’s behaviour, losing as well as winning laissez-faire players, is motivated by individual self-interest). With the change from guaranteed subsistence in exchange to having to sell labour by the hour, existence became precarious³¹. The “natural law” of laissez-faire exacerbated nature’s crop-wrecking Icelandic volcanic ash³² or hailstone storms³³, with supply and demand distortions, and grain taken out of circulation through speculating, hoarding and mass buying.

The push that came to the revolutionary shove at the Bastille began when Louis XVI combined the bourgeoisie with the commons in the Third Estate³⁴, also prompting a jockeying of position by deputies who considered the right to property as trumping the right to existence³⁵. One pamphlet from April 1789 expressed the anger of the menu peuple for being shut out of the political process: “Everything is sacrificed to the owners of property… it is revoltingly unjust that they alone should be consulted and that disdainful rejection should be the lot of those humble and useful people through whose labours they are able to live without needing to work.”³⁶

Nevertheless, the political will and the popular will together broke down the door on July 14, 1789, and the anarchic tumult was confirmed as revolution to the king, making it official… but yet it was only a staging-post on the long, amorphous struggle of the un-enfranchised to keep their heads above water as free-trade sharks circled for their next feeding frenzy. The revolution that belonged to the menu peuple would begin in September 1792, but last only until March 1794³⁷.

1032 words

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1 Ibid, pp. 4-6.

2Williams, ‘Introduction’ in The Enlightenment (1999), p. 51.

3 Gerlach, Wu-Wei In Europe (2005), pp. 17-18.

4 Ibid.

5 E. Royston Pike, Human Documents of Adam Smith’s Time (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), p. 22; Williams, ‘Introduction’ in The Enlightenment (1999), p. 53.

6 Gerlach, Wu-Wei In Europe (2005), pp. 16-18.

7 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (1962) (London: Abacus, 1977), pp. 287-290.

8Williams, The Enlightenment (1999), pp. 409-10.

9 Ibid.

10 Sir Alexander Gray, Adam Smith (London: The Historical Association, 1948), p. 16; Peter Nolan, Adam Smith and the Contradictions of the Free Market ( USA: Challenge, vol. 46, no. 3, May-June 2003), pp. 120-1.

11 Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789 (1932), p. 40; Andress, French Society in Revolution 1789-1799 (1999), pp. 17-18.

12 Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789 (1932), p. 75.

13 Schama, Citizens (1989), p. 81.

14Ibid, pp. 393-4.

15 Florence Magnot-Oglivy, A Body Without A Voice: A Literary Approach to Linguet’s Opposition to the Physiocrats over the Free Trade in Grain (The European Journal of Economic Thought, vol. 22, no. 3, 2015), p. 425.

16 Ibid, pp. 439

17 Ibid, p. 427.

18 Dupuy, The Physiocrats’ Concept of Labour (2013). Turgot was not a member of the Physiocrats, but supported most of the thinking, pp. 700-1.

19 Andress, French Society in Revolution 1789-1799 (1999), pp. 16-17.

20 Cynthia Bouton, The Flour War: Gender, Class, and Community in Late Ancient Regime French Society. (United States: Penn State University Press, 1983)

21 Andress, French Society in Revolution 1789-1799 (1999), p. xxxii.

22Schama, Citizens (1989), p. 232.

23 Bowden, Witt, The English Manufacturers and the Commercial Treaty of 1786 with France (Oxford: The American Historical Review, vol. 25, no. 1, October 1919), pp. 32-33.

24 Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789 (1932), pp. 12-13.

25 Jeremy J. Whiteman, Trade and the Regeneration of France, 1789-91: Liberalism, Protectionism and the Commercial Policy of the National Constituent Assembly (London: European History Quarterly, Vol. 31 (2), 2001), pp. 174-5.

26 Rudé, ‘Introduction’ in Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789 (1973), p. x.

27 George Rudé, The Crowd In The French Revolution (1959) (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 24.

28 Rudé, ‘Introduction’ in Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789 (1973), p. x; Schama, Citizens (1999), p. 324.

29Schama, Citizens (1999), p. 292

30 Magnot-Oglivy, A Body Without A Voice (2015), p. 423.

31 McPhee: A Social History of France 1780-1880 (1992), pp. 16-18.

32C.A. Wood, ‘The climatic effects of the 1783 Laki eruption’ in C. R. Harrington (ed.), The Year Without a Summer? (Ottawa (Canada): Canadian Museum of Nature, 1992), pp. 58–77.

33 Andress, French Society in Revolution 1789-1799 (1999), p. 51.

34 Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (1962), pp. 81-82.

35 Magnot-Oglivy, A Body Without A Voice (2015), p. 441.

36 McPhee: A Social History of France 1780-1880 (1992), p. 35.

37 Ibid, p. 64.

1 Peter McPhee: A Social History of France 1780-1880 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 14-15.

2 George Lefebvre, (trans. New Left Books), The Great Fear of 1789 (1932) (New York [US]: Schocken Books, 1973), p. 118

3 David Andress, French Society in Revolution 1789-1799 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 17.

4 George Rudé, ‘Introduction’ in Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789 (1973), p. x.eorge Rudé, ‘Introduction’ in Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789 (1973), p. x.

5 Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789 (1932), p. 24

6 Andress, French Society in Revolution 1789-1799 (1999), p. 52.

7 Simon Schama, Citizens (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 81.

8 Christian Gerlach, Wu-Wei In Europe: A Study of Eurasian Economic Thought (London School of Economics, MSc Global History Dissertation/ Working Paper no. 12/05, March 2005), p. 8.

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