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Note on the Translation

Below we discuss some of the problems faced by translating a French work on political economy from the mid-nineteenth century into English. We begin with some general observations which are applicable to all the volumes in the Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat. These are followed by some remarks which are specific to the matters covered in this particular volume.

TRANSLATION MATTERS OF A GENERAL NATURE IN THE COLLECTED WORKS

Throughout the translation of this series, we have made a deliberate decision not to translate Bastiat’s French into modern, colloquial American English. Wherever possible we have tried to retain a flavor of the more florid, Latinate forms of expression which were common among the literate class in mid-nineteenth-century France. Bastiat liked long, flowing sentences, where idea followed upon idea in an apparently endless succession of dependent clauses. We have broken up many but not all of these thickets of expression for the sake of clarity. In those that remain, you, dear reader, will have to navigate.

Concerning the problematic issue of how to translate the French term la liberté—whether to use the more archaic-sounding English word “liberty” or the more modern word “freedom”—we have let the context have the final say. Bastiat was much involved with establishing a free-trade movement in France and to that end founded the Free Trade Association (L’Association pour la liberté des échanges) and its journal Le Libre-échange (Free Trade). In this context the word choice is clear: we must use the word “freedom,” because this is intimately linked to the idea of “free trade.” The English phrase “liberty of trade” would sound awkward. Another word is pouvoir, which we have variously translated as “power,” “government,” or “authority,” again depending on the context.

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A third example consists of the words économie politique and économiste. Throughout the eighteenth and for most of the nineteenth century, in both French and English, the term “political economy” was used to describe what we now call “economics.” Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as economics became more mathematical, the adjective “political” was dropped and not replaced. We have preferred to keep the term “political economy” both because it was still current when Bastiat was writing and because it better describes the state of the discipline which proudly mixed an interest in moral philosophy, history, and political theory with the main dish, which was economic analysis. In Bastiat’s day it was assumed that any économiste was a free-market economist, and so the noun needed no adjectival qualifier. Today one can be a free-market economist, a Marxist economist, a Keynesian economist, a mathematical economist, or an Austrian economist, to name a few. The qualifier before the noun is therefore quite important. This was not the case in Bastiat’s time.

A particularly difficult word to translate is l’industrie, as is its related term industriel. In some respects it is a “false friend,” as one is tempted to translate it as “industry” or “industrious” or “industrial,” but this would be wrong because these terms have the more narrow modern meaning of “heavy industry” or “manufacturing” or “the result of some industrial process.” The meaning in Bastiat’s time was both more general and more specific to a particular social and economic theory current in his day. The word “industry” had a specific meaning which was tied to a social and economic theory developed by Jean-Baptiste Say and his followers Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer in the 1810s and 1820s, as well as by other theorists such as the historian Augustin Thierry. According to these theorists, there were only two means of acquiring wealth, by productive activity and voluntary exchanges in the free market (i.e., industrie—which included agriculture, trade, factory production, services, and so on) or by coercive means (conquest, theft, taxation, subsidies, protection, transfer payments, or slavery). Anybody who acquired wealth through voluntary exchange and productive activities belonged to a class of people collectively called les industrieux, in contrast to those individuals or groups who acquired their wealth by force, coercion, conquest, slavery, or government privileges. The latter group was seen as a ruling class or as “parasites” who lived at the expense of les industrieux.

Bastiat uses the French term la spoliation (plunder) many times in his writings. Following from his view of “industry” as defined above, Bastiat believed that there is a distinction between two ways in which wealth can be acquired,

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either through peaceful and voluntary exchange (i.e., the free market) or by theft, conquest, and coercion (i.e., using the power of the state to tax, repossess, or grant special privileges). The latter he described as “plunder.”

In Bastiat’s time, the word “liberal” had the same meaning in France and in the English-speaking worlds of England and America. In the United States, however, the meaning of the word has shifted progressively toward the left of the political spectrum. A precise translation of the French word would be either “classical liberal” or “libertarian,” depending upon the context, and indeed Bastiat is considered to be a classical liberal by present-day conservatives and a libertarian by present-day libertarians. To avoid the resulting awkwardness, we have decided to keep the word “liberal,” with its nineteenth-century meaning, in the translations as well as the notes and the glossaries.

TRANSLATION MATTERS SPECIFIC TO THIS VOLUME

More specific to this volume are the words and phrases which will be discussed below. In many cases we have found it very helpful to consult the earlier translation of the first two series of Economic Sophisms made by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 1964.1 Although we sometimes disagreed with their interpretation, we have found their notes and comments very informative and useful. We acknowledge in the footnotes when we have made use of their earlier work.

Sophism

The very title economic “sophisms” poses a problem. Sophisme can be translated directly as “sophism,” preferred by the FEE translator in 1964, or as “fallacy,” which is the term preferred by nineteenth-century translators. We have sided with the FEE translator here in most instances. Bastiat uses the word in a couple of different senses. The term can refer to an obvious error in economic theory; that is, a “fallacy.” It can also refer to an argument that has an element of truth in which this partial truth is used speciously to make a case for one particular economic interest in a debate; that is, a piece of “sophistry.” In this latter sense, which makes up the bulk of this book, the word “sophism” is the preferred translation. The word “sophism” is also

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used to refer to Bastiat’s essays in which he attacks these false or sophistical economic ideas, as in “In the sophism about the broken window Bastiat argues.… ” We hope the meaning is clear from the context.

Humor

Bastiat enjoyed creating neologisms in order to poke fun at his adversaries. These words were sometimes based on Latin words and sometimes on French words. We have tried to find English equivalents which capture the flavor of Bastiat’s originals and his intent. These are explained in the footnotes. Some examples are the two towns “Stulta” and “Puera” (“Stupidville” and “Childishtown”); the tax collector “M. Lasouche” (Mr. Blockhead); “M. Prohibant” (Mr. Prohibitor or Mr. Prohibitionist); and the two lobby groups the “Sinistrists” (the Left Handers) and the “Dexterists” (the Right Handers).

Another weapon in Bastiat’s lexical armory was parody. He liked to take government institutions or documents, or well-known works of literature, and write a parody of their structure and content. A good example of this is his creation of a “Lower Council of Labor” (for ordinary shopkeepers and workers) to make fun of the protectionist and establishment “Superior Council of Commerce.” Another is his mimicking of government “circulars” (or memoranda) issued in the early months of the Second Republic. As a deputy and vice president of the Finance Committee of the Chamber he would have seen many of these, and he is thus able to mimic their style wonderfully. But the supreme example of his skill as a writer is his parody of Molière’s parody of seventeenth-century doctors. He takes Molière’s acerbic commentary on the primitive medical practices of his day and turns it into a very sharp critique of the behavior of customs officers of his own day. These pose some difficulty for a modern translator; indeed, much has to be explained in the footnotes in order for these parodies to make sense, as he wrote his parody in “dog Latin” for which we have used the excellent translation made by FEE.2

Of all the challenges facing a translator, one of the hardest is explaining puns, which are usually unique to a given language. Bastiat liked to pun, as the footnotes will make clear. A good example is from the sophism “The Right Hand and the Left Hand” (ES2 16) in which the king is asked to expand the amount of work in the country (and thus increase “prosperity”) by forbidding people to use their right hands. Bastiat has a field day creating a

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new lobby group, the “Dexterists,” who campaign for the freedom to work with one’s right hand, and the “Sinistrists,” who lobby for the use of the left hand only. In Bastiat’s mind, all this is so much “gaucherie.” Another good example is the case of the customs barrier across the Bidassoa River, on the border with Spain, which legally permits trade (which is taxed) “over the river,” but which drives the black market in untaxed goods “under the river” (or “underground” as it were).3 He also puns on the names of the streets on which various lobby groups were located. For example, the main protectionist lobby group, the Association for the Defense of National Employment, had its headquarters on the rue de Hautville (Highville Street) and thus is an open target for puns on whether or not they are in favor of high prices or low prices.

Some of Bastiat’s funniest moments come with his frequent wordplay, which is especially hard for a translator to convey. We have attempted to do this without intruding too much on the reader’s patience. England was seen as both a real military enemy because of its role in the war against the French Republic and then Napoléon’s Empire, and as an economic enemy because of its advocacy of free trade. England was known as “Perfidious Albion” (Deceitful England), and so to show the absurdity of this idea Bastiat invents the notion of “Perfidious Normandy,”4 which threatens Paris because it can produce butter more cheaply.

French word order is also used to make a political point. In French an adjective can precede a noun or follow it without too much difference in meaning. In English this makes no sense. Bastiat has a protagonist argue with an opponent of free trade (libre-échange) who despises the very idea because it is English, but quite likes the idea of being free to buy and sell things because this is an example of échange libre (trade which is free).5

Plain Speaking

Bastiat was torn between using a more lighthearted style which used humor, puns, wordplay, and satire to make his important economic and political points, or using a more serious and sober style. He made a name for himself as a witty and clever economic journalist when he wrote for the free trade journal Le Libre-échange, which he edited between 1846 and early 1848, in

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which he pilloried his opponents.6 However, as the political and economic situation got worse in France, he seemed unable to make up his mind which was the best strategy and flip-flopped on the matter. A good example of this self-doubt appears in “Theft by Subsidy” (ES2 9), in which he called for an “explosion of plain speaking” and the avoidance of circumlocutions and euphemisms when describing government policies and their impact on ordinary taxpayers and consumers. We have tried to capture his outrage, anger, and sense of injustice at protectionism and government interventionism in our choice of words by not toning down his language, which is at times very harsh, even extending to curses. In this sophism Bastiat uses a variety of words in his attempt to speak plainly and brutally. Here is a list with our preferred translation for each: dépouiller (to dispossess), spolier (to plunder), voler (to steal), piller (to loot or pillage), raviser (to ravish or rape), filouter (filching), and variants, such as le vol de grand chemin (highway robbery).

There was also some debate in Bastiat’s time about what to call the compulsory conscription of young men into the French Army. It was called requisition in 1793, conscription in 1798, and, more euphemistically, recrutement, during the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Bastiat rejected the euphemism used during the 1840s, preferring to see it as a violation of individual liberty, and hence conscription was his preferred term.

The theory of plunder which Bastiat was working on in the last couple of years of his life, most notably in “The Physiology of Plunder” (ES2 1) and “Two Moral Philosophies” (ES2 2), is a good example of the application of his more brutal style to an analysis of how the state goes about extracting the revenue it needs to carry out its activities. Bastiat described taxation as nothing less than “plunder” (la spoliation), where the more powerful, the plunderers (les spoliateurs), use force to seize the property of others (the plundered) in order to provide benefits for themselves or favored vested-interest groups like the aristocracy or the church, resulting in what he termed “aristocratic” or “theocratic plunder.” He uses a number of closely linked expressions to describe this process of plunder: the plunderers (les spoliateurs) use a combination of outright coercion (la force), fraud (la ruse), and deception (la duperie) to acquire resources from ordinary workers and consumers. They also resort to the use of misleading and deceptive arguments (sophismes) to deceive ordinary people, the dupes (les dupes), and to convince them that these actions are taken in their own interests and not those of the ruling elites. We have

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retained this language in our translation and have indicated in the footnotes when Bastiat is using this form of “plain speaking.”

At times Bastiat resorts to cursing, which we have not hesitated to translate as accurately as we can. His best-known example of this is his essay on money titled “Maudit argent!” (Damned Money!, 1849). Other examples include the expressions que Dieu maudisse (what God would damn, or God-damned),7 malédiction sur les machines! (a curse on machines!), le fesse-mathieu, which is a coarse expression for a usurer or moneylender,8 and où diable l’économie politique va-t-elle se nicher? (where the devil is political economy taking us?).

Opposition to Circumlocutions and Euphemisms

The use of the words “plunder” and “dupes” is not the only example of Bastiat’s attempts to avoid circumlocutions and euphemisms in describing government policies like taxation and tariff protection. In the sophism “The Tax Collector” (ES2 10), Bastiat makes a concerted effort to distinguish clearly between two types of “representation,” and we have tried to follow closely the specific set of terms he uses to describe each one. In the first type of representation, an individual contracts with another party, perhaps a business representative or a lawyer with power of attorney, to act on their behalf in a strictly limited manner. For this Bastiat uses phrases such as s’arranger directement (to engage in an exchange directly with a supplier of a good or service) or placer une procuration (to appoint someone to act with one’s power of attorney). He contrasts this with political représentation, where a voter (in the case of France before 1848 this was a very limited number of wealthy taxpayers—some 240,000 in a population of 36 million) could nommer pour député (nominate as one’s representative) or se faire représenter par quelqu’un (to be represented by somebody). The latter terminology is used by Mr. Blockhead (the tax collector) to try to persuade Jacques Bonhomme that his tax money is being wisely spent by responsible political representatives in the Chamber of Deputies. Jacques Bonhomme is very skeptical and is not persuaded. We have endeavored in the translation to bring out this very different understanding of the nature of “representation,” which was Bastiat’s intention in choosing this very specific terminology.

The language of war and battle was something that Bastiat wanted to banish

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from all discussion of economic activity. In “Domination through Work” (ES2 17), he argued that it is dangerous to use metaphors drawn from war and the military to describe economic phenomena, as the former acquire wealth for a nation through violence, destruction, and killing, while the latter do it by peaceful, voluntary, and mutually beneficial exchange. He rejected such terms as invasion (of foreign goods), flood, tribute (to describe payment for foreign goods), domination (through trade), fight on equal terms, conquer, crush, be defeated (by one’s trade rivals), and machines that kill off work. He uses these military expressions throughout the sophisms in order to rebut the premises which lie behind their popular usage in the press and in debates in the Chamber, and we have followed his practice. His conclusion was unmistakable: “Bannissons de l’économie politique toutes ces expressions empruntées au vocabulaire des batailles: Lutter à armes égales, vaincre, écraser, étouffer, être battu, invasion, tribut” (Let us banish from political economy all the following expressions borrowed from a military vocabulary: to fight on equal terms, to conquer, to crush, to stifle, to be defeated, invasion, or tribute).9

Use of the Familiar “Tu” Form

As Bastiat oscillated between his more popular and humorous style of writing and his more serious and plain-speaking style, he would use quite different language. In the more lighthearted vein he would have ordinary people espouse opposing views in his constructed dialogues or plays. Sometimes he would use the familiar form of the word “you,” which in French is tu. For example, in his appeal to the workers on the streets of Paris in the early days of the 1848 Revolution, he would speak to them using tu, which we indicate in the footnotes.10

A quite interesting example is provided by the conversations between Robinson Crusoe and Friday on their island. Bastiat may have invented “Crusoe economics” as a way of making complex economic problems more understandable to ordinary readers. In their conversations about how to organize their time and labor most productively on the island, Bastiat has them address each other using tu, which suggests a certain friendship and equal status between the two, which is surprising given the historical context of European colonialism.11 We indicate in the footnotes when tu is being used.

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It is also interesting to note that Bastiat put the free trade arguments in the mouth of the native Friday and the protectionist ideas in the mouth of the European Crusoe.

Technical Economic Terms

In a work which relies so heavily on economic theory it is not surprising to come across many technical economic terms. We have tried to translate these terms consistently, but it is not always possible. A good example is the word travail, which could be translated in several ways, all of which are accurate in their own way. For example, one could use the following English words, depending on the context: “work,” “labor,” “production,” and “employment.” If there is any ambiguity, we indicate this in the footnotes.

Sometimes Bastiat makes a distinction between, on the one hand, les protectionnistes (the advocates of protectionism) and le régime de la protection (the protectionist system), and on the other hand, les prohibitionistes (the advocates of prohibiting imports) and le régime prohibitif (the system of import prohibition). He does this because French tariff policy was a mixture of numerous categories of goods the importation of which was prohibited outright in order to protect French manufacturers, and a complex system of tariffs which raised the price of imported goods to raise money for the French state as well as to give some economic advantage (protection) to French manufacturers. We have preserved Bastiat’s distinction wherever possible because it reveals the three-way split which existed in the French debate about tariffs between the free traders like Bastiat, the hard-core prohibitionists, and the protectionists.

Bastiat uses several terms for “money,” which can be confusing at times: numéraire (cash or gold coins), papier monnaie (paper money or notes), and argent (money). Bastiat makes a very clear distinction between paper money and cash (numéraire), as the European economies of his day were based upon the gold standard, and paper money was often viewed with suspicion as a result of the hyperinflation of the “assignat” paper currency during the Revolution.

There are also several different uses of the word prix (price) which need to be made clear. There is le prix d’achat (the purchase price), le prix de vente (the sale price), le prix courant (the market price), le prix de revient (the cost price), and le prix rémunérateur (the price which covers one’s costs). Very important for Bastiat is the idea of le prix débattu (the freely negotiated price), which is essential for the operation of the free market. This is a price which

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is agreed upon by two voluntary participants in an exchange who “debate” or negotiate a price which is acceptable to both parties. Both are equally free to accept or to refuse the price by concluding the bargain or walking away. Also crucial to his argument is the idea that there is a difference between real economic wealth and the accounting device (the money price) used to measure it, and thus the prix absolus (nominal or money price) of a good or service is not a true measure of the amount of wealth in a society.

Bastiat uses the terms droit, tarif, and taxe, sometimes interchangeably and sometimes reserving different meanings to each one. We have tried to be consistent in translating them as “duty” (droit), “tariff” (tarif), and “tax” (taxe) in order to preserve these sometimes subtle distinctions. It should also be kept in mind that Bastiat, like many free-market economists of the period, distinguished between a tarif protecteur (protectionist tariff) and a tarif des douanes (fiscal tariff or duty). The former, which he opposed, was designed to provide a competitive advantage to a favored manufacturer at the expense of consumers. The latter, which he supported if it was at a low rate, like 5 percent, was purely for revenue-raising purposes.

Bastiat’s References to Laissez-Faire

“The Economists,” as mid-nineteenth-century political economists like Bastiat called themselves, embraced the physiocrats’ policy prescription of laissez-faire, which requires no translation. Where the term appears in this sense, of a recommended government policy, we have left it in the French. Sometimes Bastiat uses the word laissez (leave me free to do something) as a normal French verb but often with the intention of alluding to the free-market policy prescription; for example, laissez-les faire (let them do these things), laissez-le entrer (let it freely enter), and laissez-passer (leave them free to move about). Such occurrences are indicated in the footnotes.

Industry versus Plunder: The Plundered Classes, the Plundering Class, and the People 12

The word classe is used sixy-five times by Bastiat in Economic Sophisms and What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen in at least four different senses, and the frequency of its use increases markedly during and after the 1848 Revolution,

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as Bastiat responded to the socialist critique of French society. Bastiat had his own theory of class, but he also used the word “class” in the socialists’ sense when he was engaged in rebutting their ideas. We have indicated in the footnotes the various meanings of the word “class” and Bastiat’s use of them in order to keep these distinctions clear.

Bastiat uses the word classe in four different ways in the sophisms. First, he uses it as a neutral term to mean any group which has some aspect in common, such as les classes riches (the rich classes), la classe moyenne (the middle class), or la classe des propriétaires (the landowning class). His second way of using the word is in the socialist sense of class warfare. Bastiat was fighting two intellectual battles in the late 1840s, the first against the established elites who controlled the Chamber and who benefited from agricultural and manufacturing protection and subsidies, and the second against the rising socialist movement. As the socialist movement became more influential he began to confront its supporters more directly in debate and used the same expressions they did, such as l’aristocratie (the aristocracy), la bourgeoisie (the bourgeoisie), and la classe des travailleurs or la classe ouvrière (the working class) or les prolétaires (the proletarian class). “The people” (le peuple) was also becoming a more common phrase in socialist critiques of the French political system, and Bastiat uses this on occasion as well. He uses the socialists’ language of class and turns it around in order to show the errors in their thinking about the nature of property rights and the free market and how they have mistaken the true nature of exploitation and class in French society.

Bastiat’s third use of the word “class” is a political one, as in the expressions la classe électorale (the electoral class) and la classe des protégés (the protected class). By la classe électorale, Bastiat means the very restricted group of people (who had an “electoral monopoly,” as he called it) who were entitled to vote during the July Monarchy. On the eve of the 1848 Revolution, which reintroduced universal male suffrage, the electoral class numbered about 240,000 taxpayers.13 By la classe des protégés Bastiat meant the class of favored people given special privileges by state legislation such as tariff protection, industrial subsidies, or monopolies of a particular market. Another example of the use of “class” in a political sense is his discussion of the struggle between the aristocratic class and democracy in Britain in “Anglomania, Anglophobia”

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(ES3 14), where he provides a lengthy analysis of the political power held by the English aristocracy.

The fourth use of the word is part of Bastiat’s own theory of class, which had its origins in the theory of “industrialism” developed by two thinkers who influenced Bastiat considerably in his intellectual development: Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. In their theory the terms l’industrie (productive economic activity), les industrieux, les classes d’industrieux, and l’industriel (those engaged in productive economic activity) had very specific meanings which are not the same as their modern meanings. It would be wrong therefore to translate them always in the more narrow modern meaning of “heavy industry” or “manufacturing” or “the result of some industrial process.” Bastiat sometimes does use these words in the modern sense, but he also uses them in the broader sense of Dunoyer’s theory of industrialism, and we have indicated when Bastiat does this in the footnotes.

According to the theory of industrialism, the class of industriels played a very important role in the economy because there were only two means of acquiring wealth: by productive activity and voluntary exchanges in the free market (i.e., l’industrie, which included agriculture, trade, and factory production, as well as services) or by coercive means, what Bastiat called la spoliation (plunder), which included conquest, slavery, theft, taxation, subsidies, protection, and transfer payments. Anybody who acquired wealth through voluntary exchange and productive activities belonged to a class of people collectively called les industrieux, in contrast to those individuals or groups who acquired their wealth by force, coercion, conquest, slavery, or government privileges, or what Bastiat called la classe spoliatrice or les spoliateurs (the plundering class or the plunderers). The latter group was seen as “parasites” who lived at the expense of les industrieux (the productive class) or les classes spoliées (the plundered classes).

To give an idea of the importance Bastiat placed on his theory of plunder, the following frequencies of use should provide a clue: there are 55 instances of the term la spoliation (plunder), 12 of parasite, 10 of le spoliateur (the plunderer), 5 of spoliée (plundered), and 1 of spoliatrice (plunderous).

Bastiat’s Use of the Socialist Terms “Organization” and “Association”

As with the word classe, there are two other words which were widely used by socialists in the 1840s (such as Louis Blanc and Charles Fourier) and which became closely associated with their criticism of the free market and

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their demands for government regulation and even ownership of the means of production, namely l’organisation (organization of labor) and l’association (cooperative living and working arrangements). Bastiat frequently uses these words in the socialist sense, often with a capital O or A, in order to mock or criticize them, pointing out that supporters of the free market are also firm believers in “organization” and “association,” but only if they result from voluntary actions by individuals and are not the result of government coercion and legislation. A good example of this is Bastiat’s disparaging term la grande organization,14 by which he means the folly of believing that one individual or government could centrally plan or organize an entire economy, as many socialists of his day believed. We have indicated in the footnotes when Bastiat is using these words in this socialist sense.

The Difference between “Droit à” and “Droit de”

A third important socialist idea which emerged during the 1840s with which Bastiat had to contend was the idea of le droit au travail (the right to a job).15 In English one could well translate it as “the right to work” or “the right to a job,” which would miss the subtle distinction between the two. This idea of le droit au travail (the right to a job) came to the fore in the early days of the 1848 Revolution when the provisional government established a government unemployment relief program known as the National Workshops. It was based on the ideas of socialists like Louis Blanc and was an attempt by the government to guarantee every able-bodied French male a job paid for by the taxpayers. Bastiat warned about its economic unviability, and it eventually collapsed in June 1848, sparking rioting in Paris. In French, there is a distinction between le droit à quelque chose (the right to [have] something) and le droit de quelque chose (the right to [do] something). The Economists, including Bastiat, believed in le droit du travail (the right to engage in work) and not the socialist formulation. We indicate in the footnotes when this distinction is an issue.

Interestingly, Bastiat extends this distinction to the area of profits with his formulation of le droit au profit (the right to a [guaranteed] profit) and le droit de profiter (the right to seek profits). The protectionists wanted the former, meaning that the government should guarantee them a profitable

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return on their investments, whereas the Economists wanted the latter, that businesses should take their chances on the free market and make profits only if they adequately satisfied consumer demand.

Bastiat’s Translation of Adam Smith

In “Theft by Subsidy” (ES2 9), Bastiat translates a passage from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations on the tendency of businessmen to engage in conspiracies against the public whenever they get together.16 We have taken the unusual step of retranslating Bastiat’s translation back into English in order to show how much it differed from the original (which can be found in a footnote). Bastiat was often rather cavalier in his quoting from other texts, doing it from memory in many cases and sometimes getting it wrong or conflating different passages into one (as seems to have happened with the Smith quotation). We have checked as many of Bastiat’s quotations against the original texts as we could and indicate in the footnotes where he strays. Sometimes he is in error, other times he slightly changes the text to better make his point, for example, by changing the name of the king in order to bring the passage up to date.

French Names, Weights, Measures, and Currency; Use of English Words

We have retained the use of French names of people (like Jacques and Jean) instead of translating them into their English equivalents (Jack and John) because we wanted to keep a French flavor to the translation and believed that this would be readily understood by readers. We have also retained the use of French terms for land area (arpent), weight (kilogram), and currency (sou), as it seemed quite artificial to convert them into English or American terms. We have explained what they mean in the footnotes and several entries in the glossary.

Finally, now and again Bastiat uses English words in his essays, such as “cheapness,” “go on,” “meeting,” “free-trader,” “drawback,” and “budget.” We have indicated where this occurs in the footnotes.