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JEAN LE ROND D’ALEMBERT, 1717–83 (1,309 articles). Born illegitimately to the salon hostess Madame de Tencin and the military officer Chevalier Destouches, d’Alembert had a brilliant mathematical mind and became a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences in 1742 at the age of twenty-four. While Diderot sought out the convivial atmosphere of the cafés, d’Alembert, with his high voice and attention to fashion detail, preferred the quieter and more controlled ambience of the salons. He collaborated with Diderot on the early volumes of the Encyclopédie, and his major contribution was the Preliminary Discourse, a lengthy treatise (forty-eight thousand words) that has sometimes been seen as the single most lucid and competent summary of European Enlightenment thought in the entire eighteenth century. The controversy with Rousseau and the authorities over the article GENEVA (1758–59) took its toll on him, however, and he disengaged from the project shortly thereafter. In this volume, d’Alembert’s contribution, in addition to GENEVA itself, is the eulogy for the recently deceased Montesquieu, which reveals his skill at editorial selection and concise summation and which provides one picture of how Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws tended to be viewed in the years after its appearance.
ANTOINE GASPARD BOUCHER D’ARGIS, 1708–91 (4,268 articles). Born in Paris, where his father was a lawyer, Boucher d’Argis was admitted to practice
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in 1727. He wrote several works on rural and property law from 1738 to 1749 and in 1753 received the post of councillor in the sovereign court of Dombes, which conferred hereditary nobility. That same year he became the legal expert on the Encyclopédie, subsequently becoming one of its most prolific contributors. Though not known for particularly reformist proclivities, he continued to write for Diderot’s work even after it was officially banned in 1758, and he participated in the case of the widow Calas after the execution of her husband in the 1760s. In 1767 he became an alderman of Paris, but afterwards, little is known about his activities, including during the early part of the French Revolution. His son was an active royalist in the Revolution and was executed in 1794.
NICOLAS ANTOINE BOULANGER, 1722–59 (5 articles). Born in Paris into a mercantile family, he was sent to the Jansenist collège (secondary school) of Beauvais for his studies, where he was more interested in mathematics and architecture than in Latin. He worked in the army as a private engineer during the War of the Austrian Succession (1743–44) and entered the ponts et chaussées (roads and bridges) corps in 1745. He began to correspond with naturalists such as Buffon and to develop non-Biblical theories of early history. Named subengineer in 1749, he was assigned to the Paris district in 1751. He stopped working due to illness in 1758, when he moved in with his friend Helvétius, whose recently published De l’Esprit had triggered controversy. The few published writings in his lifetime included much of the long Encyclopédie article DÉLUGE (Flood) as well as the article CORVÉE (Forced labor), which called for reform rather than abolition of the practice, but which still displeased his superiors.
His ambitious unfinished manuscript on the early universal flood and how it shaped human religions and political systems up to modern times was published as Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental [Research on the origins of Oriental despotism] (1761) and Antiquité dévoilée par ses usages [Antiquity unmasked by its customs] (1765) by d’Holbach and his friends, who were impressed with Boulanger’s thought. The latter part was translated into English by John Wilkes, a popular journalist and political figure. The philosophe André Morellet said of him, “Despite all his interest in his (often extravagant) discoveries, he was not at all put off by those who
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did not accept them; he was the first to laugh at a risky or foolish conjecture he had made the night before, and when he communicated with me, he found it good that I laughed my head off at it.”1
ETIENNE NOËL DAMILAVILLE, 1723–68 (3 articles). He was born, it seems, in a Norman village. His brother was a noble controller of the vingtième (5 percent) tax, but the rest of his family life is obscure. He received an uneven education before joining the army during the War of the Austrian Succession as a member of the king’s elite cavalry (the gardes du corps). Afterward followed a stint as a lawyer in Paris, leading to a position with the controller-general of finance. By 1755 he was a high official (premier commis) administering the vingtième tax himself, giving him insight into the subject of the long article that concludes our volume.
Around 1760 he came to know both Diderot and Voltaire and used his government position to advance their interests—distributing their illegal works, arranging mail service, supplying them with information. Both philosophes came to regard his talents highly. Voltaire called him a “soul of bronze—equally tender and solid for his friends,” and he became a trusted member of Diderot’s social circle. With d’Alembert gone by that time, moreover, Damilaville’s eager contributions to the Encyclopédie, both as writer and as editorial collaborator, were most welcome. On the other hand, d’Holbach, referring to some of his more speculative opinions, called him “philosophy’s flycatcher,” and Grimm saw him as dyspeptic and socially awkward. He had a reputation for religious heterodoxy, which may have affected his career advancement. For example, he was said to have attempted to convert Voltaire to atheism. Aside from his two long and important articles for the dictionary, Damilaville wrote little, though he was apparently preparing to do more writing when he retired in 1768, shortly before falling ill and dying at the age of forty-five.
ALEXANDRE DELEYRE, 1726–97 (2 articles). Born in Portets, near Bordeaux, into a longtime local family of merchants and professionals, Deleyre entered the Jesuit order at age fourteen, failed to find contentment,
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and left both the order and his faith at age twenty-two. After legal studies, he pursued a literary career with the help of his fellow Bordelais Montesquieu, moving to Paris in 1750, where he met Rousseau and, through him, Diderot and d’Alembert. In the 1750s, he edited anthologies of the works of Francis Bacon and of Montesquieu and contributed anonymously to a running polemic against the anti-Encyclopedist journalist Elie Fréron. He then pursued work in journalism, first with the Journal étranger (as editor), after with the Journal encyclopédique and the Supplément aux journaux des savants et de Trévoux—all of them open to religious and political reform.
He left journalism in 1760 and spent eight years as a tutor to the prince of Parma, where his supervisor was Etienne de Bonnot, abbé de Condillac. The latter rejected the English history textbook that he had asked Deleyre to prepare, because of its excessively favorable treatment of Cromwell. Returning to Paris in 1768, Deleyre wrote a work on northern European geography and exploration and contributed most of volume 7, book 19, of abbé Raynal’s History of the two Indies (1774). In that work, he defended a flexible approach toward political regimes with a marked preference for English limited government. In a 1772 will, moreover, he wrote that “France … has fallen because of moral corruption under the yoke of despotism.”
During the Revolution, he was the mayor of Portets for a time and helped draft the cahier for the Third Estate at the electoral assembly of the Bordeaux region. He was elected to the Convention from the Gironde in 1792 and voted for the king’s execution in January 1793. Educational reform was his most frequent area of interest. When the Convention was assaulted by rioters on March 20, 1795, he reportedly said, “I am a representative of the people, I must die at my post.”
DENIS DIDEROT, 1713–84 (5,394 articles). Born in Langres, in eastern France, into a cutler’s family, Diderot at first took his religion very seriously, attending perhaps both a Jansenist and a Jesuit secondary school in Paris. When a religious life did not work out, he drifted toward a bohemian life of letters in Paris. In the 1740s, he lived mainly by translating several works, the most important of which was the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (1745), a seminal work of sentimentalist
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moral theory cited several times in the present collection. By this time, he had developed a heterodox philosophy that included elements of fatalism, materialism, and at least deism if not atheism. One of his works, Letter on the Blind (1749), earned him a stay in the prison at Vincennes, where he was famously visited by Rousseau.2 His selection as the editor of the Encyclopédie in 1747, which brought an end to his near-poverty, probably grew out of his previous associations with the publishers in his translation work.
Diderot quickly became the driving force behind the project as writer, editor, propagandist, and recruiter of collaborators. There formed around him a whole social network that contemporaries called the “encyclopedic party,” and that helped make the Encyclopédie unique among eighteenth-century reference works. Also unique was the extensive interest shown by Diderot and his collaborators in the world of the arts and trades, reflected in the eleven volumes of plates that appeared from 1761 to 1772, as well as in some of the articles on economic policy anthologized here.
In between his editorial duties, Diderot wrote voluminously, including plays in a new tradition of drame bourgeois or “bourgeois drama” that he promoted—Le Fils naturel [The natural son] (1757) and Le Père de famille [The father of the family] (1758); regular art criticism in Les Salons for Grimm’s journal Correspondance littéraire starting around 1760; and numerous works that he chose not to publish in his lifetime, three of which have done the most to secure his later reputation as a writer, namely, Rameau’s Nephew (begun in 1761), D’Alembert’s Dream (1769), and Supplement to the voyage of Bougainville (1772). He received a pension from the Russian Empress Catherine II the Great, who bought his library in 1765. He supported the Physiocrats for a long time but sided with Galiani in the latter’s polemic with them in 1769 and afterward.
After the last plates for the Encyclopédie were published in 1772, Diderot traveled in 1773 to Russia, where he advised Empress Catherine on her new reform program. “There is no true sovereign except the nation,” he wrote; “there can be no true legislator except the people.” Catherine
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was unhappy and may have destroyed her copy of the work.3 During the American Revolution, Diderot supported the colonists. It is as difficult to summarize Diderot’s political views as it is that of the dictionary that he edited, partly because his public statements were clearly affected by the experience of imprisonment and by his running tension with French religious and political authorities. These problems are both reflected and generated by important articles of his such as POLITICAL AUTHORITY and NATURAL RIGHT in this volume.
JOACHIM FAIGUET DE VILLENEUVE, 1703–80? (15 articles). Not much is known about his early life except that he hailed from a Breton family of businessmen and was himself a pig merchant in Paris for a period of time. In 1748 he was director of a boarding school in Paris, and in 1756 he bought a government office as treasurer in the finance bureau in Châlons, a position that offered the prospect of nobility. It is not clear how he came to write for the Encyclopédie; he does not appear to have been a friend of either Diderot or d’Alembert. It would seem that his collaboration ended with the government’s suppression of the project in early 1759, since his last article, USURY, although appearing in 1765, was composed in 1758.
In the following decade, he took his writing interests to a different arena, writing the following five books: Discours d’un bon citoyen sur les moyens de multiplier les forces de l’Etat et d’augmenter la population [Discourse of a good citizen on the means of multiplying the strength of the State and increasing population] (1760); L’Econome politique [The political Steward] (1763); Légitimité de l’usure légale [Legitimacy of legal usury] (1770); Mémoires politiques sur la conduite des finances et sur d’autres objets intéressans [Political memoirs on the management of finances and other interesting topics] (1770); and L’Utile emploi des religieux et des communalistes, ou Mémoire politique à l’avantage des habitans de la Campagne [The Useful employment of the religious and villagers, or political Memoir for the benefit of the inhabitants of the Countryside] (1770).
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All of these works contain the forthright approach to the reform of French social, economic, and political institutions—redolent of the long reformist career of the abbé St. Pierre (1658–1743)—that are found in the two articles reproduced in this anthology, MASTERSHIPS and SAVINGS.
FRANÇOIS VÉRON DE FORBONNAIS, 1722–1800 (10 articles). From an old and distinguished cloth-making family in Le Mans, Forbonnais (or Fortbonnais) attended a Jansenist secondary school in Paris before joining the family business, traveling to Spain, Italy, and elsewhere as an agent. In his twenties he pursued a career in letters, writing poems, tragedies, and in 1750 a critical study of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. When Vincent de Gournay, another distinguished merchant, became royal intendant of commerce in 1751, Forbonnais became a member of his circle and found his niche, becoming perhaps the leading writer on economic matters in the 1750s before the Physiocrats emerged to prominence. He was the author of Considérations sur les finances d’Espagne [Considerations on Spanish finances] (1753); Recherches et considerations sur les finances de France depuis l’année 1595 jusqu’à l’année 1721 [Studies and considerations on French finances from the year 1595 to the year 1721] (1758), which was widely cited; and Elémens du commerce [Elements of commerce] (1754), partly drawn from his Encyclopédie articles, which was one of the leading statements of economic theory available at that time.4
For unknown reasons, Forbonnais stopped writing for the Encyclopédie with volume 5, in 1755, and in the late 1750s, he had a falling out with Diderot and Grimm. By then he was flirting with a career in government service, becoming an important adviser to the controller-general Silhouette in 1759 and achieving a reputation for both probity and prickliness. But in the end, he did more in the coming years as an informal adviser than as the holder of specific offices. After 1759 he mainly returned to business, investing in glass manufacture and becoming a gentleman farmer. In 1762 he established a model farm based on renunciation of his personal tax exemption and imposition of taxes on the basis of land possession rather
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than income, thereby illustrating a reformist theme discussed in Quesnay’s article CEREALS and in Damilaville’s FIVE PERCENT TAX in this volume. In 1763 he purchased a judgeship in the Parlement of Metz, which led to nobility after twenty years.
Forbonnais was active during the Revolution as a Third Estate deputy, as a supporter of reforms in government finances, and as a royalist until the summer of 1792, at which time he retreated from the scene, calling Robespierre’s republic a “sanguinary tyranny.” He died in March 1800, optimistic at the prospect of Napoleon’s rule.
PAUL-HENRI THIRY, BARON D’HOLBACH, 1723–89 (414 articles). Born Paul Heinrich Dietrich, d’Holbach moved from his native Palatinate, a region close to Lorraine and influenced by French culture, to Paris at the age of twelve. In the 1740s, he studied law in Leiden, returning to Paris to become a lawyer (avocat) and a naturalized French subject in 1749. He received family property in 1750, was conferred the title of baron of the Holy Roman Empire in 1753 upon the death of his uncle, and bought a nobility-conferring office, secrétaire du roi, in 1755; he also had real estate in France and Holland. By the end of the 1750s, he was a wealthy man.
In the middle of that decade, he began to host his salon, one of the most brilliant and sought-after in Paris, which met every Thursday and Sunday. Regulars included Diderot, Grimm, Morellet, Saint-Lambert, Chastellux, Galiani, Helvétius, and Raynal. Less-regular participants included d’Alembert, Boulanger, Damilaville, Jaucourt, Rousseau, Turgot, and many others.
His intellectual interests were complex and wide-ranging. His translations of German chemical work into French helped prepare the way for Lavoisier’s breakthroughs in the 1770s. Probably recruited by his friend Diderot into the Encyclopédie, he wrote voluminously, though often anonymously, for it, accelerating his production after the government crackdown of March 1759. At first he wrote on science and German culture, then increasingly on political and religious matters. From 1766 until 1776, he poured out a number of anonymous or pseudonymous works on these controversial topics: Le Christianisme dévoilé [Christianity unmasked] (1766); Théologie portative [Portable theology] (1767); La Contagion sacrée
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[The Sacred contagion] (1768); Système de la nature (1769); La Politique naturelle (1773); Système sociale (1773); Ethocratie, ou le gouvernement fondé sur la morale [Ethocracy: or Government founded on morality] (1776), and La Morale universelle [Universal morality] (1776). These works, on which he received help from Naigeon and perhaps others, marked him as a man of bold, indeed even atheistic views and wide-ranging criticism of current political regimes, leavened by a certain conservative skepticism about the alternatives. His article REPRESENTATIVES, included in this volume, is one of the most important sustained statements of political theory in our compendium.
His writing stopped in 1776; it is not clear what he thought of the American Revolution or the French pre-Revolution. He died just months before the French Revolution began in earnest.
LOUIS, CHEVALIER DE JAUCOURT, 1704–80 (17,288 articles). Author of no fewer than forty-three of the eighty-one articles translated here, Louis de Jaucourt was born in Paris on September 26, 1704, into a family of traditional sword nobility of Huguenot (Calvinist) background. Jaucourt’s father had officially reconverted to Catholicism but secretly raised his family in the old faith. Though there is some disagreement about how active the family’s Protestant professions were by the eighteenth century, there is little doubt that the Jaucourts were well connected in international Protestant circles and that Louis’s education profited from these connections. At the age of eight, he was sent to Geneva, where he stayed with an aunt and a Protestant uncle and received an education at the Academy of Geneva (1719) and at the University of Geneva. By this time, he could speak several modern European languages.
In 1727 he went to London, where his sister had married John Carmichael, a Scottish gentleman. It seems that he briefly entertained the prospect of becoming a Calvinist pastor, but his parents counseled strongly against it, and his religious fervor seems to have waned precipitously while in the eclectic and skeptical ambience of his English friends. Most of the rest of his life he appears to have spent as a kind of deist. One of his best friends from Geneva, Theodore Tronchin, joined him both in abandoning plans for a pastoral vocation and in deciding to study medicine
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instead, a profession almost as disappointing to the Jaucourt family as the ministry.
To pursue this education he went to Holland, studying in Leiden under the great Hermann Boerhaave, whom he praised in some of his Encyclopédie articles. While there, he also fell in with some of the remarkable community of émigré Protestant scholars of the period. When the Bibliothèque raisonnée was founded in 1728, he collaborated on it with Jean Barbeyrac, the editor and translator of the natural-law classics of Pufendorf and Grotius, and remained associated with the project until 1740. In 1734, under his assumed academic name L. de Neufville, he appended a well-regarded biography of Leibniz to his edition of Essais de Théodicée [Essays on Theodicy]. He was already on cordial terms with Voltaire in the 1730s and was elected to the Academy of Bordeaux in 1747, thanks partly to Montesquieu’s influence as well as to his own scientific experiments. By the end of his travels through Geneva, England, and Holland, he returned to France with a worldview not of a nobleman from Catholic France but of a Protestant, middle-class burgher with an indelible sympathy for the cause of civil and political liberty that each of these places had in its own way featured.
His great ambition in this pre-Encyclopedic phase was to make an international name as the leading expert on medical science in Europe. Toward this end, he worked for the better part of ten years, starting around 1740, on the compilation of a six-volume lexicon medicum universale. In June 1750 he concluded the arrangements with his Amsterdam publisher. But when he sent the only copy of the manuscript to the publisher by boat, sometime in late 1750 or early 1751, the boat capsized and the manuscript was lost forever.
Looking for alternatives after losing a decade of labor, he noticed the advertisement for contributors to the new project of Diderot and d’Alembert, sent in a few sample articles to Le Breton, the publisher, and the collaboration, announced in the third volume (1753), was begun. Although he began with topics close to his specialties in botany and natural history, he gradually expanded his range, using his Dutch gazetteer experience to turn out competent if not sparkling entries on every kind of topic.
A respected scholar with elections to the royal academies of Bordeaux, Sweden, and Berlin, and to London’s Royal Society, Jaucourt was viewed
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by some as a mere compiler. Others, such as Voltaire, admired his work, and it is doubtful that the Encyclopédie had a more stalwart friend or defender. Jaucourt sold his house (to the publisher) to pay for his small staff of secretaries. In a letter to Sophie Volland, Diderot wrote of Jaucourt that “this man has for six or seven years been in the middle of four or five secretaries—reading, dictating, working thirteen to fourteen hours a day, and that situation has not yet bored him.”5 When Diderot announced to him the impending conclusion of the work, Jaucourt is reported to have responded with a long face of dismay. It is at least clear that he wrote nothing after the completion of the project in 1765 until his death, in 1780, after having turned out nearly a quarter of all the articles—most of them signed, and totaling nearly five million words—in Diderot’s dictionary.
ABBÉ EDME-FRANÇOIS MALLET, 1713–55 (1,925 articles). Born in Melun to a family of pewterers, Mallet received early instruction from a local priest before being sent to a Barnabite secondary school in Montargis. He then pursued his studies in Paris, completing his doctorate in theology in 1742. There followed stints as a tutor (1742–44) and as a parish priest in a small church near Melun. During this period, he wrote two works, Principes pour la lecture des poëtes [Principles for reading the poets] (1745) and Essai sur l’étude des belles-lettres [Essay on the study of literature] (1747), which promote classical French aesthetic theory and express skepticism about Locke’s sensationalist philosophy of knowledge as well as about the influence of English letters more generally.
In 1751 he was appointed to a chair of theology at the University of Paris, where he wrote two works on oratory, a work on Dutch diplomacy under Louis XIV and a translation of an Italian work on the French religious wars—in which he defended the assassination of the Duke of Guise but condemned the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
The nearly two thousand articles that he wrote for the Encyclopédie in the few years of collaboration allotted to him before his untimely death included large numbers on commerce (five hundred or so, mostly compilations
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from earlier reference works) and even more on theology and religion, where his erudition was more fruitful. His views are difficult to summarize. He affirmed the existence of Hell, sided with the Jesuits against the Jansenists over the bull Unigenitus (in an article suppressed by Malesherbes, the book trade director), and defended the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV (in an unpublished draft of the article PACIFICATION). On the other hand, he denied rational proof of eternal punishment, opposed the Sorbonne’s condemnation of the controversial thesis by abbé de Prades (which precipitated the first government censorship of the Encyclopédie), and won the trust of d’Alembert, whose eulogy in volume 6 depicts him as a fine scholar, a mild and modest man, and an “enemy of persecution.”
FRANÇOIS QUESNAY, 1694–1774 (3 articles). The founder of the Physiocratic school of economists, Quesnay was born into a farming family in Normandy. Marrying a grocer’s daughter in 1717, he practiced as a master surgeon in Mantes from 1718 to 1734, where he became a civic leader. The Duke of Villeroy and the first surgeon to the king, La Peyronie, learned about him and brought him to Paris, making him Villeroy’s personal surgeon and heaping honors and offices on him. He became an active participant in the surgeons’ continuing attempt to enhance their status relative to the physicians. One of his patients, the Countess d’Estrades, recommended him to Madame de Pompadour, who made him a resident royal physician in 1749. From there, he became a trusted confidant at court as well as a helpful agent for Diderot, Voltaire, Marmontel, and other men of letters in their dealings with the government.
His chief importance lay in his development of the school of theory that came to be known as Physiocracy. From 1758 until about 1770, he was the acknowledged master of this school, combining the most robust free-market theorizing of the period with a resolutely non-Montesquieuan political model the school called “legal despotism.” The Physiocrats were supported by the vigorous and concerted writing and journalistic efforts of such talented figures as Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de La Rivière, abbé Nicolas Baudeau, and the Marquis de Mirabeau. Diderot himself generally supported the school through the 1760s,
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when the leading agenda item was complete freedom for the grain trade, a proposal partially adopted by the French government in 1763 and 1764. By the time of abbé Galiani’s stinging parody of the rigid dogmatism and universalism of the school in his Dialogues on the grain trade (1770), with its appeal for a more Montesquieuan flexibility in treating the different liberty-interests of different regimes, Diderot, like many others, had had second thoughts about the Physiocrats.
For the Encyclopédie, Quesnay wrote an important anonymous article, EVIDENCE, as well as two lengthy entries on economic topics, CEREALS and FERMIERS (Farmers), which were early precursors of his Physiocratic doctrine, appearing as they did a few years before the formation of the school. By the time of the government crackdown in 1759, Quesnay, who had always been cautious about his association with the Encyclopedists because of his court position, was asking d’Alembert to withdraw his manuscripts for HOMMES (Men), IMPÔTS (Taxes), and INTÉRÉT DE L’ARGENT (Interest Rates), and his collaboration ceased. But many of the articles that appeared on economic topics in the Encyclopédie bore the imprint of his influence, including Damilaville’s FIVE PERCENT TAX.
JEAN-FRANÇOIS, MARQUIS DE SAINT-LAMBERT, 1716–1803 (17 articles). The future poet was born in Nancy into a poor and obscure noble family. After a Jesuit education, he served in the infantry and for the king of Poland. Stationed at Lunéville, he became acquainted with Voltaire, fell in love with the latter’s mistress Emilie du Châtelet, and fathered a child with her. When she died in childbirth (1749), he gained notoriety and moved to Paris, where his poetry began to attract attention. Voltaire described his now-obscure Les Saisons, an idyll to rural life that urged noblemen to return to their country estates and revitalize the countryside, as “the only work in our age that will make it into posterity.” In the Seven Years’ War, he became a colonel in the French army, though an attack of paralysis led him to leave the military for good in 1758 and instead pursue a life of letters.
He was friendly with the Encyclopédie circle, including Diderot, Mme. Geoffrin, d’Holbach, Grimm, Mme. d’Epinay, and, especially, Mme. d’Houdetot, with whom he had an affair celebrated for its dignity and fidelity until his death nearly half a century later. His association with the
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Encyclopédie project began in 1756 with volume 6, and he wrote at least sixteen articles, all anonymous, most on political and philosophical subjects. His essay LUXURY, which was published as a separate tract immediately after its appearance in Diderot’s dictionary (1765), became one of the most influential statements on that popular theme before the Revolution.6
His plays and especially his highly scientific and philosophic poetry led to his selection by the Académie Française in 1770, where he became a force. His Catéchisme universel, a lengthy work on the origins and nature of human morality, won the grand prize for morale at the Institut de France in 1810. Saint-Lambert died in 1803.
ANNE-ROBERT-JACQUES TURGOT, Baron of Aulne, 1727–81 (5 articles). Turgot hailed from one of France’s oldest and most prestigious families. Born in Paris, he distinguished himself at the Sorbonne and became one of the leading protegés of the liberal controller-general Vincent de Gournay. His first publication, a translation of part of the Englishman Josiah Tucker’s Reflections on the expediency of a law for the naturalization of foreign Protestants (1755), grew out of that association. In the early 1750s he drafted a number of highly original works on the historical evolution of the human mind and on economic development among other topics, and soon acquired the reputation as a polymath genius. By 1755 he was collaborating with the Encyclopédie.
His articles, all anonymous, were few but important. His essay ETYMOLOGY is a sophisticated application of recent epistemology to the question of the origins and history of language. EXISTENCE is a searching critique of Cartesian metaphysics, and EXPANSIBILITY is a precursor of Lavoisier’s work on the chemical properties of air. He also wrote FOIRE (Fairs), on the marketplaces of old Europe. He dissociated himself from Diderot’s project in the aftermath of the controversy of 1758 that led to its temporary suppression, perhaps for a variety of reasons: a prudent regard for his government position, a concern that the enterprise was becoming dogmatic,
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and the defection of d’Alembert, who had been his main friend and contact there.
In 1761, he became provincial intendant for Limousin, where he remained for thirteen years, developing a reputation for reformist vigor and effectiveness in an undynamic province. During that period, he became the leading exponent of free trade in grain, though his relations with the Physiocratic school usually associated with that policy were cool. He also found time for some writing, including his Reflections on the formation and distribution of wealth (1766), a short tract that was one of the most far-reaching works in economic theory before Adam Smith.7 Smith himself knew and greatly respected Turgot’s work.
In 1774 he was elevated to controller-general of France, where he attempted to implement on a national scale the reforms he had reflected on, described, and attempted locally for many years. His far-reaching changes such as the abolition of the guilds and of corvée (compulsory labor) on public roads met with a backlash, and he was disgraced and forced from office nineteen months later in early 1776, after which he mainly ceased both his writing and his government service. One exception is a long 1778 letter he wrote to the English philosopher Richard Price in which he praised the new American republic as “the hope of the human race.” “It should give the example,” he continued, “of political freedom, religious freedom, and freedom of commerce and industry. The asylum that it offers to the oppressed of all nations should console the earth.”8 But he also warned against the lack of centralization in the Articles of Confederation and against the comfort given to vested interests in the system of checks and balances built into each of the states, prompting John Adams to write three volumes in refutation a few years later (A Defence of the Constitutions of Government, 1787–88). He died in 1781.
