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Louis Joseph Plumart, Marquis d'Angeul, 1722-1777
French aristocrat and Enlightenment liberal.
Biographical details are scanty. Plumart d'Angeul (sometimes given as Plumard de Dangeul) is said to be have been born in Le Mans and was a relative of Veron de Forbonnais. He is was a commissioner or maitre des comptes in the royal household, a member of the Academy of Stockholm and perhaps even served in the French army in some capacity during the Seven Years' War. He is referred inconsistently as Sieur or Marquis de Plumart d'Anguel.
Plumart d'Angeul is said by several authors (notably Dupont de Nemours) to have been an early disciple the prominent free-trade liberal intendant Vincent de Gournay. In 1752, Plumart d'Angeul translated a 1740 treatise by Spanish Mercantilist Berarndo de Ulloa on the decline in Spanish manufactures, believing it contained valuable policy lessons (and warnings) for the French State. He was subsequently directed by Gournay towards the works of Josiah Tucker.
Plumart d'Angeul's principal claim to fame is his famous 1754 Remarques, under the fabricated pseudonym of "Sir John Nickolls". [the treatise also claimed itself to be a second edition, published in Leyden, thus making the French censors imagine a first edition had already passed the review process and overlook it - a common tactic among 18th C. French authors.]
The Remarques was a comparative study of the conditions of the French and English economies (and economic policy). Plumart d'Anguel pointed out that despite France's greater resources, Britain exhibited greater prosperity and growth, and that this was due to the absence of restrictions on trade, and called for the establishment of a similar regime of natural liberty in France - both economic and, more boldly, political. The French clergy, military and nobility are declared to be institutions inimical to French prosperity, that have maintained the country (and the state) impoverished.
Plumart d'Angeul's treatise was in effect an adaptation of Josiah Tucker's Brief Essay of 1750 (title and first seven paragraphs were directly plagiarized and the rest of the text was a free adaptation, bolstering Tucker's arguments by filling in more details of French institutions and policy). Curiously, d'Angeul's book was translated into English that same year, prompting confusion with Tucker's own.
The principal effect of Plumart d'Anguel's treatise was to make Tucker's ideas and arguments accessible to French Enlightenment readers. It was particularly influential on bringing François Quesnay into economics, the latter having drawn upon it when composing his articles in 1756-7 for the Encyclopèdie.
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