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Frédéric Bastiat, 1801-1850
French liberal journalist, economist and wit.
Claude Frédéric Bastiat originated from Bayonne, in the Pyrenées region
of southern France, the son of local merchant. Frédéric was orphaned at
1810 and raised under the guardianship of an aunt. In 1818, Bastiat left
school without completing his formal education and went to work for his
uncle in Bayonne. He got interested in the issue of trade in relation to
the business, and at some early point, Bastiat read the works of Jean-Baptiste
Say and Adam Smith. In
1825, Bastiat inherited a landed estate in nearby Mugron from his
grandfather. Although not finding much success as a farmer, Bastiat was
an enthusiast for new agricultural technology. Bastiat struck up a
critical friendship with a neighboring farmer, Felix Coudroy, of
socialist inclinations, who would become Bastiat's debating partner and
study companion in political economy for the next two decades. In 1831,
Bastiat married Marie Hiard, but apparently the marriage was not a
success and the two became estranged shortly after.
After the July Revolution of 1830, Bastiat put his toe into politics. He became a justice of the peace (juge de paix) in the district of Mugron in 1831 and was elected member of the local council, the Conseil général des Landes, in 1832. But his attempts to get elected to the national Council of Deputies did not succeed.
Bastiat's first writings were a series of pamphlets (one in 1834, three more in the early 1840s), mainly pertinent to taxes and the local economy - notably the wine trade. In the early 1840s, Bastiat became a subscriber to the English paper, The Globe & Traveller, through which he became acquainted with the Anti-Corn Law League, the vigorous British free trade movement of Richard Cobden and John Bright.
In 1844, Bastiat submitted his first article to the Journal des economistes, the major French economics journal of the day, which drew considerable attention. Encouraged, Bastiat took to writing a book on Cobden and the British free trade movement, as well as more articles for the Journal, including the series "Sophismes économiques" in 1845, which contained the famous "Petition of the Candlemakers" and numerous other satirical pieces that have since become classics of economic commentary. The toast of the free trade economists, Bastiat visited Paris in May, 1845 and proceeded to London and Manchester in July 1845, returning to Mugron in October.
Frédéric Bastiat moved to Paris permanently in 1846. Later that year, Bastiat and other members of the Société d'économie politique, founded the Paris branch of the French free trade association (Association pour la Liberté des Échanges, orig. est. in Bordeaux in February 1846), serving as its general secretary and editor of its journal, Libre Échange. Through his writings and activities, Bastiat agitated against the protectionist tendencies of the Orleanist July Monarchy and in particular Adolphe Thiers. The "people's revolution" of February 1848 prompted a change of direction. Bastiat launched a new paper, the République française, and put out of series of pamphlets directed against the socialists. Significant among them was Bastiat's Capital et Rente (1849) ruminating over the nature of capital and interest, which had been assailed by socialists. It provoked a literary duel with Michel Proudhon in the pages of the Voix du Peuple.
In August 1848, Frédéric Bastiat was elected to the French constituent assembly for the department of Landes, and was selected for the finance committee. Although the weakness of his voice did not let him stand out as an orator, Bastiat was nonetheless returned the next year for the legislative assembly, Moreover, ill health (tuberclosis) soon began to plague Bastiat, and he gave up more active editing duties. Following up on a few articles, in 1850, with some difficulty, Bastiat put out the first volume of his Economic Harmonies, articulating an optimistic laissez-faire position and repudiating the concept of class conflict. It contained Bastiat's rejection of Malthus's population doctrine and the more ambitious goal of displacing the classical Ricardian labor theory of value with an exchange (or "service") theory of value. Bastiat may be regarded as a proto-marginalist in line with the catllacticists of the Oxford-Dublin school. Bastiat's theory in the Harmonies was lauded by H.D. Macleod as coincident with his own, and Arthur L. Perry would credit Bastiat as the primary source for his own catallactic theory. But Bastiat's theoretical work was not well-received by others, and he was severely criticized by, among others, Cournot, Lassalle, Cairnes, Marshall and Bohm-Bawerk.
Exhausted and ill after its completion, Bastiat went to Italy in the late summer of 1850 to recuperate his health, but died in Rome on December 24, 1850.
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