Michel Chevalier, 1806-1879.

Michel Chevalier was one of the leaders of the French Liberal School in the mid-19th Century. 

Born in Limoges, the son of a shopkeer and bureaucrat. In 1823, the eighteen-year-old Michel Chevalier enrolled at the prestigious École Polytechnique in Paris and went on to become a mine engineer in the Nord department.

Around 1829, the youthful Chevalier became a convert to the Saint-Simonian movement, a mystical semi-socialist movement.  Chevalier was an able articulator and vigorous defender movement's principles in their principle organs the daily  Globe and the fortnightly Organisateur. Chevalier quickly discovered a natural talent for writing - as one commentator put it, his pen was able to make every subject seem interesting.  Chevalier would abandon his engineering post in November 1830 to become editor-in-chief of the Globe until its suppression in April 1832.  Among the remarkable articles in this period was Chevalier's Système de la Méditerrannée with a prescient call for governments to embrace railway-building (which had only just been invented) across Europe as an antidote to war.  Chevalier was raised to the rank of "cardinal" to the "Supreme Father" Enfantin.  In the Summer of 1832, the leaders of the Saint-Simonian sect, including Enfantin and Chevalier, were arrested and charged with spreading immorality and irreligion.  The Saint-Simonians turned up at their trial decked out in their resplendent robes and transformed the courtroom into a theatrical farce that strained the judges' patience.  On August 28, 1832, Chevalier was duly sentenced to a year's imprisonment and a fine of 100 francs.

After six months in prison, the duly-sobered Chevalier was released and resumed his engineering career.  His term had been shortened by the French government, conditional on Chevalier's commitment to undertake an study of North American transportation networks.  In late 1833, Chevalier sailed across the Atlantic.  He would spend two years there, researching roads, canals and witnessing the birth of the American railway. He also visited Mexico and Cuba. While in America, Chevalier dispatched a series of letters that were regularly published in the Journal des Débats (they had taken him on as a correspondent) which included wide-ranging reflections of his impression of American economic life and society,    After his return to France in late 1835, Chevalier's collected Lettres on America were collected and published to much acclaim.  His technical report on American transportation was published in 1840. 

In 1836, Chevalier secured support for a second trip to the United States, to study the commercial crisis, but the trip was cancelled after Chevalier suffered a vehicle accident on his way to London, forcing him to remain in France.  In November, 1836, Chevalier was given a high administrative post (maître des requêtes) by the government of Louis Mathieu Molé, and went on to be raised to Councillor of State in March 1838.  These were temporary appointments, enabling Chevalier to lend his expertise to assist in Molé's re-organization of the French ministries to encompass railroads and public works. Chevalier developed an ambitious program of public works (1838), which included not only railroads, but also professional education and credit banks.  Much of his plan was shelved after Molé government fell in December 1838, and Chevalier's influence declined under the subsequent more conservative cabinets. In 1840, Chevalier authored a famous letter (to Molé)  vigorously protesting the plan of the Thiers government to militarily fortify the city of Paris.   

Economics only came gradually to him.  Having started out as an expert on transportation, Chevalier moved on to study public works (1838) and private manufacturing (1841).  Although he had picked up snippets of economic theory here and there, his understanding was still inchoate.  But this was soon remedied. In 1841, Michel Chevalier succeeded Pelegrino Rossi to Say's old chair at the Collège de France, and had to delve into economics literature to compose his lectures.  His lecture notes were recorded by a student and compiled into the Cours d'économie politique (1842-44), and then revised for a second edition by Chevalier in 1855-56.  The lectures show Chevalier's rapid deepening mastery of the field over this time period, as well as his changing economic views.  At the beginning still a romantic Saint-simoniste, suspicious of laissez-faire, Chevalier was soon converted to a faithful adherent of the French Liberal School. and a fervent proponent of free trade principles.  In 1842, Chevalier helped found the Société d'Économie Politique and the influential Journal des économistes.

In January, 1845, Chevalier was elected a deputy from Aveyron to the French parliament.  However, his brief political career soon came to an end.  Chevalier failed to be re-elected the next year, losing to a protectionist challenger, after a prolonged polemic over the benefits of free trade versus protectionism..  In between, Chevalier found time to get married to a certain Mlle Fournier, daughter of an industrialist in Herault.

Chevalier greeted the February 1848 Revolution warily.  Chevalier authored a critique of the  budding labor schemes of  socialists Louis Blanc, Etienne Cabet and others - initially in the Revue de Deux Mondes in mid-March, and then (judging its readership too narrow) in a series of more popular letters in the Journal de Debats beginning in late March.  Chevalier's comments appalled his old Saint-Simonian comrades, notably Hippolyte Carnot, the new education minister.   His course at the  Collège de France was promptly suspended, and further steps were taken to suppress Chevalier's chair, ostensibly as part of a scheme of overall educational reform.  But it came to naught, and Chevalier's chair and course was soon restored by parliament. The matter was soon forgotten, and Chevalier found no obstacles to his election to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in February 1851, succeeding Joseph Droz.

Michel Chevalier welcomed the coup of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in December 1851, and was promptly given a position in Bonaparte's Council of State in January, 1852.  Chevalier's collaboration shocked fellow liberal  economists, many of whom were republicans and suspicious of the populist conservative "president prince".  There were moments of tension with the firmly anti-Bonapartiste Horace Say at the Société d'Économie Politique.  But the appearance of Chevalier's Examen later in 1852, with its vigorous defense of free trade, set doubts at rest.   Indeed, Chevalier was to be vital in making liberal economic policy a  key feature of the Second Empire.  Too busy with his government functions, Chevalier delegated Henri Baudrillard to teach his economics course at the Collège de France through the 1850s and early 1860s (Chevalier only resumed his academic duties in 1866). 

The embrace of Manchester-style "liberalism" during the Second Empire faced steep obstacles, and the chipping away at France's highly protective system came only in small steps, usually by temporary emergency decrees in the name of Napoleon III.  In June 1856, a comprehensive bill  devised by Chevalier to replace outright prohibitions on the import of manufactures with still-highly protective tariffs (30-50%), faced such tremendous opposition in the normally-compliant Chamber of Deputies that it had to be withdrawn.  By 1860, despite continuous efforts, the French protectionist system had barely been dented.  Chevalier decided to outmaneuver domestic opposition in parliament by using the emperor's prerogative to negotiate treaties. 

The ascension of the Liberal government of Palmerston and Russell in Britain late 1859, both of whom had liberal economic views and prior good relations with Napoleon III,  offered a valuable opportunity, and in October 1859, Chevalier opened secret negotiations with Richard Cobden..   In the resulting "Cobden-Chevalier" Anglo-French commercial treaty, signed on January 23, 1860, France abolished all import prohibitions, replacing them with a tariff on imports of British coal and most British manufactures of 30% or less, while Britain reduced duties on the importation of French wines and brandy.  It also included a "most-favoured-nation" clause, then a novel concept, by which Britain and France agreed to grant each other the same privileges now or in the future, that they might grant to any other foreign country (this substituted the usual "reciprocity clause", which had been customary in trade treaties before 1860 - where the extension of a new privilege to an existing trade partner was not automatic but conditional on the old partner matching the concessions of the new one).

The negotiation of the treaty was, in some senses, unorthodox and surprising.  The erratic French emperor was still viewed with suspicion in Britain, and only recently, over the Summer of 1859, there been a panic in the British press - provoked by Viscount Palmerston himself - that France was preparing to declare war and invade Britain.  The  Manchester School leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, had both urged trade treaties as a way to secure peace and overcome war fears with France.  Chevalier, who had been in contact with Cobden at least as far back as 1846, agreed and decided to act.  Under the guise of traveling to Bradford for an international conference on weights and measures, Chevalier zipped across the channel, and went through a quick series of meetings with Cobden, Bright, the French ambassador Flialin de Persigny, the chancellor of the exchequer William Gladstone and the suspicious prime minister Palmesrton himself.   Chevalier invited Cobden to accompany him back to France, to help persuade  and they stayed in Paris together With Palmerston's reluctant blessing, Cobden accompanied Chevalier back to France, and stayed with him in Paris through the fall of 1859, to help him persuade Napoleon III.  The emperor did need much persuading, having attended ACLL meetings while in exile in England back in 1846, and well-aware of the arguments.   But Cobden's mission, private and unofficial as it was, had an air of vitality and dulled opposition back in Britain, helping him (or more precisely, Gladstone, then chancellor of the exchequer) to sell the trade treaty as a way to "avoid war" rather than requiring him to prove it was good in itself.   The opposition of the French manufacturing interests was side-stepped by keeping them in the dark as long as possible.  However, on January 15, the Moniteur published a letter of Napoleon III (dated January 5), expressing the emperor's intention to issue a series of liberalizing decrees and sign commercial treaties, revealing the on-going negotiations of Cobden and Chevalier.   The French protectionists - notably, iron-manufacturers, "the praetorian guard of monopoly", as Cobden characterized them - howled in protest but as the treaty did not need to go through parliament, were powerless to stop it.  They duly denounced it a "another coup d'etat".  This was followed up by further more precise protocols on trade with Britain (signed on October 12 and November 16 later that year).

Chevalier's 1860 treaty coup was hailed by the French Liberal School, and any misgivings about Chevalier's credentials or dubious past associations were promptly forgiven or forgotten.  He had accomplished in one blow what careful arguments by generations of Says and Bastiats had failed.  Chevalier did not rest on this one treaty, but went on to push France to pursue other similar commercial treaties -  with Belgium (May, 1861),  Prussia and thus the German Zollverein  (August, 1862), the fledgling kingdom of Italy (January, 1863), Switzerland (June, 1864), Sweden and Norway (February, 1865), the Hanseatic towns (March, 1865), Spain (June 1865), the Netherlands (July 1865), Portugal (July 1866) and finally Austria (December, 1866).  Most came with most-favored-nation clauses, thus ensuring their benefits would be passed around.  Other nations, like Denmark, were integrated into this commercial network by their prior treaties with England.  As country after country plugged into the Anglo-French treaties, the compounding of most-favoured-nation clauses ensured a mass demolition of protectionist barriers across continental Europe.  The treaty negotiated by Chevalier and Cobden in 1860 had, in six short years, made the free trade liberal era a reality, bringing centuries of Mercantilist economic warfare to an end. At least in Europe.  The United States and Russia stuck to their protectionist policies and remained stubbornly out of the Anglo-French network - although France would eventually manage to finally bring Russia into the complex a decade later (April, 1874).  

Although sometimes given to utopian reflections on free trade, Chevalier believed in the importance of an interventionist government to check the excesses and dangers of free enterprise. Although his economic research was highly historical in nature, Chevalier was not averse to economic theory and was indeed a great admirer of the British proto-Marginalist economist Henry D. Macleod.

Chevalier was succeeded in the political economy chair at Collège de France by his son-in-law Paul Leroy-Beaulieu

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