Moreover, as power is centralized, those further down the chain of command, who are nominally responsible for maintaining government assets, have less and less authority to do so. Since nobody really owns government assets, nobody has a personal stake in protecting their value. Consider a few cases.

Why Can’t Government Maintain New Orleans’s Levees?

The nearly half-million people of New Orleans wanted to live in their big bowl below sea level, and they entrusted politicians with the job of maintaining more than 125 miles of levees. These large walls, typically made of earth and/or stone, surrounded the city to keep out water from the Mississippi River (to the south and southeast of the city), Lake Borgne (to the east), Lake Pontchartrain (to the north), and various canals. Since water continuously leaked into the city, there were floodwalls, about 200 floodgates, plus pumps and drainage canals for additional protection.

Then Hurricane Katrina hit. It crossed Florida on Thursday, August 25, 2005, as a Category 1 (weakest category) hurricane, then gathered strength as it reached the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Wind velocities accelerated, and by Sunday, August 28, Katrina was a Category 5. It weakened somewhat to a Category 4 when it made landfall east of New Orleans the next day, with winds of up to 145 miles per hour. We all know what happened next.

But why did it happen? There seemed to be problems almost everywhere in New Orleans’s levee system. Dr. Peter Nicholson, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Hawaii, headed a study of the levee failures on behalf of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He reported, “We found literally dozens of breaches throughout the many miles of levee system. A number of different failure mechanisms were observed.” Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center, criticized the design and suggested that inadequate construction could also be an issue. Forensic teams that studied these levees generally agreed with the assessment.

Who was responsible for the failure of the levees?

They needed maintenance because everything needs maintenance and because each year the city was sinking about an inch deeper into the Mississippi River mud. Although New Orleans politicians’ most important job was public safety and the levees obviously affected public safety, politicians seemed to believe doing maintenance work–which would probably go unseen–wouldn’t serve their personal interests (especially getting reelected).

The state had established the New Orleans District Levee Board in 1890 to be responsible for maintaining the levees around the city. But the board members, a majority of whom are appointed by Louisiana’s governor, pursued their interests by expanding their power, gaining jurisdiction to develop properties around the levees. Board members spent time on such matters as licensing a casino, leasing space to a karate club, and operating an airport and marinas. The Senate Homeland and Governmental Affairs Committee reported, “A review of the levee-district board minutes of recent years revealed that the board and its various committees spent more time discussing its business operations than it did the flood-control system it was responsible for operating and maintaining.”

James P. Huey, who had been on the board for 13 years and served as its president for nine years, blamed the state legislature. He claimed that the board had to generate money from those time-consuming extraneous businesses because the state legislature had cut the board’s revenue in half. So even though members of the board knew that a levee in New Orleans East was three feet below its design height–which would affect its ability to withstand a storm surge and therefore jeopardized the people in the city–they didn’t get it fixed because they were squabbling about who would pay for it. The Army Corps of Engineers refused. The board wrote letters to their members of Congress asking Washington for money, but they were busy with other things. And the Flood Control Act, which Congress passed in 1965, sent a clear signal that the federal government would bail out people who wanted to live in flood-prone areas like New Orleans.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers handled design and construction of the levees, as it handled flood-control projects throughout the United States. But its budget consisted almost entirely of “earmarks,” assuring that appropriations would be spread around congressional districts. That gave incumbents something to brag about during their election campaigns. The problem was that spending a lot more money on New Orleans flood protection wasn’t the top priority for the state’s politicians. J. Bennett Johnston Jr., for example, when he was a Louisiana senator, secured appropriations for four new dams on the Red River between Mississippi and Shreveport, costing $2 billion.

Bottom line: Nobody in the city, state, or federal governments wanted responsibility for maintaining the levees.

Why Can’t Government Maintain Public Housing?

Because poor people tend to live in poor housing, many people thought it would be a good idea for government to build housing. This started during the New Deal and accelerated after World War II as the federal government subsidized municipalities. Public housing projects were given names–like Cochran Gardens, Maplewood Court, Henry Horner Homes, and Rockwell Gardens–that suggested they might be charming.

A guiding principle of the time was that housing projects should be massive. In part this reflected the influence of the Swiss-born architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris–later known as Le Corbusier–who urged during the 1920s that people be concentrated in big buildings consisting of cell-block apartments. The buildings were set pieces, surrounded by empty parks and separated from their neighborhoods. Bigness became a kind of architectural cult, embraced by Soviet mass murderer Joseph Stalin and others during the mid-twentieth century. Like so many Soviet buildings, U.S. housing projects tended to be big and ugly.

Consider the experience of the Chicago Housing Authority, the third-largest public-housing bureaucracy in the United States. It built a four-mile stretch of housing projects. Just one of them, the Robert Taylor Homes, included a couple dozen 16-story buildings containing 4,400 units altogether. It was reportedly the world’s largest housing project.

These monstrosities quickly deteriorated. “The buildings in its enormous family developments are literally crumbling,” reported housing analyst Susan J. Popkin in 2000. “They are relatively old; most construction occurred during the 1950s and early 1960s. The original materials were cheap and have not held up well over time. Further, the buildings are poorly designed, with exterior hallways and elevators that have proven extremely difficult to maintain.” The government couldn’t begin to take care of this development. Popkin went on, giving a litany of problems familiar to many residents of “the projects” across the country:

Because the hallways of the high-rises are covered with metal grates, the buildings look like prisons. Many apartments (and some entire buildings) are boarded up because their major systems–plumbing, heating, electrical–have failed. The grounds and hallways are often filled with refuse and reek of human waste. The buildings are infested with vermin, including rats, mice, roaches, and even feral cats. Lights in interior hallways, elevators, and stairwells are vandalized regularly, leaving these areas dark twenty-four hours a day. The buildings’ exteriors, halls, and stairwells are often covered with graffiti or, in the better-maintained developments, the evidence of the janitors’ attempts to paint over the mess.

Without constant vigilance it is nearly impossible to keep the units clean. In addition to the dirt that blows in from outdoors, it is not uncommon to see apartment walls literally crawling with roaches. Most apartments also have serious maintenance problems, owing to years of neglect and failed structural systems. For example, in some units, it is impossible to turn off the hot water in the bathrooms, so the walls now have severe moisture damage.

Despite spending millions of dollars on law enforcement in the housing projects, neither the federal government nor the city have been able to maintain public safety. Maintenance people were afraid to enter the housing projects, which contributed to their deterioration.

During the 1980s real estate developer Vincent Lane became chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority and ordered police to “sweep” through public housing projects, ejecting people who weren’t legitimate residents. But the American Civil Liberties Union challenged these sweeps, and evidently they were discontinued. Moreover, they were expensive–about $175,000 per building–and Lane became embroiled in conflict-of-interest scandals involving security service contracts. The Chicago Housing Authority had trouble securing enough funding for its operations, and by the 1990s it had ceased making major repairs.

The next short step was to demolish the disastrous housing projects. The last tower came down in 2007. The city of Chicago began building townhouses, some of which were sold to middle-income private buyers, while others were reserved for former tenants in the projects. Applicants were screened in an effort to avoid drug users or those with criminal records. But construction is likely to proceed slowly and accommodate a fraction of the people who had lived in the projects.

Perhaps the most notorious of all housing projects was Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, winner of a number of architectural awards and praise in Architectural Forum. Pruitt-Igoe included 33 11-story buildings on 57 acres in DeSoto-Carr, a poor section of the city. There were 2,870 apartments.

The project was finished in 1956. “Only a few years later,” reported Alexander von Hoffman of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, “disrepair, vandalism, and crime plagued Pruitt-Igoe. The project’s recreational galleries and skip-stop elevators, once heralded as architectural innovations, had become nuisances and danger zones. Large numbers of vacancies indicated that even poor people preferred to live anywhere but Pruitt-Igoe. The St. Louis Housing Authority spent $5 million trying to fix the problems but failed.” In 1972, three of the 16-year-old Pruitt-Igoe buildings were demolished. The following year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development agreed Pruitt-Igoe was hopeless, and the rest of it came down.

Similar public housing projects across the country were just as wretched. Joseph Petrone, a former maintenance supervisor with the Philadelphia Housing Authority, recalled: “I’d go to work at Schuylkill Falls [a PHA project] with a .38-caliber revolver in my belt and a big stick in my hand. The stick was for the German shepherds people kept tied to their doorknobs. The halls were covered with trash because the dogs would tear up the trash bags. We’d find bodies in the elevator shafts; the kids would play there, get stuck, and fall or get crushed.” The government was incapable of maintaining anything it built.

Why Can’t Government Maintain National Parks?

More than a century ago, “Progressives” promoted the idea that only government could be trusted to take care of natural wonders like Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. Things have worked out rather differently. Apparently when politicians began considering the idea of national parks, nobody thought much about maintenance. For example, Congress was assured Yellowstone wouldn’t cost Washington anything once the initial roads and buildings were constructed. In 1916 Stephen Mather, who managed the national parks, reported, “The revenues of several parks might be sufficient to cover the costs of their administration and protection and Congress should only be requested to appropriate funds for their improvement.”

Over the years, presidents have bragged about how much they added to the National Park Service. Now it includes some 6,000 historic structures, 8,500 monuments, 2,000 bridges and tunnels, 4,300 employee housing units, and 27,000 campground sites, as well as docks, parking areas, and other assets. But it wasn’t until 2002 that the National Park Service began to assess their condition.

Since the federal government “owns” the national parks, their funding depends on Washington politics. The prevailing policy has been that most revenue generated in the parks goes to Washington. As a consequence, the parks have had to lobby politicians for appropriations. But over the years the biggest increases in federal spending have involved wars and social programs. The National Park Service has had a hard time competing for funds with the likes of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. It’s a small pig at the trough. There has been a big backlog of deferred National Park Service maintenance jobs that lacked funding. Roads are sometimes hazardous because of potholes. Visitor facilities are falling apart. Historic structures are in jeopardy. Sewage systems have broken, causing pollution.

Why Should Government Start Something It Can’t Maintain?

Government cannot be counted on to maintain anything well because there’s no political glory in maintenance. Those who sign major laws, who launch new government programs, and who cut the ribbons for new government buildings can brag about their exploits during reelection campaigns. But politicians don’t seem to gain any credit with voters when they maintain programs that somebody else started. In many cases, like adding more cement to New Orleans levees, maintenance work is invisible.

Since taxpayer money is wasted when it’s spent on projects that subsequently suffer from inadequate maintenance, and often much harm is done, government should be limited to projects it might be able to maintain. If this means government ends up doing little, so be it.

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During 1933, Roosevelt’s first year in office, GDP increased about 17 percent. What would have accounted for that?

Not FDR’s 1933 decision to seize privately owned gold and devalue the dollar from $20 per ounce of gold to $35. This increased the value of gold held by the U.S. Treasury and entitled it to print an additional $3 billion of greenbacks. The Thomas Amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) authorized the Treasury to print $3 billion more. Nonetheless, the total amount of currency held by the public didn’t increase until 1934. The Fed wasn’t very active during this period.

The most sweeping pieces of legislation passed in 1933—the climax of the Hundred Days—were the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, but both promoted contraction, not expansion. The NIRA authorized FDR to establish cartels fixing wages, prices, and output. The AAA aimed to reduce agricultural acreage.

Recovery Preceded Policy

It’s not clear how any of FDR’s 1933 policies could have accounted for a 17 percent increase in GDP, even if they promoted expansion, because they wouldn’t have had time to ripple through the economy. It seems more likely that FDR had the good fortune to come into office near the bottom of the Depression, and enough adjustments in wages, prices, and other factors had occurred that the economy was ready to recover. The economy had recovered from previous panics, crashes, and depressions without a big-government program. Undoubtedly FDR’s sunny personality and formidable communications skills helped give people confidence they could achieve a turnaround.

From 1933 to 1937 GDP increased about 60 percent. This was the biggest GDP expansion of the New Deal—and it occurred without federal spending and deficits that would qualify as Keynesian stimulus. Krugman wrote, “[T]he New Deal didn’t pursue Keynesian policies. . . . [F]iscal policy was only modestly expansionary.” Other economists, such as Price V. Fishback, agree that New Deal budget deficits probably didn’t contribute to recovery—Fishback calls FDR’s deficits “tiny.”

Since the NIRA and AAA promoted contraction, the Supreme Court gave the economy a boost in 1935 by striking them down. Ironically, FDR viewed the anti-New Deal justices as the “Four Horsemen of Reaction.”

Raising Labor Costs

It has often been said that the depression-within-a-depression of 1938 happened because FDR foolishly cut federal budget deficits, but that couldn’t have been the case since the dramatic 1933–1937 expansion occurred without meaningful deficit stimulus. Other factors help explain that depression, starting with the newly centralized Federal Reserve Board’s decision in July 1936 to increase minimum required bank reserves 50 percent and its decision in January 1937 to increase bank reserves another 33.3 percent. Suddenly, less money was available for lending, and interest rates went up—a double whammy for employers. The Social Security excise tax on payroll began to be collected in 1937, making it more expensive for employers to hire people. The undistributed profits tax became a big issue in 1937. The Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act in 1937, setting off the rapid unionization of mass-production industries, which led to an 11 percent increase in wage costs during that depression year—and a resulting surge in unemployment.

The problem with the New Deal wasn’t expansion. The problem was the persistence of high unemployment despite expansion. Many economists point to New Deal laws such as the NIRA, the Wagner Act, and the Social Security payroll tax (there weren’t yet any Social Security benefits), which made it more expensive for employers to hire people. Whenever anything becomes more expensive, there’s likely to be less demand for it.

Uncertain Tax Environment

In addition, the succession of New Deal tax increases—1933, 1934, 1935, and 1936—reduced private funds available for hiring. And the constant tax changes made it hard for investors to estimate their potential risks and returns, so they remained on the sidelines. Investors, like everybody else, need predictable rules. No wonder investment was at historic lows during the 1930s. Without investment it was very difficult to create new jobs.

When FDR came into office he had Congress and the nation at his feet. He was hailed as a conquering hero. With his rhetorical acumen and political genius, he might have begun by forming coalitions to undo his predecessor Herbert Hoover’s biggest disasters: the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff that throttled trade and the 1932 revenue act that doubled many taxes. Ending rather than embracing Hoover’s disasters would have been change that people could believe in! If, furthermore, FDR had avoided his own misguided policies, the expansion probably would have been more robust, and without the blunders of 1937, it might have lasted longer—and most important, it would have enabled the private sector to create millions more jobs.

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Why were civil liberties first secured in England?

One important reason was the development of common law principles and precedents independent of a ruler. Edward Coke (pronounced “Cook”) was more responsible for this than anybody else. Murray N. Rothbard called him a “great early seventeenth century liberal.” Winston S. Churchill observed that “His knowledge of the Common Law was unique.” Historian George Macaulay Trevelyan considered him “one of the most important champions of our liberties.” F.A. Hayek referred to him as “the great fountain of Whig principles.”

Coke had a gift for expressing common law principles in unforgettable ways. “The common law,” he wrote, “is the best and most common birth-right that the subject hath for the safeguard and defense, not merely of his goods, lands and revenues, but of his wife and children, his body, fame and life. . . . No man ecclesiastical or temporal shall be examined upon secret thoughts of his heart. . . . the house of an Englishman is to him as his castle.”

As a lawyer and judge, Coke worked with arguments based on precedents, which one might think would mean that if he couldn’t cite precedents he didn’t have a case. But he was the best at discovering precedents for liberty. If at times he claimed that precedents went back farther and proved more than they actually did, he was almost always right about fundamental principles.

His Reports and Institutes did much to give the English a coherent constitution. Even his rival Francis Bacon conceded: “Had it not been for Sir Edward Coke’s reports . . . law by this time had been almost like a ship without ballast; for that the cases of modern experience are fled from those that are judged and ruled in former times.”

Although Coke embraced conventional religious beliefs, he did much for religious toleration. As Chief Justice of common law courts, he worked to keep many cases out of ecclesiastical courts that sentenced religious dissenters to be tortured, imprisoned, or burned. He appointed Puritan ministers to the churches he owned. He hired an independent-minded secretary named Roger Williams, who went on to establish Rhode Island as a sanctuary for religious toleration. At Coke’s death, his personal library included major Puritan writings of the previous half century.

Coke was more than a jurist; he deserves much credit for the emergence of representative government. Under Queen Elizabeth I, Parliament was a cipher for the monarch. Members of Parliament lacked the ideological vision as well as practical experience to provide effective opposition or leadership. In 1621, 1624, 1625, and 1628, Parliament spearheaded attacks against the ministers of James I and Charles I. Parliament articulated constitutional principles and took initiative in formulating policy. Coke certainly wasn’t the only important figure in these parliaments, but he framed the issues, served on more parliamentary committees, delivered more committee reports and speeches than anybody else. He did much to secure the principle that ministers must be accountable for their actions—a critic remarked that Coke “would die if he could not help ruin a great man every seven years.” His ideas helped inspire the revolution which, two decades later, toppled Charles I.

“Coke’s great influence both in the Commons and in Parliament as a whole is easily explained,” according to Wesleyan University historian Stephen D. White. “His extensive governmental experience both in and out of Parliament and his formidable legal reputation naturally brought him respect from other members. He had held many high offices in both central and local government. . . . He had participated in every meeting of Parliament since 1589, had served as Speaker of the Commons in 1593, and was an expert on parliamentary precedents and procedure. And his published writings and his years as a judge and legal officer of the crown had established his reputation as the most eminent legal authority of the era.”

Coke has had an enormous influence in America. Coke’s principal legacy: the independence of the judiciary and the principle that judges may overturn statutes which are contrary to the Constitution.

An Imposing, Difficult Man

Biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen noted that “Coke stood out above a crowd, a noticeably handsome man, tall, big-boned, inclined to spareness. His face was oval and a trifle long; between mustache and pointed short beard the lower lip showed full and red. Dark hair, cut even with the ears, had as yet no trace of gray but had begun to recede at the temples, accentuating the height of his forehead. Coke’s eyebrows were heavy and smooth, his complexion somewhat swarthy; there were few lines to his face. His eyes, large, dark, and brilliant, bore the watchful look of a man ambitious and self-contained.”

Coke, to be sure, was often a difficult character. “Pedant, bigot, and brute as he was,” historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in his essay on Bacon, “he had qualities which bore a strong, though a very disagreeable resemblance to some of the highest virtues which a public man can possess. . . . He behaved with gross rudeness to his juniors at the bar, and with execrable cruelty to prisoners on trial for their lives. But he stood up manfully against the King and the King’s favourites. No man of that age appeared to so little advantage when he was opposed to an inferior, and was in the wrong. But, on the other hand, it is but fair to admit that no man of that age made so creditable a figure when he was opposed to a superior, and happened to be in the right.”

Edward Coke was born with law in his blood, February 1, 1552, in Mileham, Norfolk, England. His father, Robert Coke, was a lawyer practicing in London and Norfolk. His mother, Winifred Knightley, was the daughter of an attorney.

After attending the Norwich Free Grammar School for seven years, Coke entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and was four years there. Destined for a legal career, he began studying at Clifford’s Inn in 1571 and the next year transferred to Inner Temple. These were guilds where young men went to acquire knowledge of common law that would be needed for professional practice. Common law was the law applying to everyone. It included Saxon legal customs, standard commercial practices for resolving disputes, parliamentary statutes, judicial decisions and, yes, some royal decrees. In addition, there were treatises going back several hundred years, written by respected judges like Henry Bracton, Anthony Fitzherbert, John Fortesque, John Glanville, and Thomas Littleton. Students of the common law had to learn “law French,” the language of common law pleadings, and Latin, the language in which medieval court records were kept. Coke began a lifelong practice of arising at 3:00 A.M. so that he could gain several hours for learning more about law before the day began.

Coke started practicing law in 1578. He spent a lot of time in Coventry, Essex, Norwich, and London, and he always had a notebook which he filled with his observations about courtroom proceedings. He was to continue recording his observations for more than four decades—they became the basis of the published works that secured his reputation.

When Coke was 30, he married 17-year-old Bridget Paston, who descended from a wealthy Suffolk family and came with a dowry of P30,000. He developed ties with Lord Burghley, a councilor to Queen Elizabeth. After a succession of minor positions, he was appointed Solicitor General by Queen Elizabeth in 1592. She named him speaker of the House of Commons the following year, and in 1594 chose him over Francis Bacon to be attorney general.

Francis Bacon

Bacon and Coke were to be rivals for nearly three decades. Bacon, nine years younger than Coke, was the son of an Elizabethan courtier, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Bacon’s father died before he could buy his son an estate, so he had to work for a living. He learned law at Gray’s Inn, then pulled political strings and got elected to Parliament in 1584. He urged religious toleration for loyal citizens, but otherwise he was a thoroughgoing government man. As a consequence, he acquired estates and secretaries, including Thomas Hobbes, who later distinguished himself as a theoretician for political absolutism.

In his lucid essays (first edition, 1597), Bacon expressed admiration for Machiavelli’s political writings and declared that governments shouldn’t be judged by the moral standards that apply to ordinary people. Bacon made clear his distrust of Parliament and his belief in political absolutism. He approved of war because it promoted a strong state.

Coke, meanwhile, prospered as a vigorous defender of royal prerogative and enforced laws against religious dissenters. His wife died, and he soon remarried Lady Elizabeth Hatton, granddaughter of Lord Burghley and niece of Robert Cecil, the most influential minister of Queen Elizabeth and, for a while, of her successor, James I. This second marriage was rocky, but it brought him even more property.

Coke, unlike Bacon, was critical of patents of monopoly which the government had issued since 1552 to generate revenue. The patents were issued for mechanical inventions, chemical processes, and other things. There were many complaints because patents of monopoly benefited a few individuals at the expense of everybody else. Coke handled some of the most important cases against monopolists. As he explained, “it appeareth that a man’s trade is accounted his life, because it maintaineth his life; and therefore the Monopolist that taketh a man’s trade, taketh away his life.”

England had the lowest taxes in Europe, but toward the end of her reign Elizabeth needed more revenue. After the Spanish Armada was smashed in 1588, Spain built more ships for another possible attack on England, requiring new English defenses. Elizabeth was at war with France, too. Bacon recognized the danger of taxation. In 1593, he remarked: “wee breed discontentment in the people and in a cause of Jopardie her Majesties saftie must consist more in the love of her people then in their welthe.”

The Ascension of James I

Elizabeth died on March 24, 1603, and was succeeded by the 37-year-old James VI of Scotland, who became James I of “Great Britain”—he revived the name from early medieval times. Elizabeth, he soon discovered, left a pile of debts. “My lord treasurer,” wrote one official in September 1603, “is much disquieted how to find money to supply the King’s necessities.” This official found “all means shut up of yielding any relief.” London bankers twice refused to loan the government any more money, claiming they had suffered big losses because of the plague, but Venetian ambassador Nicolo Molin reported: “ill-will is also suspected as the cause.”

A monarch was supposed to pay the cost of maintaining his palace and retainers with hereditary income, while Parliament financed national defense and wars. But James asked Parliament—taxpayers—to help cover his extravagant royal household expenses.

The king’s personal habits made his political problems worse. “James was a loutish savage,” wrote historian Paul Johnson. “When hunting, he liked to plunge his bandy legs into the stag’s bowels. . . . He delighted in getting the young court ladies drunk, and seeing them collapse in vomit at his feet. He would sit there, laughing. . . . Everything James did, and everything he omitted to do, was certain to evoke protest.”

Attorney General Coke made his reputation as a tough prosecutor in three sensational trials. First came the Earl of Essex, an adventurer who had blundered in Ireland, disobeyed Elizabeth’s orders, and burst into her private quarters (1601); Walter Raleigh, who allegedly plotted against James (1603); and Guy Fawkes and his fellow Catholic conspirators who dug a tunnel for 35 barrels of gunpowder under Westminster Palace, which they hoped to blow up when the King and royal family gathered for the opening of Parliament (1605). Coke caused quite a stir as he repeatedly underscored key points, displayed his eloquent Latin, picturesque English, and formidable knowledge of legal precedents.

Bacon and Coke were at each other’s throats. Parliament turned down James’s request for more revenue, and he attempted an “end run” around Parliament by doubling tariffs, an idea backed by Bacon. James’s “New Impositions” meant that imports were subject to the delay and expense of being inspected twice. John Bates, an importer of Venetian currants, tried to evade the “New Impositions” and was brought before the Court of the Exchequer. It ruled that tariff policy was the king’s jurisdiction, not Parliament’s. The House of Commons named a commission to look into the matter. Coke was the point man. He insisted the king’s jurisdiction was to protect England against foreign enemies, but the “New Impositions” were for revenue, and Parliament’s approval was required.

“It is odd, indeed,” noted biographers Hastings Lyon and Herman Block, “that Bacon, the philosopher, should have failed to apprehend what Coke, the legist, apparently did see: namely, that if the enforced loans, benevolences and monopolies were permitted, the King would have a nearly complete system of extra-Parliamentary taxation, and Parliament would soon become an unnecessary assembly, with a consequent corruption of the State into tyranny.”

Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas

In June 1606 James appointed him Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, which mostly handled private actions between citizens. This was a position where Coke would have to do the king’s bidding or be dismissed. The “New Impositions” didn’t generate enough revenue, and soon James issued a writ which forced people in England’s seaports to equip his fleet. (Elizabeth had issued such a writ but there was more political support for it because she faced the Spanish Armada.) Coke authored the “Protestations from the House of Commons,” which declared, in part, that “from the time of Magna Carta the liberties, franchises, privileges and jurisdiction of Parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England.” This outraged James.

Coke clashed with the king on fundamental issues. “The state of monarchy,” James maintained, “is the supremest thing upon earth. For Kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods . . . for they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth.” James, like Elizabeth, considered judges to be agents of the crown. They certainly weren’t supposed to render independent decisions.

English common law was a murky field, and Coke made the most of it when countering the king. Judicial decisions weren’t systematically based on precedents, because it was difficult to determine what the precedents were. “Argument from decided cases, though frequent and persuasive,” noted English constitutional law scholar Charles M. Gray, “did not dominate courtroom dialogue. Prior decisions were sometimes followed by judges who professed not to agree with them, but they were sometimes rejected for reason or simply ignored.”

On November 13, 1608, there was an epic confrontation between James and Coke. James described judges as “shadows and ministers.” Coke replied that “the King in his own person cannot adjudge any case . . . but that this ought to be determined and adjudged in some Court of Justice, according to the law and Custom of England.”

James countered “that he thought the law was founded upon reason, and that he and others had reason as well as the Judges.” Coke: “God had endowed his Majesty with excellent science and great endowments of Nature. But his Majesty was not learned in the Laws of his Realm of England; and Causes which concern the Life, or Inheritance, or Goods, or Fortunes of his Subjects are not to be decided by natural Reason but by the artificial Reason and Judgment of Law, which requires long Study and Experience before that a man can attain to the cognizance of it.”

James was outraged, as one observer reported: “his Majestie fell into that high indignation as the like was never knowne in him, looking and speaking fiercely with bended fist, offering to strike [Coke].”

Meanwhile, Coke labored to share his knowledge of common law. He had begun issuing an annual Report on cases in 1600, and he continued until 1616. The prefaces were in English, texts in “law French,” and pleadings in Latin. “Anything that could be gleaned in Westminster, London Guildhall or the circuit courts in the counties he set down in his own form and fashion, adding comment, aside, comparison,” noted biographer Bowen. “No law reports had hitherto been half so comprehensive; Coke must have lived and walked and sat and talked with notebook in hand. At once the books became—as Blackstone indicated in 1765—an intrinsic authority in the courts of justice.”

Bacon, whom James had named Solicitor General in 1607, considered the king legibus solutus—above the law. Lord High Chancellor Ellesmere, the highest judicial official, declared Rex est lex loquens—“the king is the law.”

Bacon advised James, in Peacham’s Case, to try influencing court decisions by presenting judges with the allegations in a case and asking their opinion before trial. Edmund Peacham was a Puritan minister who criticized a bishop’s religious intolerance, for which he was brought before the High Commission. As Bacon reported to the king, “Upon these interrogatories, Peacham was examined before torture, in torture, between torture, and after torture; nothing could be drawn from him, he still persisting in his obstinate and inexcusable denials and former answers.” Coke wouldn’t cooperate with Bacon, saying that “taking of opinion is not according to the custom of this realm.” Coke considered it unfair to present judges with allegations when neither a defendant nor defense counsel were present for cross-examination. Bacon told James that Coke’s “over-confidence, doth always subject things to a great deal of chance.” Peacham died in prison.

In Bonham’s Case, Coke ruled that the common law stood above Parliament. The case involved Dr. Thomas Bonham, jailed for practicing medicine without a certificate issued by the Royal College of Physicians. He filed suit for false imprisonment. Coke observed that according to the Royal College’s statute of incorporation, it pocketed half the fines from violators like Bonham. This, he noted, meant the Royal College was both a party and judge in every action. Citing a common law principle, Aliquis non debet esse judex in propria causa [Nobody should be judge in his own cause], Coke ruled: “in many cases the common law will control acts of Parliament and some times adjudge them to be utterly void; For when an Act of Parliament is against common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible to be performed, the common law will control it and adjudge such Act to be void.” This was the most controversial decision he ever rendered.

James asserted his power by issuing proclamations that he insisted had the force of law. In September 1610, Coke presented his view of these proclamations to the Privy Council, which had the responsibility of advising the king on executive, judicial, and financial business and seeing that the king’s will was done. “All indictments,” he observed, “conclude with the words, Against the law and custom of England, Contra legem et consuetudinem Angliae; or against laws and statutes, Contra leges et statuta. But I never heard an indictment to conclude, Contra regiam proclamationem; against the king’s proclamation.” Coke went on to review the legal history of royal proclamations. Accordingly, the Privy Council resolved “That the King by his proclamation cannot create any offense which was not an offence before, for then he may alter the law of the land by his proclamation in a high point; for if he may create an offence where none is, upon that ensues fine and imprisonment. Also the law of England is divided into three Parts: Common Law, Statute Law, and Custom; but the King’s Proclamation is none of them.”

Coke issued “prohibitions” aimed at curbing the power of ecclesiastical courts, especially the High Commission, which imprisoned individuals for preaching Nonconformist doctrines. A prohibition ordered the ecclesiastical courts not to proceed with a case if there was any reason it might belong in a common law court. Coke defended his prohibitions by showing how they had long been issued by common law courts. Moreover, he explained how, during the past 60 years, the High Commission had expanded its power beyond what had been specified in any statute.

James called Parliament in 1610 because he needed money, but Members drew up a Petition of Grievances. Among the principles at stake: “there is none which they have accounted more dear and precious than this, to be guided and governed by the certain rule of law, which giveth to the head and the members that which of right belongeth to them, and not by any uncertain and arbitrary form of government.”

James took offense: “We are an old and experienced king, needing no such lessons.” Coke rose to defend the Petition: “I never spake but mine own conscience. The privileges of this House is the nurse and life of all our laws, the subject’s best inheritance. If my sovereign will not allow my inheritance, I must fly to Magna Carta and entreat explanation of his Majesty. Magna Carta is called Charta libertatis quia liberos facit. . . . The Charter of Liberty because it maketh freeman. When the King says he cannot allow our liberties of right, this strikes at the root. We serve here for thousands and ten thousands.”

James fumed, “The House of Commons is a body without a head. The members give their opinions in a disorderly manner. At their meetings nothing is heard but cries, shouts, and confusion. I am surprised that my ancestors should ever have permitted such an institution to come into existence. I am a stranger, and found it here when I arrived, so that I am obliged to put up with what I cannot get rid of.”

James dissolved Parliament the following year, and Coke stood alone against the king. He issued two rulings that limited the discretionary power of the High Commission. James snapped that the rulings were “of a nature extraordinary and showing more the perverseness of [Coke's] spirit than any other prohibitions.” James summoned Coke and several like-minded judges to explain themselves. Coke endured a three-day interrogation.

Chief Justice of the King’s Bench

In 1613, Bacon had an idea for taming Coke: promote him to Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, which handled criminal as well as civil actions; and promise him a seat on the 12-member Privy Council. “Coke will thereupon turn obsequious,” Bacon assured James. Coke became Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in October, but Bacon and James were in for a surprise.

Conflict developed when James granted two income properties to the Bishop of Coventry. The grant was contested by two men who claimed the property was theirs—this became known as the Case of Commendams (which meant the bishop could collect the income while having somebody else perform whatever services might be required). Coke and his fellow judges were about to conduct a hearing on the dispute when James ordered them not to proceed, because his prerogative was at issue. Coke countered that “The stay required by your Majesty was a delay of justice and therefore contrary to law and the Judges’ oath.” Bacon, who had become Attorney General and a member of the Privy Council, denounced Coke, for behaving improperly. James stepped up the pressure. The judges relented, except for Coke who, a court reporter noted, told the king “That when the case should be, he would do that should be fit for a Judge to do.” Coke was dismissed as Chief Justice.

“Coke had not striven in vain,” noted historian George Macaulay Trevelyan. “He had enlisted the professional pride of the students of the common law against the rival systems of law specially favoured by the Crown in the Star Chamber, the admiralty and the Ecclesiastical Courts. He had turned the minds of the young gentlemen of the Inns of Court, who watched him from afar with fear and reverence, to contemplate a new idea of the constitutional function and of the political affinities of their profession, which they were destined in their generation to develop in a hundred ways, as counsel for England gone to law with her King.”

Coke was so desperate to regain a high position that he pressured his 14-year-old daughter, Frances, to marry John Villiers, the impotent older brother of James’s most influential adviser, George Villiers (later the Duke of Buckingham). Bacon filed a complaint against Coke for riotous behavior. This was surely the low point of Coke’s career. Although he didn’t get back his judgeship, he regained his position on the Privy Council. Apparently, the king and Buckingham still hoped that showing him some favor would undermine his independent spirit. Bacon was subsequently appointed Lord High Chancellor, which made him the highest-ranking person outside the royal family.

James summoned Parliament, which met on January 13, 1621, the first time in seven years. James again needed money, and Members intended to negotiate about their grievances.

Among other things, Parliament was intent on limiting royal power by rooting out corruption. The top target was Buckingham, who had gained considerable influence with the king. After he had sent Walter Raleigh to attnd he was summoned before the House of Lords. He apologized for his brothers who had taken bribes and avoided prosecution by sheer political clout. The House of Commons turned to drafting a bill which would curb monopolies.

Bacon’s Downfall

The House of Commons then formed a Committee for Inquiring into Abuses in the Courts of Justice. A trail of dubious payments led to Bacon’s door. Coke soon emerged as the leading inquisitor. The inquiry against Bacon led eventually to the charge of bribery.

Coke objected to James’s proposal that a special commission should investigate the charges, because it couldn’t be counted on to recommend prosecution. Accordingly, Parliament began impeachment proceedings for the first time in 160 years. It reported a growing list of bribes. Since the bribes had been delivered in the presence of his servants, Bacon didn’t mount a defense. “Condemn and censure me,” he wrote the House of Lords—thereby offending the House of Commons.

He was impeached, dismissed as Lord High Chancellor, fined £40,000, imprisoned in the Tower of London, then banished from London and the law courts. The historian Lord Acton later remarked, “the Commons, guided by the most famous English lawyer, Coke, struck down Bacon, and deprived the Stuarts of the ablest counsellor they ever had. Impeachment and responsibility of ministers remained.”

Coke Imprisoned

On December 18, James dissolved Parliament, and soon afterwards Coke was summoned to appear before the Privy Council. “You have forgotten the duty of a servant, the duty of a Councilor of State and the duty of a subject,” he was told. Guards escorted him to a damp, bitter-cold, urine-soaked cell in the Tower of London. Denied access to books, he wrote Latin verses with pieces of coal. He was interrogated by the President of the Privy Council who reported: “I charge you therefore with treason. I have heard you, Sir Edward, affirm that by law he is a traitor who goes about to withdraw subjects’ hearts from their King.” But after seven months of going through Coke’s personal papers and investigating his affairs, crown officials concluded they couldn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing. He was released. No charges were ever filed.

The Parliament of 1624 came on the heels of a four-year business depression, and there were a lot of complaints about monopolies. Coke led the attack against monopolies over wool, brick-making, glass-making, salmon fishing, and the transcribing of wills.

James died on March 27, 1625. He had achieved a long period of peace which enabled the English to prosper. But he left a debt of over P200,000. His 24-year-old son became King Charles I, and right away he began spending money at a reckless pace. Then, as Buckingham had arranged, he married the 15-year-old French Catholic princess, Henriette Marie, who came with an 800,000-crown dowry; the idea here was that if there wasn’t going to be a marriage to promote peace with Spain, then there should be a marriage to help secure an ally against Spain if needed.

The wedding took place at Notre Dame de Paris, and Charles was represented by a stand-in, the Duc de Chevreuse, because of the risk of Charles falling in the hands of a foreign power. Buckingham himself escorted the new queen back to England, biographer John Bowle reported, with “fifteen lords, twenty-four ‘knights of great worth’, and far too many pages.” Henriette Marie was accompanied by her servants—a bishop and 28 priests.

Thirty Years War

Charles summoned Parliament in May 1625 and faced mounting skepticism. For openers, Members were distracted because several thousand people a week were dying from plague in London. Buckingham had approved military adventures against France and Spain which were fiascos, convincing many Members of Parliament that the previous subsidy they approved was a mistake. Buckingham proposed more military adventures, one to attack Spain and another to save the Protestant Elector of Palatine—which meant becoming embroiled in the conflict that would become known as the Thirty Years War. Parliament voted for two small subsidies and authorized Charles to spend customs revenue only for a year. Charles was in trouble because the Lord Treasurer reported the government didn’t have any money or credit left. Assuming Parliament would give him what he needed, Charles had drawn from his own resources to pay P136,000 for a subsidy to Denmark, wages for British soldiers serving in the Low Countries, and food and ammunition for the British navy. “By the grace of God,” Charles remarked, “I will carry on the war if I risk my crown.” He dissolved Parliament.

Short of money, Charles resorted to conscription. The government rounded up as many able-bodied men as they could find around the port towns. Reportedly many men paid bribes to avoid being conscripted. The government didn’t spend money on army barracks, so it forced thousands of private individuals to feed and house the recruits. This, of course, provoked widespread resentment, and the result was martial law. The first adventure, against Spain, was a fiasco which Charles and Buckingham tried to cover up, and by the end of the year Charles pawned some of his jewelry and silverware for more money.

Charles summoned Parliament again. In an effort to undermine resistance, he appointed his half-dozen most troublesome opponents, including Coke, as sheriffs, which kept them out of parliamentary proceedings for at least a year. But this enabled a formidable orator, John Eliot, to step forward as a leader. Though he had befriended Buckingham as a young man, he witnessed the return of wretched British soldiers from one of Buckingham’s disastrous expeditions against Spain, and he resolved to bring down the Duke. Eliot declared that Parliament wasn’t a tool of the king and that Members were morally obligated to follow their conscience. He urged that Buckingham be impeached.

Asked for further subsidy, Members of the House of Commons began impeachment proceedings against Buckingham. Charles responded by ordering Eliot and another outspoken Member, Dudley Diges, imprisoned in the Tower of London. But the Commons charged Buckingham anyway, for failing to suppress piracy in the English Channel, for choosing incompetent leaders of the Spanish expedition, for taking bribes and for scheming with Catholics. On June 12, 1627, Charles dissolved his second Parliament, saving Buckingham’s skin.

“At the back of the Parliamentary movement in all its expressions lay a deep fear,” explained Winston S. Churchill. “Everywhere in Europe they saw the monarchies becoming more autocratic. The States-General, which had met in Paris in 1614, had not been summoned again; it was not indeed to be summoned until the clash of 1789. The rise of standing armies, composed of men drilled in firearms and supported by trains of artillery, had stripped alike the nobles and the common people of their means of independent resistance. Rough as the times had been in the earlier centuries, ‘bills and bows’ were a final resource which few kings had cared to challenge. But now on the Parliamentary side force as yet was lacking.”

Needing money, Charles resorted to high-handed revenue-raising measures, and on March 27, 1628, Charles summoned Parliament for the third time.

Parliament was aboil over squandered money, conscription, billeting of soldiers in private homes, forced loans. Citing common law precedents, Coke maintained that “the King cannot order any man arrested, because there is no remedy against him.” Coke insisted people could be legitimately imprisoned only upon the order of a judge. On March 21, 1628, Coke presented a bill which specified that no one could be imprisoned more than three months without being brought to trial. The House of Commons approved resolutions saying that nobody should be imprisoned unless the government cited the alleged crimes, and the writ of habeas corpus must not be denied.

The House of Commons approved the subsidies that Charles asked for, provided he would agree to respect the liberties of Englishmen. Charles resisted, and the House of Lords was reluctant to break with him. The Lords eventually approved a declaration that the Magna Carta remained in force and that the king must not infringe on “any of his loyal people in the property of their goods or liberty of their person.” But then the Lords hedged, suggesting that “as touching his majesty’s royal prerogative intrinsical to his sovereignty and entrusted to him from God . . . in the case, for the security of his Majesty’s Royal person, the common safety of his people, or the peaceable government of his kingdom, his Majesty shall find just cause, for reason of State, to imprison or restrain any man’s persons, his Majesty would graciously declare that within a convenient time, he shall and will express the cause of the commitment or restraint, either general or special.”

Coke thundered: “Is the confirmation of the Great Charter a matter of grace? What are just liberties? Who were the best of his Majesty’s predecessors? We see what advantage they have that are learned in the law in penning articles above them that are not, how wise soever. What is intrinsical prerogative? It is a word, we find not much in the law. Intrinsical prerogative is not bounded by any law, or by any law qualified. Admit this intrinsical prerogative, and all our laws are out. This intrinsical prerogative it appears is entrusted to the king by God. It is jure divino [divine law]. No law can take it away. His majesty can commit when he pleases.”

When the king continued to resist, Coke proposed on May 8 that Parliament adopt a Petition of Right for the king’s agreement on “1. The personal liberty of the subject. 2. His propriety in his goods. 3. Unbilletting of soldiers. And 4. Silencing of martial law in time of peace.”

Charles dispatched a letter to the Lords, saying he must be able to imprison people without filing specific charges. For 18 days, the Lords tried to figure out how they could draft something agreeable both to Charles and the Commons. Then Coke rose in the Commons and spoke: “Let us palliate no longer. If we do, God will not prosper us. I think the Duke of Buckingham is the cause of all our miseries, and till the King be informed thereof, we shall never go on with honor or sit with honor here. That man is the grievance of grievances. Let us set down the cause of all our disasters and they will reflect on him.”

On June 8, Charles met both Houses of Parliament at 4:00 in the afternoon. Then he signified the words of approval which gave a bill the force of law: “Soit droict fait comme est desire.”

“We reach here,” wrote Churchill, “amid much confusion, the main foundation of English freedom. The right of the Executive Government to imprison a man, high or low, for reasons of State was denied; and that denial, made good in painful struggles, constitutes the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land. Trial by jury of equals, only for offenses known to the law, if maintained, makes the difference between bond and free.”

Coke’s Greatest Work

Coke retired to Stoke House in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, just west of London, where he completed his life work.

Scholars traditionally wrote commentaries on established authorities, and that’s how Coke proceeded with his greatest work. He prepared commentaries on Thomas Littleton’s Treatise on Tenures, a fifteenth-century text about land law. “The ornament of the common law,” Coke called it, “the most perfect and absolute work that ever was written in any human science, and as free from error as any book that I have known to be written of any human learning.” Coke covered about 500 years of English property law.

His health declined in 1634. On June 9, he asked for a pen and paper to affirm his religious faith. While he lay dying, the government—“by order of his Majesty’s Privy Council”—issued a warrant to search his house for documents which might threaten the monarchy. Police took manuscripts for his Institutes and for two unpublished volumes of Reports. Coke died at Stoke House on Wednesday, September 3, 1634, around 11 P.M. A month later, he was buried in the church graveyard at Tittleshall, about six miles southwest of Fakenham, Norfolk, next to his first wife.

Charles trashed Coke’s principles. He did everything he pledged not to do in the Petition of Right, and he refused to call another Parliament for 11 years. But the principles had taken root. When the Long Parliament met in 1640, it arranged for publication of the Institutes because they “contain many monuments of the subject’s liberties.”

The Second Part of the Institutes appeared in 1642. In this commentary on Magna Carta and almost 40 other charters and statutes, Coke distilled the views he had promoted throughout his public life. He believed individual liberty was best protected by “due process of the common law.” He asserted that “Generally all monopolies are against this great charter, because they are against the liberty and freedome of the subject, and against the law of the land.” He affirmed that “The interpretation of all statutes concerning the clergy, being parcell of the lawes of the realme, do belong to the judges of the common law.”

The Third and Fourth Parts of the Institutes were published in 1644. The Third Part covered a variety of crimes. Coke defined a crime, explained the penalties, and covered the legal history of it.

The Fourth Part developed his familiar themes about the role of Parliament.

Coke urged his successors in the common law: “And you, honorable and revered judges and justices, that do or shall sit in the high tribunals or seats of justice, fear not to do right to all, and to deliver your opinions justly according to the laws; for fear is nothing but a betraying of the succors which reason should afford; and if you shall sincerely execute justice, be assured of three things: first, though some will malign you, yet God will give you his blessing; secondly, that though thereby you may offend great men and favorites, yet you shall have the favourable kindness of the Almighty, and be his favorite; and lastly, that in so doing, against all scandalous complaints and pragmatic devices against you God will defend you as with a shield.”

Coke inspired freedom fighters in England and the American colonies. When Roger Williams established Rhode Island, he reflected in 1652: “how many thousand times since I had the honorable and precious remembrance of his person, and the life, the writings, the speeches, and the example of that glorious light. And I may truly say, that besides my natural inclination to study and activity, his example, instruction, and encouragement have spurred me on to a more than ordinary, industrious, and patient course in my whole course hitherto.”

By the time of the Glorious Revolution (1688), long-standing English grievances had been resolved. The monarchy had a Protestant succession. There was a considerable degree of religious toleration. People were protected from arbitrary search and seizure. They couldn’t be held in prison unless formal charges were filed, alleging violation of a law. Above all, the power of the monarch was limited by Parliament which had achieved supremacy. Ironically, this meant judges couldn’t overturn an act of Parliament. Judges could only rule that the government exceeded the powers granted by a statute—a situation which continues to this day.

The American Founders learned constitutional principles from Coke. Thomas Jefferson remarked that “Coke Lyttleton was the universal elementary book of law students and a sounder Whig never wrote nor of profounder learning in the orthodox doctrines of . . . British liberties.” Patrick Henry, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, John Jay, Daniel Webster, and many other influential Americans read Coke. Joseph Story, who became a Jeffersonian Supreme Court Justice, wrote: “When I had completed the reading of the most formidable work, I felt that I breathed a purer air and that I had acquired a new power.”

American constitutional historian Bernard Schwartz observed that “The influence of Coke may be seen at all of the key stages in the development of the conflict between the Colonies and the mother country.”

Especially since the Constitution was ratified, an independent judiciary and judicial review have become bedrock principles of American law. While judges have made plenty of bad decisions, at least they have the power to strike down unconstitutional statutes, and sometimes they do. This is a big advance from the era when judges were everywhere intimidated into doing what a ruler wanted. Eloquent testimony to the vision, courage, and devotion of Edward Coke.

Related posts:

1. Constitutional Protection of Economic Liberty
2. The Rise and Fall of England: 3. Political Foundations of Liberty
3. Just Dial 911? The Myth of Police Protection

The French thinker Benjamin Constant was, according to respected Oxford University scholar Isaiah Berlin, “the most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy.” Constant’s most important contribution: he recognized that “the main problem . . . [is] how much authority should be placed in any set of hands. For unlimited authority in anybody’s grasp was bound, he believed, sooner or later, to destroy somebody.”

Constant described the dynamic of collectivism that would become a scourge during the twentieth century. For instance: “the primitive conquerors were satisfied with outward submission; they did not inquire into the private lives or local customs of their victims . . . the conquerors of today are resolved to gaze over the level surface of their empire and to encounter no deviation from uniformity . . . local interests and traditions contain a germ of resistance, which a centralized authority tolerates unwillingly and attempts to eradicate at the first opportunity. It finds the isolated individual easier to deal with; without effort it crushes him beneath its mighty weight.”

He denounced war, “the greatest offense that a government today can commit. It destroys every social guarantee without compensation; it jeopardizes every form of liberty; it injures every interest; it upsets every security; it weighs upon every fortune. It combines and legitimizes every kind of internal and external tyranny.”

Constant believed the key issue is to keep political power out of private life. “For forty years,” he reflected, “I have defended the same principle: freedom in everything, in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in industry, in politics—and by freedom I mean the triumph of the individual both over an authority that would wish to govern by despotic means and over the masses who claim the right to make a minority subservient to a majority. . . . The majority has the right to oblige the minority to respect public order, but everything which does not disturb public order, everything which is purely personal such as our opinions, everything which, in giving expression to opinions, does no harm to others either by provoking physical violence or opposing contrary opinions, everything which, in industry, allows a rival industry to flourish freely—all this is something individual that cannot legitimately be surrendered to the power of the state.”

Constant made some spectacular flip-flops, he had tangled love affairs, and he ran up big gambling debts, so he was an easy target for criticism. These things, noted intellectual historian Biancamaria Fontana, “were all distinctive marks of a traditional aristocratic education. Though they may strike the modern reader as adventurous and romantic, there was nothing especially odd or unusual about them. What was truly eccentric about Constant’s life was . . . the unsettling extent of his cosmopolitanism.” He moved easily among intellectuals in France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and Britain, as well as his native Switzerland. He absorbed the ideas of Baron de Montesquieu about law and the ideas of Adam Smith and Jean Baptiste Say about markets. He was a friend of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller. In the French Chamber of Deputies, Constant championed civil liberties with the legendary Lafayette.

Victor Hugo believed that Constant was “one of those rare men, who furbish, polish, and sharpen the general ideas of their times.” Said Lafayette: “Endowed with one of the most extensive and varied esprits which has ever existed . . . the master of all the languages and literatures of Europe, he united to the highest degree sagacity . . . and the faculty, especially attributable to the French school, of making clear abstract ideas.”

Constant was an eyeful. “His appearance was striking,” noted biographer J. Christopher Herold, “tall and gangling, in his late twenties; a pale, freckled face surmounted by a shock of flamboyant red hair, braided at the nape and held up by a small comb; a nervous tic; red-rimmed myopic [blue] eyes; ironic mouth; a long, finely curved nose; long torso, poor posture, slightly pot-bellied, long-legged, wearing a long flapping riding coat—a decidedly gauche, unhandsome, yet interesting and attractive figure of a man, certainly somebody altogether out of the ordinary.”

By his fifties, Constant had become a familiar figure as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, the French elected legislative body where he was an outstanding champion of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Baron de Loeve-Veimars recalled Constant “dressed in his gold-embroidered deputy’s uniform so as to be ready to address the House from the tribune where it was obligatory to wear this formal dress. His hair was blond and turning white, and on his head he wore an old round hat. He carried under his arm a coat, books, manuscripts, printer’s proofs, a copy of the budget and his crutch. Once he had got rid of all these impedimenta and was seated on his bench, on the far left, he began to write and send off an unbelievable quantity of letters and notes to people . . . answered the questions of all those crowding around him.”

According to historian Paul Thureau-Dangin, “At first sight one would never have said that he had the usual qualities necessary to make an orator. He seldom improvised without having a pen in his hand; but his pen had the quickness of speech, and sometimes he wrote out his reply in full while still listening to the harangue he was to refute. He normally read his speeches from little pieces of paper which he was constantly obliged to put in order. . . .

“With his clever rather than highly coloured speeches, subtle rather than powerful in their delivery, he showed great skill in argument, rare presence of mind, he had a way of saying everything, despite legal restrictions, so that even the most intolerant audience understood what he was implying, and he was nimble enough to slip through his opponent’s fingers and to stand up for himself even in the tightest corner.”

Beginnings

As Constant began the story of his life, he wrote that “I was born on 25 October 1767, in Lausanne, Switzerland, the son of Henriette de Chandieu, who was from a formerly French family which had taken refuge in the Pays de Vaud for religious reasons, and Juste Constant de Rebecque, a colonel in a Swiss regiment in the service of Holland. My mother died as a result of giving birth, a week after I was born.”

He had a succession of tutors and read eight to ten hours a day. After trying to get him admitted to Oxford University (he was too young), Juste sent him to the University of Erlangen (Bavaria), where he began learning German and became addicted to gambling. Then he transferred to the University of Edinburgh where faculty included such distinguished friends of liberty as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Dugald Stewart. Constant mainly studied history and Greek. After two years, he went to Paris and studied with the intellectual Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard—his friends included Scottish philosopher David Hume, English playwright David Garrick, English novelist Lawrence Sterne, French mathematician Jean le Rond d’Alembert, French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet, and Lafayette. Before Constant was 18, he had learned to get along in three languages, and he was exposed to the ideas of brilliant thinkers.

In May 1789 he married Baroness Wilhelmina von Cramm, lady-in-waiting for the Duchess of Brunswick, but she didn’t share his intellectual curiosity, and they were divorced.

Constant watched the French Revolution as it lurched from constitutionalism to Jacobin Terror. “I am currently busy reading and refuting Burke’s book against the French levellers,” he wrote a friend. “This famous book contains as many absurdities as it does lines, and thus it is highly successful in all English and German circles. He defends the nobility, the exclusions of the sectaires, the establishment of a dominant religion, and other things of this nature. . . . I believe, as you do, that what we are witnessing is fundamentally knavery and fury. But I prefer the knavery and fury which overthrow citadels, destroy titles and similar follies, and place all religions on an equal footing, to those which seek to preserve and hallow these wretched monstrosities. . . .”

Madame de Staël

On September 18, 1794, Constant met Germaine de Stael on a road between Nyon and Coppet, Switzerland. She was the 28-year-old daughter of Suzanne Curchod, former lover of historian Edward Gibbon, and Jacques Necker, a Geneva banker who had served as the last finance minister under French King Louis XVI and had lent him some 2 million francs. She was married off to Eric-Magnus de Stael, impecunious Swedish aristocrat who became ambassador to France. He got some of her money, and she got better connections at the French court. Madame de Stael emerged as the most influential woman in Europe—brilliant, bold, vain, and sensuous.

She launched a fabled salon that attracted the leading lights of French life, including Condorcet and Lafayette. As Constant described his impressions of her: “I have seldom seen such a combination of astounding and attractive qualities; so much brilliance coupled with so much good sense; such expansive, positive kindness; such immense generosity; such gentle and sustained politeness in society; such charm and simplicity; such absence of all restraint within the circle of her intimates.” Constant particularly admired her for operating a remarkable network to help friends escape from the French Reign of Terror.

One of Madame de Stael’s friends, Jean Lambert Tallien, launched the political attack on Maximilien Robespierre that brought his overthrow and execution in July of 1794, ending the Reign of Terror. Almost a year later, May 25, 1795, Constant and Stael ventured to Paris and witnessed the ruins of revolution amidst runaway inflation. They found many neighborhoods deserted. All around they saw signs saying that properties which the government had confiscated were for sale. Impoverished aristocrats held tag sales on the streets, offering their clothing, furniture, draperies, statues, anything that might fetch money for food. “The capital of the world,” according to Stael’s friend Henri Meister, “looks like an immense junk shop.”

On September 23, 1795, the ruling Convention approved the third constitution since the Revolution began. This one established an executive consisting of a five-person Directory and a two-chamber legislature. The franchise was limited to those of substantial means. Members of the Convention wanted to retain their power, so they proposed a law which would require that two-thirds of the new legislature come from the Convention. Constant launched his political career by writing three articles opposing the proposed law, published in the June 24, 25, and 26 issues of Nouvelles Politiques—a newspaper edited by his former tutor Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard. He and Stael were accused of being dangerous counterrevolutionaries, and they left Paris.

Napoleon’s Ascent

Stael’s friend Paul Barras, a member of the Directory, turned his mistress, Josephine de Beauharnais, over to an unemployed military commander named Napoleon Bonaparte. During the Revolution, Napoleon had emerged as a Jacobin and, after the government declared war against Britain and Holland in February 1793, then against Spain the following month, the country was soon surrounded by enemies. Napoleon demonstrated his resourcefulness by driving British and Spanish forces out of Toulon, about 40 miles east of Marseilles on the Mediterranean. This throttled royalist hopes of inciting an anti-Jacobin rebellion throughout southern France. In December 1793, amidst the Reign of Terror, the Convention named Napoleon a brigadier general. When royalist forces threatened to crush the Convention, Barras summoned Napoleon, and on October 5, 1795, he unleashed his artillery.

In April 1796, Napoleon struck at the Sardinian army and crushed it. By boldly throwing himself into battle when his subordinates got bogged down, Napoleon captured Milan, the financial and cultural capital of Lombardy—and his awed men began calling him “Le Petit Caporal” (“the Little Corporal”). At Castiglione, Napoleon faced an Austrian army that had grown until it was three times bigger than his own forces, but he took some 15,000 Austrian prisoners. Outnumbered by another Austrian army at Lodi and Rivoli, Napoleon won again as he killed some 30,000 Austrian soldiers. He set up administration of his spoils—about half of Italy—then returned triumphant to Paris.

On September 4, 1797 (known as 18 Fructidor on the revolutionary calendar), Napoleon helped Barras seize power, expelled Directors who wanted to restore the Bourbon monarchy, suppressed royalist newspapers, and deported 165 dissidents to French Guiana. Horrified at the prospect of seeing the Bourbons back in power, Constant praised Barras.

Napoleon thirsted for military glory, so he sailed for Egypt, which he hoped to capture and thereby cut off Britain from its Indian empire. The campaign was a disaster, and Napoleon was lucky to escape back to France—without his army or his fleet.

France was a mess. There was unrest because of high taxes, forced loans, military conscription, and the seizure of gold, silver, and works of art. Poor people resented greedy government officials who seized their crops and their sons. There were price controls, chronic shortages, and endless lines for the simplest things like bread. Armed gangs terrorized merchants and travelers. In once-prosperous Lyons, an estimated 13,000 out of 15,000 shopkeepers had been driven out of business. Directors responded by ordering dissidents arrested, suppressing newspapers, and deporting editors. French forces were driven out of Germany and Italy. Napoleon’s stunning gains had been lost. On November 9, 1799 (18 Brumaire), Napoleon decided it was time for him to seize power, and Constant and Stael supported him as a lesser evil than Jacobins or Bourbons.

Napoleon established a facade of representative government. There was a Tribunate whose members received a 15,000-franc salary and were expected not to cause any trouble. Constant was appointed a Tribune, but in his first address, January 5, 1800, he presented a case for freedom of speech. He denounced Napoleon’s demand to have himself named Consul for Life, which took place August 2, 1802. This meant gaining absolute power and suppressing civil liberties. “These intellectuals are like vermin in my clothes,” Napoleon remarked, “I shall shake them off.” Constant was dismissed. “He put himself into opposition, thinking I would pay a high price for his co-operation,” Napoleon recalled later. “He should have known that I do not buy my enemies; I stamp on them.”

Exile

Madame de Stael fled with Constant to Coppet, her family estate near Geneva. Then they traveled to Weimar, Germany, where he worked on a history of religion. He got to know Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805).

After the death of her father, Jacques Necker, Madame de Stael turned for consolation to Constant, but he yearned to be free of her dominating influence. “Never have I met a woman who is so incessantly exacting,” he noted in his diary. “One’s whole life (every minute, every hour, every year) must be at her disposal. When she gets into one of her rages, then it is a tumult of all the earthquakes and typhoons rolled into one. We must part . . . it is my sole chance for a peaceful life.” During their years together, she wrote about French and German romanticism, but Constant’s important political writings came after their romance ended in 1808.

He had already been at work two years on his autobiographical novel, Adolphe. It chronicled the doomed on-again, off-again affair between aimless Adolphe and a Polish woman named Ellenore. For years, Constant held public readings of the evolving story, which almost everybody assumed to be about himself and Madame de Stael. The novel wasn’t published until 1816. By then, Constant had married Charlotte von Hardenberg, who offered him the closest thing to domestic harmony he would ever know.

Meanwhile, Napoleon had emerged as a world-class monster. As historian Paul Johnson wrote, Napoleon “created the first modern police state, and he exported it. Austria, Prussia, and Russia all learned from the methods of Joseph Fouche, Bonaparte’s minister of police, from 1799 to 1814. . . . Over 2 million people died as direct consequence of Bonaparte’s campaigns, many more through poverty and disease and undernourishment. Countless villages had been burned in the paths of the advancing and retreating armies. Almost every capital in Europe had been occupied—some, like Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, and Madrid, more than once. Moscow had been put to the torch. . . . The wars set back the economic life of much of Europe for a generation. They made men behave like beasts, and worse.”

In late November 1813, Constant started writing a pamphlet, De l’esprit de conquete et de l’usurpation, which developed a sophisticated, new vision of liberty. He focused not on politics, which had preoccupied the leading thinkers for decades, but on private life. He insisted that commerce was the standard-bearer of civilization and peace. The Hanover edition appeared on January 30, 1814. This was followed by a London edition (March), and two Paris editions (April, July).

Constant offered historical perspective, writing that “what we now call civil liberty was unknown to the majority of the ancient peoples. All the Greek republics, with the exception of Athens, subjected individuals to an almost unlimited social jurisdiction. The same subjection of the individual characterized the great centuries of Rome; the citizen had in a way made himself the slave of the nation of which he formed a part. He submitted himself entirely to the decisions of the sovereign, of the legislator; he acknowledged the latter’s right to watch over his actions and to constrain his will.”

Constant observed how tyrants demand conformity. “The love of power,” he wrote, “soon discovered what immense advantages symmetry could procure for it. While patriotism exists only by a vivid attachment to the interests, the ways of life, the customs of some locality, our so-called patriots have declared war on all of these. They have dried up this natural source of patriotism and have sought to replace it by a factitious passion for an abstract being, a general idea stripped of all that can engage the imagination and speak to the memory.”

Napoleon Deposed

The British and their allies entered Paris on March 31, 1814. On April 6, the Senate, whose members were nominated by Napoleon and given the power of overthrowing laws considered unconstitutional, voted to depose him. He found sanctuary on the island of Elba, between Corsica and western Italy. At the same time, the Senate assigned some respected liberals like the economist Destutt de Tracy (1754-1835) to help draft a new constitution. It soon became clear that the British favored the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy as the best bet for peace—the Bourbon heir Comte de Provence, Louis XVIII, had been an exile in Britain.

Upon his return to France, Louis XVIII set aside the Senate’s draft constitution, and in May 1814 he issued the Declaration de Saint-Ouen promising toleration and yet another constitution. The resulting Charte—presented as a gift from the king—assured religious toleration and equality before the law. It affirmed the abolition of feudal fees and church tithes. It accepted the Code Napoleon. There was an ambiguous commitment to freedom of the press. It specified that private property which had been seized during the Revolution wouldn’t be taken away from those who had acquired it during subsequent decades. There would be a two-chamber legislature: the king would name members of the House of Peers, and voters would elect members of the Chamber of Deputies. Louis XVIII acknowledged the inevitability of some constitutional limitations on government power, but he certainly didn’t intend to introduce British-style parliamentary government to France.

Ultra-royalists, led by the king’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, considered the king a sellout for accepting so many changes from the Revolution and Napoleonic era. They denounced Louis XVIII as a “crowned Jacobin” and “King Voltaire.” As the first French political party, the Ultras demanded that royalists take over the administrative bureaucracies Napoleon had established. They wanted royalists who had fled the Revolution either to get their property back or be compensated. They urged that dissidents be suppressed. When the king cut back the army, the Ultras exploited bitterness among former soldiers who needed money. And the Ultras fanned resentment against the continued Allied occupation of France and interference in French affairs. Ultras gained respectability from the intellectual counterrevolution against liberalism.

Constant responded to the Ultras by writing pamphlets that helped educate French people about parliamentary government for the first time. For instance, in Les Reflexions sur les Constitutions (Reflections on Constitutions and the Necessary Guarantees), he insisted that the king must be politically neutral as in Britain, ministers must be responsible for government policy, and there should be an unpaid, elected legislature. He asserted the primacy of civil liberties, including trial by jury and freedom of the press. When government censors suppressed this pamphlet, Constant wrote another, De la liberté des brochures, des pamphlets et des journaux (The Freedom of Pamphlets and Newspapers).

Napoleon’s Return

On March 1, 1815, Napoleon escaped from Elba and landed on the Cap d’Antibes, near Cannes, with about 800,000 gold francs and 1,100 soldiers. As they marched north toward Paris, more soldiers joined them.

Although Constant had loathed the Bourbons, he gave Louis XVIII credit for acknowledging some liberal principles, and he wrote an attack on Napoleon, published in Journal de Paris on March 11. He followed this with a March 19 attack in Journal des débats: “Napoleon has not promised clemency. . . . He is Attila, he is Genghis Khan, but more terrible and more odious because the resources of civilization are his to use. I have sought liberty in all its forms; I have seen the king ally himself with the nation.” Constant added what would prove to be embarrassing hyperbole: “those who love liberty, will prefer to die upon the steps of a throne by which that liberty is safeguarded and assured.”

The next day, Napoleon entered Paris with his Polish Hussars, and Constant went into hiding at Angers, about 150 miles southwest of Paris. When he heard that Napoleon had declared a general amnesty, he met Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte at the Palais Royal and provided assurances of his cooperation. Joseph Bonaparte claimed that Napoleon learned his lesson and would support constitutional government. The emperor would purportedly need the help of respected liberals like Constant, and, accordingly, he was ushered into the Tuileries palace for a face-to-face meeting with Napoleon on April 14. “I need the support of the nation,” Napoleon told Constant. “In return, the nation will ask for liberty; she shall have it.”

Constant’s friends like Lafayette hooted at the idea of Napoleon as a born-again liberal. Constant countered: “I did not for one moment believe in the sudden conversion of a man who for so long had exercised so absolute an authority. . . . I wanted to find out for myself what we could still hope for, whether his bitter experiences had in any manner altered his mind.”

Constant adapted the constitution which had been accepted by Louis XVIII, and on April 24 Napoleon accepted a modified version. To avoid public debate, Napoleon presented it as a mere addition to existing laws—Acte Additionnel aux Constitutions de l’Empire. There were many features which reflected Constant’s views, but the Acte Additionnel stressed monarchy much more than Constant would have liked. The Acte Additionnel, known as La Benjamine, was approved in a plebiscite and proclaimed June 1.

Principles of Politics

Constant had been working on Principes de politique (Principles of Politics), and it was published in May as an analysis of constitutional principles. “The citizens possess individual rights independently of all social and political authority,” he wrote, “and any authority which violates these rights becomes illegitimate. The rights of the citizens are individual freedom, religious freedom, freedom of opinion, which includes the freedom to express oneself openly, the enjoyment of property, a guarantee against all arbitrary power. No authority can call these rights into question without destroying its own credentials.”

Ultras demanded power to enforce virtuous behavior, but Constant warned that “Arbitrary power destroys morality, for there can be no morality without security; there are no gentle affections without the certainty that the objects of these affections rest safe under the shield of their innocence.”

Constant challenged the doctrine that unlimited power was acceptable as long as it was exercised in the name of popular sovereignty: “When sovereignty is unlimited, there is no means of sheltering individuals from governments. It is in vain that you pretend to submit governments to the general will. It is always they who dictate the content of this will, and all your precautions become illusory.”

He reaffirmed the urgency of limiting government power: “You may divide powers as much as you like; if the total of those powers is unlimited, those divided powers need only form a coalition, and there will be no remedy for despotism. What matters to us is not that our rights should not be violated by one power without the approval of another, but rather that any violation should be equally forbidden to all powers alike.”

But before anything could come of the new constitution, the Prussian general Marshal Blucher and the British Duke of Wellington gathered 213,000 British, Prussian, Dutch, and Belgian soldiers and on June 18, 1815, routed Napoleon at Waterloo, near Brussels. Napoleon demanded dictatorial power, but Lafayette, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, demanded Napoleon’s abdication. He was banished to a shabby, pink six-room house (shared with his top officers and families) on St. Helena, a British-controlled volcanic island in the South Atlantic Ocean about 1,140 miles west of South Africa, where he was to die six years later. Allied armies entered Paris on July 7, and the following day Louis XVIII was again installed at the Tuileries palace.

Constant offered an apology to Louis XVIII, and the king let him stay in France. Constant settled down with his wife, Charlotte. (Madame de Stael died of a stroke in Paris, July 17, 1817, at 51.) While trying to jump over a garden wall, he injured his hip, and for the rest of his life he needed crutches to get around.

Ultra-royalists gained a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, and they did everything they could to undermine Louis XVIII. They made divorce illegal, imposed restrictions on publishing and established the Cours Prévotales, a court to deal with defendants accused of treason. People were arbitrarily arrested, jailed for weeks without being brought to trial, then hit with long prison sentences. The Allies feared that such policies might trigger a new revolution, and they urged Louis XVIII to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies, which he did.

In 1817, the liberal-leaning Minister Elie Décazes pushed through an extension of the voting franchise to every Frenchman over 30 who paid more than 300 francs of taxes—about 88,000 out of an estimated 30 million people. Constant and Lafayette were elected from Sarthe, a district in central France. They emerged as leaders of the new Liberal party. By 1819, a new law granted more freedom of the press.

Political debates intensified. Ultras promoted their views through newspapers like Quotidienne and Drapeau Blanc. Moderates had the Journal des Débats. Constant edited Minerve Francaise, and there was Constitutionnel, another liberal newspaper.

Constant defied laws against seditious speech and writing—court decisions couldn’t be appealed, and sentences were carried out within 24 hours. He produced dozens of newspaper articles and pamphlets, and he delivered hundreds of speeches. Nobody was as steadfast a champion of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. He went on to launch a campaign against the African slave trade. He kept attacking slavery for years through articles, speeches, and debates.

Constant hailed commerce which “inspires in men a vivid love of individual independence. Commerce supplies their needs, satisfies their desires, without the intervention of the authorities. This intervention is almost always—and I do not know why I say almost—this intervention is indeed always a trouble and an embarrassment. Every time collective power wishes to meddle with private speculations, it harasses the speculators. Every time governments pretend to do our own business, they do it more incompetently and expensively than we would.”

On December 22, 1824, Louis XVIII died, and he was succeeded by his Ultra-royalist brother, the Comte d’Artois, who became Charles X. He pushed for a succession of laws to imprison people found guilty of offending Catholic clergymen; to give Catholic clergy the power to appoint all teachers in primary school and to control secondary schools; and to make it illegal for anybody to publicly question the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Constant, elected to the Chamber of Deputies from a Paris district, led the opposition.

Constant’s health deteriorated seriously during 1830. His legs became swollen. He experienced paralysis in his feet, tongue, and other parts of his body. He was confined to his house at 17 rue d’Anjou, Paris. He told a friend: “I have been unable to sustain an hour’s conversation.”

On May 7, the king dissolved the Chamber of Deputies and called new elections, but Liberals won 274 of the 417 seats. On July 25, the king dissolved the new Chamber of Deputies, which hadn’t yet met, and announced a tougher censorship policy aimed at suppressing political pamphlets—nothing under 25 pages could be published without prior approval of censors. Journalists spurred by Louis Adolph Thiers issued a call for resistance, and the next day merchants closed their shops throughout Paris. There were riots July 28 and 29 in which some 2,000 people were killed. The king had dispatched 40,000 of his best soldiers to achieve colonial glory in Algiers, so he was caught unprepared.

Lafayette wrote Constant: “A game is being played here in which our heads are all at stake. Bring yours!” He got out of bed but soon encountered barricades that blocked many of the streets in Paris. When he finally made it to the Chamber of Deputies, they resolved to depose the king and name as the successor the Duc d’Orléans who, though related to the Bourbons, had fought as a republican during the French Revolution. Constant was among those who secured his agreement to honor the fundamental protections specified in the Charte of 1814. Soon afterward Charles X abdicated.

Constant died on December 8, 1830, with his wife, Charlotte, at his side. He was 63. There was a funeral service December 12 at a Protestant church on rue Saint Antoine. As his coffin was brought to the Cemetery of Pere Lachaise, people waved the tricolor flags of the Liberal Party. Lafayette told the crowd: “Love of liberty, and the need of serving her, always ruled his conduct. To say this is a justice due him, over his grave, by a friend who, less trusting and temperate than he, was nevertheless the confidant of his most intimate thoughts.”

And there was this letter to Constant’s wife, Charlotte, signed by 13 people in the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe: “How could we forget the Honourable Deputy who by his efforts did so much to abolish, at least in part, the revolting ill-treatment of which we were the victims. . . . The entire family of coloured peoples dares to hope that in your justifiable grief you will deign to accept the expression of the regrets which his loss inspires in us—the loss of a man who was always the staunchest supporter of our rights.”

Constant’s most influential ideological successor was Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859). “The last generation in France,” Tocqueville wrote, “showed how a people might organize a stupendous tyranny in the community at the very time when they were baffling the authority of the nobility and braving the power of kings. . . . When I feel the hand of power lie heavy on my brow, I care but little to know who oppresses me; and I am not the more disposed to pass beneath the yoke, because it is held out to me by the arms of a million men . . . unlimited power is in itself a bad and dangerous thing.”

Although the French liberal journalist Edward Laboulaye brought out an edition of Constant’s works in 1861, collectivism was coming into fashion, and Constant was remembered as an author of French romantic literature (mainly Adolphe). This view continues in some quarters—a 1993 biography of Constant, by French literature professor Dennis Wood, belittles his political philosophy. Elizabeth Schermerhorn’s 1924 biography remains the best in English.

But twentieth-century government horrors have brought recognition that Constant had fantastic insight. Political theorists F.A. Hayek and Isaiah Berlin helped revive interest in Constant’s political writings during the 1950s, and there was a new Paris edition of his works in 1957. In 1980, the Institut Benjamin Constant got started in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the first English-language assessment of Constant’s political contributions was published—Benjamin Constant’s Philosophy of Liberalism by Brown University political science professor Guy H. Dodge. Cambridge University Press published the first English translation of Constant’s major political writings in 1988. New documents have come to light, and since 1993 the prestigious German publisher Max Niemeyer Verlag has issued the first three of a projected 40 volumes of Constant’s publications, memoirs, and correspondence. Let us hope that more people will discover the genius of this great thinker for liberty.

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The freedom fighter Marquis de Lafayette changed history. He helped defeat the British at Yorktown, winning American independence. In France, he helped topple two kings and an emperor. Jean-Antoine Houdon, the great eighteenth-century sculptor who created busts of many great heroes, dubbed Lafayette “the apostle and defender of liberty in the two worlds.”

Cornell University historian Stanley Idzerda remarked, “Lafayette knew only one cause during his long lifetime: human liberty. As a young man he risked his life in war and revolution for that cause. In middle age, living under the barely concealed dictatorship of Napoleon, a regime he detested, he recalled how he had been wounded, denounced, condemned to death, despised, imprisoned, beggared, and exiled—all in the service of human liberty. Poor, powerless, and with no prospects at that time, Lafayette asked, ‘How have I loved liberty? With the enthusiasm of religion, with the rapture of love, with the conviction of geometry: that is how I have always loved liberty.’”

Lafayette was the principal author of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. “There exist certain natural rights inherent in every society of which not only one nation but all the nations together could not justly deprive an individual,” he insisted. He maintained these rights aren’t “subject to the condition of nationality,” and they include “freedom of conscience and opinions, judicial guarantees, the right to come and go.” He promoted free trade. He fought for religious toleration and freedom of the press. When the French government harassed immigrants, he sheltered many in his own house. He spent a lot of his own money to help free slaves in French colonies.

He did more than anybody else to link friends of liberty everywhere. He was in touch with Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson, and James Fenimore Cooper, among other Americans. He was a friend of Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, Germaine de Stael, Benjamin Constant, and Horace Say in France. He corresponded with Charles James Fox in Britain and Simón Bolvar, who helped secure the independence of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Lafayette encouraged Italian liberals, Spanish constitutionalists, and Greek and Polish freedom fighters.

Lafayette stood out in a crowd. He was tall and bony with green eyes. “Pale, lanky, red-haired, with a pointed nose and receding forehead,” added biographer Vincent Cronin, “he looked less like an officer than a wading bird. Nor was he a shining courtier, being slow to speak and awkward.”

From the beginning, though, Lafayette impressed people. His cousin, the Marquis de Bouille recalled, “I found the young La Fayette remarkably well informed for his age, astonishingly forward in reason and reasoning, and extraordinary for his reflections, his wisdom, his moderation, his cool head and his discernment.”

Washington saluted Lafayette’s abilities as a strategist and commander: “He possesses uncommon military talents, is of quick and sound judgment, persevering, and enterprizing without rashness, and besides these, he is of a very conciliating temper and perfectly sober, which are qualities that rarely combine in the same person.”

Jefferson, representing American interests in Paris, offered this candid assessment to Madison: “The Marquis de La Fayette is a most valuable auxiliary to me. His zeal is unbounded, & his weight with those in power, great. His education having been merely military, commerce was an unknown field to him. But his good sense enabling him to comprehend perfectly whatever is explained to him, his agency has been very efficacious. He has a great deal of sound genius, and is well remarked by the King, & rising in popularity. He has nothing against him, but the suspicion of republican principles. I think he will one day be of the ministry. His foible is, a canine appetite for popularity and fame; but he will get above this.” Jefferson told Lafayette: “according to the ideas of our country, we do not permit ourselves to speak even truths, when they may have the air of flattery. I content myself, therefore, with saying once and for all, that I love you, your wife and children.”

The respected Lafayette scholar Louis Gottschalk wrote that “For most of the last fifty years of his long life, he was the outstanding champion in Europe of freedom—freedom for all men, everywhere.”

Early Life

Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier was born September 6, 1757, in Chateau de Chavaniac, Auvergne, in south-central France. His father was Michel Louis Christophe Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, Colonel of the French Grenadiers. He descended from a long line of warrior-aristocrats, one of whom fought with Joan of Arc against the English. Lafayette’s mother was Marie-Louise-Julie de la Riviere, whose family had money.

Lafayette’s tutors stressed Catholic doctrine and the battlefield exploits of his ancestors, but he did acquire some proficiency in the classics. “I was very good in Latin,” he recalled. “I wasn’t made to take Greek, which annoyed me. I spent four years at the College [de Plessis]. My essays were quite outstanding.” One of his early heroes was Vercingétorix, who had defended Gaul against Julius Caesar.

When he was two, his father was killed by a British cannon ball at the battle of Minden (about 40 miles west of Hannover, Germany) during the Seven Years War, and he became the Marquis de La Fayette (as he spelled it before the French Revolution). His mother pulled strings to find a place at Versailles, where the king held court. She died in April 1770, and his grandfather, the Marquis de la Riviere, died soon afterward, leaving Lafayette an inheritance which assured him of a sizeable annual income of around 120,000 livres.

At 15, he met 14-year-old Marie Adrienne Francoise de Noailles (known as Adrienne) and fell in love. The wealth and power of the Noailles family were rivaled only by the royal house of Bourbon. They married about a year later, on April 11, 1774. According to biographer André Maurois, she had “large, brooding eyes and an air of alert intelligence.” Her aunt the Comtesse de Tesse, remarked that Adrienne rooted her views in “the Catechism and the Rights of Man.”

Lafayette became impatient with positions in the Noailles cavalry, and he didn’t see a future for himself at the royal court. He heard insurgent Americans were looking for French recruits, so he called on Silas Deane, a Connecticut merchant who was representing the Continental Congress. He wanted to volunteer at his own expense. He told Deane: “it is when danger threatens that I wish to share your fortune.”

Lafayette bought a little two-gun merchant ship named La Victoire and set sail for America on April 20, 1777. It was an anxious voyage, because the ship would have been easy prey for a faster, better-armed British privateer. But Lafayette was lucky, and after 54 days at sea, he arrived at the Bay of Georgetown, South Carolina. He sailed on to Charleston. He spent a month traveling to Philadelphia, mostly on horseback.

The Americans gave him the brush-off because previous French volunteers had proven to be a troublesome lot. But General George Washington was in desperate straits. There were only about 11,000 men in his army, they were poorly equipped, and they were being chased by British General William Howe. Moreover, Benjamin Franklin, whom Lafayette had met in Paris, sent letters asking Washington to serve as a “discreet friend” to Lafayette, “to advise him if necessary with a friendly affection.” Franklin was confident that a generous reception for Lafayette would make the French more willing to help America.

Lafayette and Washington

Lafayette first met Washington during a dinner at Philadelphia’s City Tavern, July 31, 1777. He welcomed Lafayette as the American forces began moving to evade an attack by British General Charles Cornwallis. They were overrun at Brandywine, Pennsylvania, and Lafayette was wounded in the leg. Then Washington’s forces suffered serious losses fighting British General William Howe around Philadelphia.

Lafayette shared the hardships at Valley Forge in 1777-1778. “It is here,” he explained to his wife, “that the American army will spend the winter in little huts which are scarcely more cheerful than a cell. . . . Everything tells me to leave, but honor bids me stay, and really, when you understand in detail the circumstances I am in, which the army is in, as is my friend who commands it, and the whole American cause, you will forgive me, my dear heart, you will even pardon me, and I dare almost say that you will congratulate me.”

Washington’s enemies tried to lure Lafayette into schemes that would undermine Washington’s command, but Lafayette asserted his loyalty. He wrote Washington: “I am bound to your destiny, I shall follow it and will serve you with my sword and with all my faculties.” Washington replied: “I am well aware that you are quite incapable of entertaining plans whose success depends upon lies and that your spirit is too high to stoop to seek a reputation by ignoble means and by intrigue.” He became Washington’s information officer.

On May 18, 1778, Washington directed Lafayette to lead a force up between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers and disrupt British communications with Philadelphia. He displayed tactical genius by cleverly ambushing several British detachments, then maneuvering his men back through British lines. The British pulled their soldiers out of Philadelphia and headed for New York, and Washington asked Lafayette to pursue them and inflict as much damage as possible. Working with General Charles Lee, who turned out to be incompetent, Lafayette was nearly routed by the British at Monmouth, New Jersey.

He decided to see how he could help the cause by returning to France and leading French forces against the British. He bid farewell to Washington, boarded L’Alliance in Boston, and sailed on January 11, 1779, bearing a letter from Washington to Benjamin Franklin. At Lafayette’s suggestion France would send ships and soldiers to America. Of course, Lafayette would have loved to command the force, but he was only 22, and there were others with considerable seniority.

Lafayette versus the British

Lafayette proved himself extraordinarily resourceful at harassing the British—and escaping from them. One engagement with about 2,500 British soldiers at Petersburg, Virginia, was marked by the death of General William Phillips—the same man who, as an artillery officer 22 years before, had ordered the cannon fire that blew Lafayette’s father to bits.

Traitor General Benedict Arnold took over Phillips’s command, and he was to be joined by General Charles Cornwallis, marching up from South Carolina, and by General Henry Clinton, coming down from New York.

Cornwallis’s primary mission was to cut off the South from the North, destroy its arsenals, and, if possible, capture Lafayette, who had built up a force of about 3,500, including a 40-man cavalry and six artillery pieces—about half the total force led by Cornwallis. Lafayette retreated as Cornwallis advanced. He was careful to avoid being outflanked by always staying on higher ground north and west of Cornwallis. His men found myriad ways to cross the rivers of tidewater Virginia and harass Cornwallis from positions that were hard to assault.

Cornwallis approached Fredericksburg, then withdrew toward Williamsburg, and Lafayette followed. Hundreds of “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s Pennsylvanians met Lafayette at the banks of the North Anna River. He was joined by General Daniel Morgan’s riflemen and by skilled horsemen from Virginia and Maryland. Lafayette’s forces grew almost as large as those of Cornwallis. The British commander dispatched troops to destroy Lafayette’s military supplies stored at Albemarle Old Court House, but Lafayette led his forces through backwoods trails and thwarted the British.

War’s End

On May 31, 1781, Washington wrote Lafayette saying that at last he and Rochambeau agreed to attack Clinton in New York. This, Washington believed, would force the British to withdraw forces from Virginia. Washington told Lafayette he could head north if he still wished, providing he could find a capable leader for his forces. The British intercepted Washington’s message, and Clinton concluded that he was more vulnerable than Cornwallis. He ordered Cornwallis to establish a defensive position and send some of his forces to New York. Lafayette followed Cornwallis every step of the way, often through night maneuvers that eluded British detection. Two of his subordinates subsequently marched into a British trap, and a reported 139 Americans were killed, and Lafayette spurred his horse through the gunfire to rally his troops. It was a defeat, but Cornwallis withdrew as he dispatched forces to New York, and he planned on leaving Virginia for Charleston. Lafayette regained Williamsburg.

His forces dwindled to about 1,500 as men went home and tended their fields, but he kept tabs on Cornwallis. Lafayette feared he would miss the most important action. He wrote Washington asking for an assignment in New York. Meanwhile, Clinton ordered Cornwallis to maintain a presence on the Chesapeake Bay—a staging area for attacks on Philadelphia—by occupying Yorktown.

On July 31, Washington ordered Lafayette to rebuild his forces as fast as possible and make the cavalry strong. He knew what that meant: keep Cornwallis bottled up on the peninsula where Yorktown stood. A subsequent dispatch confirmed that Admiral Francois-Joseph-Paul, Comte de Grasse, was sailing to Yorktown from French possessions in the Caribbean. And Washington and Rochambeau were on the way!

Lafayette amassed provisions. He beefed up his intelligence about British maneuvers. He repositioned his forces. He begged Virginia governor Thomas Nelson for help: “We have not 2000 militia fit to bring into the field. We are destitute of ammunition, and the army living from hand to mouth and unable to follow the enemy. So that on the arrival of the Spanish, French and American forces, I may be reduced to the cruel necessity to announce that I have not, that it was not in my power to stop the enemy.”

On August 30, Admiral de Grasse’s fleet—six frigates and 28 battleships, with 15,000 sailors and 3,100 marines on board—reached Yorktown. These ships could prevent Cornwallis from escaping by water, and they could help bring American and French soldiers to the scene more quickly. Soon Lafayette commanded over 5,500 regular troops, and there were another 3,000 militiamen. Cornwallis’s 8,800 English, Hessian, and provincial troops were outnumbered by the time Washington and Rochambeau arrived on September 9.

“Through his own good luck and the bad judgment of Generals Clinton and Cornwallis had won for him much of his success,” wrote historian Louis Gottschalk, “less perseverance or more rashness might easily have led to the annihilation of the force which he had commanded. If Cornwallis now faced the prospect of surrender, it was in large part because Lafayette had persisted where others might have given up or had been cautious where others, yielding to an alluring temptation, might have proved too bold.”

The siege of Yorktown began on October 6, 1781. Lafayette was in the thick of the action, leading the capture of British positions. Cornwallis was almost out of food and ammunition, and about a quarter of his men were ill. He surrendered at noon, October 19. British soldiers marched between lines of American and French soldiers as a band played a melody called “The World Turned Upside Down.” When the British tried to slight the Americans by looking only at the French, Lafayette ordered his drum-major to start playing “Yankee Doodle” as the British handed over their weapons and returned to Yorktown under militia guard. Historian Gottschalk observed: “No other person (except perhaps De Grasse) had contributed so much or so directly to the capture of one of England’s finest armies as had the young general fresh from the ‘Society’ of Paris.”

Continuing Efforts for Liberty

Back in France, after the war, Lafayette suggested that he and Washington launch a joint venture against slavery: “permit me to propose a plan to you which might become greatly beneficial to the Black Part of Mankind. Let us unite in purchasing a small estate where we may try the experiment to free the Negroes, and use them only as tenants—such an example as yours might render it a general practice, and if we succeed in America, I will cheerfully devote a part of my time to render the method fascionable [sic] in the West Indias. If it be a wild scheme, I had rather be mad that way, than to be thought wise on the other track.” Washington replied that he would welcome such an opportunity.

Lafayette arrived in New York on August 4, 1784. Two weeks later, he was at Mount Vernon at Washington’s invitation. He spent 11 days there, then visited other American friends and by November he was back with Washington. They traveled together to Annapolis. They bid farewell on December 1. Washington wrote Lafayette, “I felt all that love, respect and attachment for you, with which length of years, close connexion and your merits have inspired me. I often asked myself, as our carriages distended, whether that was the last sight I should have of you. And tho’ I wished to say no, my fears answered yes.” Lafayette and Washington never saw each other again.

Lafayette worked tirelessly for liberty. He promoted freer trade between France and the United States. “There now exist in this kingdom many obstacles to trade which I hope, by little and little, will be eradicated. . . . I think my present duty is, and it ever shall be my rule, to do that in which I hope to serve the United States.”

Lafayette became a charter member of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. He was an honorary member of the New York Manumission Society and the British Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. In 1785, Lafayette and his wife spent 125,000 livres to buy two plantations in Cayenne, French Guiana. These came with 48 black slaves who were subsequently emancipated and given some land with which to start providing their own livelihood. The aim was to show how emancipation could be handled successfully.

Revolution in France

The slavery issue was soon overtaken by revolution. The French government had incurred enormous debts during the Seven Years War with Britain, and the situation worsened when the government gave substantial aid to the American struggle against Britain. Half the annual budget went to serve the debt, another quarter was spent on the armed forces, and the royal court at Versailles was a costly drain.

The weak-willed Louis XVI had caved in to special interests, dismissing his finance minister, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, who, during his brief tenure (1774-1776), had cut government spending, abolished monopolies, abolished internal trade restrictions, and abolished forced labor. For a while, Turgot’s successor, Jacques Necker, had covered soaring deficits with borrowing, but this had about reached its limit, and government spending cuts couldn’t be delayed any further. Thousands of people, long dependent on government checks, were desperate. Moreover, inefficient, high-cost producers shut down as consumers gained the choice of spending their money on less expensive goods from Britain and elsewhere. Unemployment in Paris soared to an estimated 50 percent.

Louis XVI intensified demands that the Parlement of Paris approve new taxes. They countered that approval must come from the Estates-General, an assembly of clergy, nobles, and taxpayers (known as the “Third Estate”), which hadn’t met in a century and a half. The nobles who dominated the parliament figured they would dominate a new Estates-General, which is what Louis XVI was afraid of.

In 1787, the king nominated 143 lawyers, judges, and other influential people to the Assembly of Notables, and Lafayette was among them. Although this Assembly could only advise the king, Lafayette hoped that it might persuade the king to limit his absolute power. When that failed, he became a vocal member of the opposition. He constantly spoke out against taxation—and in favor of liberty. After Louis XVI insisted on new taxes, Lafayette declared: “The oriental despotism of the regime enfuriates me.” Lafayette called for a national assembly.

On July 5, 1788, Louis XVI agreed that the following May he would summon the Estates-General. Representatives would have to be elected and an agenda drawn up. Clergy, nobles, and taxpayers had met and voted separately, which meant that the tax-exempt clergy and nobles would always outweigh the Third Estate. This included taxpaying lawyers, bankers, merchants, artisans, and peasants who didn’t want to be forever dominated. The king acceded to demands that the Third Estate have as many representatives as clergy and nobles combined.

The Estates-General convened at Versailles in May 1789. The 47 representatives of the Third Estate declared themselves to be a National Assembly and boycotted the proceedings, demanding that clergy, nobles, and commoners deliberate together and vote individually. Nobles insisted that the king close the hall where the Third Estate met. He did, they continued their deliberations on an indoor tennis court, and Lafayette was there. They swore what became known as the Oath of the Tennis Court on June 20, 1789, to remain in session until they had drafted a constitution for France.

On July 14, 1789, Lafayette was having lunch with the Duke d’Orléans, a rival of Louis XVI, when he heard the distant sound of cannon. He found out that the Bastille, a medieval prison, had been seized by some 800 angry people. Almost a hundred attackers were killed, and the 49-year-old administrator of the Bastille was beheaded by a cook with a butcher’s knife. The Bastille held only seven prisoners at the time, but it had come to symbolize the corrupt regime. Its fall to commoners launched the French Revolution.

A disgruntled lawyer named Maximilien Robespierre described it with what would become his bywords, “punish,” “terror,” and “victim.” He was a leader of the Jacobins, who got their name because they began meeting in a hall which once belonged to Jacobin monks. Generally well-to-do, the Jacobins promoted egalitarian doctrines with force and violence.

The Declaration of Rights

Lafayette believed if anything good was to be accomplished, the aims of the revolution must be spelled out in a way that would win the hearts of people. Accordingly, for months he had been drafting what became the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Lafayette was inspired by the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and his draft reflected his view that the primary threat to liberty was royal absolutism. He affirmed the right of the individual to “assure his property, liberty, honor, and his life.” He advocated separation of powers, limited taxation, and freedom of speech. He carefully specified how the constitution could be revised. In January 1789 he gave this draft to Jefferson, who praised it and sent along a copy to James Madison, then contemplating a Bill of Rights for America.

As the National Assembly debated the Declaration between July 11 and August 26, more members became convinced the primary threat to liberty was mob violence rather than royal absolutism, and they insisted on somewhat more conservative language. The final draft stressed obedience to law. It was more specific on freedom of thought. It specified freedom of religion. It emphasized the importance of secure private property. It didn’t say anything about amending the constitution. Despite these differences, the final version was based more on Lafayette’s draft than any other—almost all of his first five paragraphs were incorporated into the final version. While less eloquent than the immortal opening lines of the American Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted on August 27, offered a more fully developed vision of liberty.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen appeared in thousands of broadsheets, pamphlets, and books. It was read in public places.

As for specific constitutional arrangements, Lafayette believed that a separation of powers was essential. He favored a bicameral legislature with a Chamber of Representatives, a lower house (short terms) that could initiate legislation, and the Senate, an upper house (six-year terms) that could exercise a “suspensive” veto on legislation, preventing enactment for perhaps a year. Similarly, he thought that legislative power should be subject to check by a king with a suspensive veto, preventing enactment through two elections—unless overridden by a two-thirds vote in the Chamber of Representatives.

But there was a bitter split in the National Assembly over checks and balances. Lafayette asked his friend Jefferson to host a dinner for eight National Assembly leaders, but despite the Virginian’s benevolent influence, the split remained as deep as ever. On September 10, the Assembly voted 490 to 89 for a legislature with a single chamber. It supported a suspensive veto for the king, giving Lafayette a partial victory.

Citizen militias formed throughout France, and they came together as the National Guard, which served the National Assembly. Lafayette was appointed commander of the Paris National Guard. “The National Assembly,” he declared, “recognizes with pleasure that all France owes the Constitution which is going to ensure her happiness to the great efforts for public liberty just made by the Parisians.” Soldiers throughout Paris swore allegiance to Lafayette, which seemed to give him more power than the king. Lafayette used his power mainly to save people from being murdered by mobs.

In the National Assembly, Lafayette was pushing for reforms. He introduced a measure for abolishing aristocratic privileges, and it passed on August 4. He proposed major reforms of criminal justice—accused persons must be provided with legal counsel, they must have access to all documents in their case, they must be able to confront witnesses, and trials must be public.

During the night of June 20, 1791, Louis XVI secretly made his “flight to Varennes,” near the Belgian frontier, an attempt at rallying royalists and, if necessary, joining the Austrian army mobilized against the Revolution. Lafayette awakened his house guest, Rights of Man author Thomas Paine, and exclaimed: “The birds have flown away!” Outraged, since he had assured people that the king agreed to stay put, he signed the first order in French history for the arrest of a king, and he brought the humiliated royal family back to Paris.

On September 14, 1791, Louis XVI abandoned royal absolutism as he signed the Constitution.

This wasn’t good enough for fanatics who were gaining more influence every day. Mob violence became endemic. Lafayette was branded an enemy of the nation who must be guillotined. On August 17, 1792, he was dismissed from the National Guard, an almost certain prelude to execution. Lafayette headed for the Belgian border, on his way to Holland. By fleeing the country, according to a 1792 decree, he forfeited all his properties.

Imprisonment

Lafayette was detained in Rochefort, Belgium, which was controlled by the Austrian Emperor Francois II. Although Austria welcomed French royalist émigrés, Lafayette was considered a dangerous revolutionary. He was sent off to Wesel in western Germany, where he was placed in solitary confinement in a dark, damp, moldy, rat-infested dungeon. After about a year, the Prussian government agreed to serve as jailer for enemies of Austria, and Lafayette was transferred east to a fortress at Magdeburg, about 75 miles from Berlin—another dungeon. By January 1794, he had been transferred further east, a 12-day journey through bitter-cold weather to yet another dungeon at Neisse, near the Polish frontier.

The Prussians decided that Austria should jail its own enemies, and in the spring, Lafayette was transferred to Olmutz, Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic). Lafayette was stripped of virtually all possessions except a few books, including, ironically, a copy of Thomas Paine’s radical Common Sense.

He wrote a friend that “Liberty is the constant subject of my solitary meditations. . . . It is what one of my friends once called my ‘holy madness.’ And whether some miracle releases me from here, or whether I testify upon the scaffold, ‘liberty, equality’ will be my final words. Here, I can fight against the tyrants only for my soul and my body.” He expressed concern “that the Blacks who cultivate it [his estate in Cayenne] still keep their liberty.”

Meanwhile, during the Reign of Terror in 1793 and 1794, when Robespierre ordered some 60 executions a day, 40,000 altogether, Adrienne Lafayette’s mother, grandmother, and sister had been guillotined, and Adrienne had been imprisoned in Brioude and Paris. She was released thanks, in part, to efforts by American diplomat James Monroe, who had also helped free Thomas Paine from a French prison. Adrienne arranged for 14-year-old George Washington Lafayette to find a safe haven in America. He bore her letter to George Washington that said “I send you my son.”

Adrienne worked singlemindedly to see Lafayette. As Lafayette descendant and scholar Réné de Chambrun explained, “Lafayette had not spoken to a human being and had been completely isolated from the outside world for nearly one year, when suddenly, on October 15, 1795, the door of his narrow cell was thrown open.” In came Lafayette’s wife and two daughters. It was the most “dramatic instant of his life.”

Prison conditions took their toll on Adrienne. She developed fevers, her arms became swollen, and there were open sores on her legs. When she asked to visit a physician in Vienna, she was told that if she left she could never return. She stayed, and her health worsened.

George Washington wrote a confidential letter to Francois II, pleading for their freedom and offering the United States as a sanctuary. In the British parliament, Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan championed Lafayette.

Freedom

The October 17, 1797, Treaty of Campo-Formio stipulated, among other things, that Lafayette and his wife would be released. They went to Holstein, a province of Denmark that wasn’t likely to become embroiled in war between France and England. On Christmas Day 1798, George Washington wrote his last letter to Lafayette, expressing relief that his friend was free.

Finally in November 1799, Napoleon agreed they could return. Most of their properties had been confiscated and sold during the French Revolution. They were left with La Grange, an abandoned fifteenth-century castle about 35 miles east of Paris. Jefferson pleaded with Lafayette to make America his home. But Lafayette was convinced that if he left France, Napoleon would never let him return.

Réné le Chambrun emphasized that “Madame Lafayette’s greatest concern was to find the hidden ditch where the beheaded bodies of her grandmother, mother, and sister Louise lay with the other victims of the Terror. With her sister . . . they one day found the dreaded hole. They were too poor to buy the surrounding land, so they raised a subscription among the victims’ kin. They built a chapel on the site of the one the Revolution had destroyed at Picpus.”

Despite all he had suffered, Lafayette remained defiant. In 1802, Napoleon wanted to be named a consul for life, but Lafayette expressed his opposition. “The French people have too well known their rights to have forgotten them,” he declared.

In 1807, Adrienne suffered the same painful symptoms she had in prison. By October, she developed a fever and went into a delerium. Her family gathered around. On Christmas Eve, she put her arm around Lafayette’s neck and whispered, “Je suis toute a vous” (“I am all yours”). She groped for his fingers, squeezed them, and was gone.

Lafayette, Réné le Chambrun explained, “seldom left La Grange, where he led a farmer’s life.” He improved fertilization techniques. He introduced American corn to France. He planted apple and pear orchards, and he did a good business selling cider. He introduced new breeds of cattle, hogs, and sheep. He did well enough that he paid off debts and achieved some financial security.

Every day he arose at five in the morning, Chambrun reported, and “remained in bed for two hours writing friends of liberty all over the world: Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese, North and South Americans . . . and, alone on his knees, holding in his hand a small portrait of Adrienne and a lock of her hair, he would spend a quarter of an hour in meditative devotion.”

Lafayette’s Return to Public Life

After Napoleon’s downfall in 1814, Lafayette returned to public life. He visited Germaine de Stael, who, after a decade of exile, had revived her influential liberal salon. He protested as Napoleon’s successor, Louis XVIII, affirmed the divine right of kings and issued one decree after another. He lashed out at aristocrats scrambling back into power.

When Napoleon attempted his comeback, claiming a conversion to liberalism, the supposedly nave Lafayette declared, “I see no sign of his doing so.” The intellectual Benjamin Constant, who had bet on Napoleon’s conversion to liberal principles, told Lafayette: “You are my conscience!” Constant persuaded Lafayette to seek election for the Chamber of Deputies. He became a deputy from the department of Seine-et-Marne.

Defeated at Waterloo, Napoleon demanded dictatorial power. Lafayette rose in the Chamber of Deputies. “When for the first time in long years,” he declared, “I raise a voice that the old friends of liberty will still recognize, I feel called upon, Messieurs, to speak to you of the dangers confronting the nation, which you alone, just now, have the power to save. . . . This is the moment for us to rally round the old tricolour standard, the standard of ‘89, the standard of liberty, of equality and public order; it is that alone which we have to defend against pretensions abroad and assaults at home.” He proposed five resolutions that, among other things, asserted the supremacy of parliamentary government.

Napoleon, still the most feared military commander in Europe, was furious. Lafayette urged his fellow deputies to join him in telling the Emperor that “after all that has happened, his abdication has become necessary to save the nation.” Napoleon abdicated.

Lafayette withdrew from politics, but he remained an inspiration to friends of liberty everywhere. When fanatical royalists began to terrorize much of France, friends encouraged Lafayette to seek office again. In 1818, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies from Sarthe. He started a group called Friends of the Liberty of the Press, and he pleaded for toleration. He urged that people “return to the national, constitutional and peaceable path—the path of good will. We have so many public and personal interests to conserve, so many common sorrows to deplore, so many private qualities to recognize in one another, when they are not denatured by the partisan spirit.”

In 1823, Lafayette accepted President James Monroe’s invitation for a farewell tour of America. He declined Monroe’s offer to send a warship for him and instead traveled aboard the ordinary packet ship Cadmus. He arrived on August 15, 1824, and was greeted by some 30,000 people. An estimated 50,000 cheered Lafayette as he rode a wagon drawn by four white horses to New York’s City Hall. People threw flowers at him. Mothers brought their children for his blessing. Some 6,000 people attended a ball in his honor. He began a 13-month tour through all 24 states.

“I see you are to visit York-Town,” Jefferson wrote Lafayette in Boston, “my spirit will be there with you; but I am too enfeebled by old age to make the journey. . . . Our village of Charlottesville insists upon receiving you, and would have claimed you as its guest, if in the neighborhood of Monticello you could be anybody’s guest but mine . . . God bless and keep you; may He permit me to see you again and to embrace you.”

Lafayette commended Americans for what they had accomplished: “In the United States the sovereignty of the people, reacquired by a glorious and spotless Revolution, universally acknowledged, guaranteed not only by a constitution . . . but by legal procedures which are always within the scope of the public will. It is also exercised by free, general, and frequent elections. . . . Ten million people, without a monarchy, without a court, without an aristocracy, without trade-guilds, without unnecessary or unpopular taxes, without a state police, a constabulary, or any disorder, have acquired the highest degree of freedom, security, prosperity, and happiness, which human civilization could have imagined.”

At Bunker Hill, Massachusetts, the orator Daniel Webster declared: “Heaven saw fit to ordain, that the electric spark of liberty should be conducted through you, from the New World to the Old.” Lafayette entered Philadelphia, escorted by four wagons carrying about 160 Revolutionary War veterans. He stopped at the Brandywine battlefield where he had been wounded. He returned to Yorktown, which was still in ruins. Big crowds welcomed him everywhere—for instance, 10,000 in Newburgh (New York), 50,000 in Baltimore, and 70,000 in Boston. He was cheered in Richmond, Columbia, Charleston, Savannah, Augusta, Montgomery, Mobile, New Orleans, Natchez, St. Louis, Nashville, Lexington, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Albany. He appeared at Catholic churches, Protestant churches, and Masonic lodge gatherings. He attended receptions open to everybody, and he publicly welcomed blacks and Indians who came. Lafayette descended to the vault of George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon. There was a reception at the University of Virginia. He saw John Adams in Quincy, Massachusetts, and James Madison in Montpelier, Virginia.

And Lafayette reached Monticello. “The Marquis got out of his barouche and limped as fast as he could toward the house,” explained biographer Brand Whitlock. “Between the white columns of the portico appeared a tall, spare figure of a man stooped with age, wearing the swallow-tailcoat, the long waistcoat and the high stock of another epoch; he had cut off his queue, and his thin white locks hung about his hollow temples and lean cheeks; he tottered down the steps, and came towards him.

“‘Ah, Jefferson!’ cried Lafayette.

“The two old men broke into a shuffling run.

“‘Ah, Lafayette!’ cried Jefferson.

“No need for eloquence now! They burst into tears and fell into each other’s arms.”

Sometime later, Lafayette’s secretary Auguste Levasseur described an awesome sight in Charlottesville: “the Nation’s Guest, seated at the patriotic banquet between Jefferson and Madison.” On September 7, Lafayette went down the Potomac River on the steamboat Mount Vernon, boarded the frigate Brandywine, and sailed back to France.

Lafayette began spending winter months at 6 rue d’Anjou, Paris, and there held Tuesday evening receptions that attracted liberals from America and Europe. The American author James Fenimore Cooper reported that the gatherings “are exceedingly well attended.” Benjamin Constant and Alexander von Humboldt attended, as did members of the Chamber of Deputies. Historian Lloyd Kramer noted that “Lafayette’s soirees in Paris, like his long conversations with guests at La Grange, thus facilitated contact between different generations in much the same way as they contributed to new connections between politicians and writers or between his French friends and foreigners.”

Meanwhile, in 1824, Charles X had become king of France and reasserted the power of church and throne. The Roman Catholic Church regained control over French schools, and anyone convicted of committing a sacrilege in a church building could be put to death. In 1830, the Chamber of Deputies voted “no confidence” in the ministry, the king called for new elections, and voters supported the king’s outspoken opponents. On July 26, 1830, the king issued four decrees that dissolved the new Chamber of Deputies, suppressed freedom of the press, restricted the voting franchise of merchants and bankers and announced new elections based on the restricted franchise.

The day after the decrees were announced, Paris erupted in revolt. People barricaded the streets July 27, 28, and 29. The army refused to shoot at the rebels. Some wanted a democratic republic, while others wanted stronger constitutional limitations on the monarchy, and still others were mainly concerned about job security.

The 73-year-old Lafayette declared that the regime of Charles X was politically finished and that it was time for a new government. “Make a revolution,” he urged. “Without it, we shall have made nothing but a riot.” As in 1789, he was asked to head the National Guard, and he accepted, but he declined suggestions that he become president of a French republic. While Paris seemed to favor a republic, most people in the provinces feared violent upheaval and wanted a constitutional monarchy. Lafayette concluded that “what the French people need today is a popular throne surrounded by republican institutions, but altogether republican.” He believed the top priority for liberty was to preserve the authority of the Chamber of Deputies.

He proposed that the Duke d’Orléans become king. The duke was related to the Bourbon dynasty, had been in the republican army during the French Revolution, and he agreed to observe constitutional limitations on royal power. Accordingly, the Chamber of Deputies offered him the throne on August 7, and he became Louis-Philippe, “the bourgeois king.” He proved to be an adroit public relations man—displaying the revolutionary tricolor flag, calling himself “king of the French” (rather than king of France), dressing in austere dark suits instead of opulent robes. Louis-Philippe made the Chamber of Peers an elected rather than hereditary body, and the voting franchise was doubled to include about 200,000 business people who possessed some property.

Lafayette defended individuals jailed for political offenses. He opposed capital punishment. He denounced slavery. He supported insurgents in Belgium. He was a champion of Polish freedom, and—defying government restrictions on refugees—he hid Polish patriots like Antoine Ostrowski and Joachim Lelewell at his La Grange estate.

In early February 1834, Lafayette reported pain and fatigue, perhaps triggered by prolonged exposure to bitter cold air. He had pneumonia. His children stayed with him. At about 4 o’clock in the morning, May 20, 1834, Lafayette pressed to his lips a medallion with a picture of Adrienne and took his last breath. He was 77. The funeral service was at the Church of the Assumption, Paris. Tens of thousands of people turned out to see 3,000 National Guards accompany Lafayette’s coffin to the humble Picpus cemetery, where he would join Adrienne and so many guillotined victims of the French Revolution. Lafayette was laid to rest in American soil he had brought back on the Brandywine.

Lafayette was idolized during the nineteenth century, especially in the United States. His portrait seemed to be everywhere—American Friends of Lafayette has over a thousand historic portraits of him. Dozens of American towns, counties, and schools were named after him. “Pronounce him one of the first men of his age,” John Quincy Adams proclaimed in his tribute, “and you have not done him justice.”

But most twentieth-century historians—especially French—debunked Lafayette as a vain, immature, mediocre, doctrinaire simpleton. Many conservatives, including his descendants, viewed him as a traitor to his class. Lafayette’s grandson inherited La Grange, and he married a British woman—a Tory. She consigned Lafayette’s books, papers, and other personal possessions to the third-floor attic of the northwest tower, a space which Lafayette had called the “Couloir des Polonais” (“hiding place of free Poles”). The next two generations maintained the Tory ambiance of the place.

Happily, there has come a renewed appreciation for Lafayette. Réné le Chambrun, descended from Lafayette’s daughter Virginie, acquired La Grange in 1955 and explored the northwest tower attic. He and his wife discovered a treasure of letters and mementoes.

Historian Lloyd Kramer recalled the revelation he experienced when he helped edit Cornell University’s vast collection of Lafayette letters, gathered from Lafayette’s birthplace at the Chateau de Chavaniac: “I soon came to realize the historical value of reading ‘primary sources’ and to believe that Lafayette’s life had been far more varied and complex than the ironic, historical narratives suggested.”

Even a tart-tongued biographer like Olivier Bernier acknowledged that “whatever his limitations, it is to Lafayette’s glory that the one idea he seized on was that of liberty. Nothing can replace the right to speak, think, organize, and govern freely: from this all benefits derive. With his vanity, his obstinacy, his self-satisfaction, his thirst for popularity, Lafayette never lost sight of that all-desirable principle. For that, he deserved the gratitude of his contemporaries and the esteem of later generations. In a world where liberty is in very short supply, there are worse heroes than a man who never stopped worshipping freedom.” So the one thing Lafayette’s critics concede is the most important of all. He still stands tall as the great hero of two worlds.

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By the mid-eighteenth century, a number of authors had expressed the liberating vision that came to be known as laissez faire. Anne Robert Jacques Turgot put it into action.

As regional administrator and later comptroller-general of France, a nation which had succumbed to absolute monarchy, he took giant steps for liberty. He spoke out for religious toleration. He granted freedom of expression. He gave people freedom to pursue the work of their choice. He cut government spending. He opposed inflation and made a case for gold. He abolished some onerous taxes and trade restrictions. He abolished monopoly privileges. He abolished forced labor.

Turgot was respected by leading thinkers for liberty, including the Baron de Montesquieu, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Benjamin Franklin. Referring to Turgot, Adam Smith wrote that I had the happiness of his acquaintance, and, I flattered myself, even of his friendship and esteem. After meeting Turgot in 1760, Voltaire told a friend: I have scarcely ever seen a man more lovable or better informed. Jean Baptiste Say, who inspired so many French libertarians during the nineteenth century, declared, There are hardly any works which can yield to the journalist and to the statesman an ampler harvest of facts and of instruction than may be found in the writings of Turgot. Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, a French champion of laissez faire and founder of the American industrial family, paid his friend Thomas Jefferson the supreme compliment by calling him the American Turgot.

Turgot displayed remarkable vision. For instance, he predicted the American Revolution in 1750, more than two decades before George Washington and Benjamin Franklin saw it coming. In 1778, Turgot warned Americans that slavery is incompatible with a good political constitution. He warned that Americans had more to fear from civil war than foreign enemies. He predicted that Americans are bound to become great, not by war but by culture. Turgot warned French King Louis XVI that unless taxes and government spending were cut, there would be a revolution which might cost him his head. Turgot warned about the dangers of fiat paper money, and when it was resorted to during the French Revolution, the result was ruinous runaway inflation and a military coup. Turgot showed how people could make the transition from absolutism to self-government.

Although few of Turgot’s writings were published in his lifetime, he was ablaze with ideas for liberty. Turgot was much too able a man to write anything insignificant, observed intellectual historian Joseph A. Schumpeter. Commenting on his most important work, a slim volume, Schumpeter noted that it contains a theory of barter, price, and money that, so far as it goes, is almost faultless . . . comprehensive vision of all the essential facts and their interrelations plus excellence of formulation.

Early Life

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot was born in Paris on May 10, 1727, the third and youngest son of Michel tienne Turgot and Madeleine Francoise Martineau. His father was a government official who helped build the Paris sewage system. An awkward child, Turgot didn’t seem to get along with his mother, who reportedly cherished fine manners above all. The family, which had Norman roots, lived comfortably.

Early on, Turgot acquired a love for learning. He attended the College du Plessis where he discovered the theories of English physicist Isaac Newton. It was traditional for the youngest son to become a priest, and accordingly Turgot enrolled at the Saint-Sulpice seminary, where he earned his bachelor of theology and became known as Abbé de Brucourt. He then enrolled at the Sorbonne.

A fellow student named Morellet remarked that The remembrance of Turgot is sweet to all who have known him personally. Already his mind announced all the qualities it afterwards unfolded of sagacity, penetration, and profoundness. He had the simplicity of a child, yet it was compatible with a kind of dignity. Despite a striking physical appearance, Turgot was shy around women. He never married.

Turgot learned English, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and Latin. He translated into French works by Caesar, Homer, Horace, Ovid, Seneca, Virgil, and other classical authors, as well as writings by eighteenth-century authors like Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, and Alexander Pope. He translated David Hume’s essay On the Jealousy of Trade.

Turgot’s first writing on economics was an April 7, 1749, letter to his friend Abbé de Cice. He attacked the doctrines of the Scottish financier John Law, who moved to France and in 1716 began promoting what became a disastrous inflation. Defending gold, Turgot wrote: It is ridiculous to say that metallic money is only a sign of value, the credit of which is founded on the stamp of the king. This stamp is only to certify the weight and the title. Even in its relation to commodities the metal uncoined is of the same price as that coined, the marked value is simply a denomination. This is what Law seems to have been ignorant of in establishing his bank.

It is then as merchandise that coined money is (not the sign) but the common measure of other merchandise, and that not by an arbitrary convention, founded on the glamour of that metal, but because, being fit to be employed in different shapes as merchandise, and having on account of this property a saleable value, a little increased by the use made of it as money and being besides suitable of reduction to a given standard and of being equally divided, we always know the value of it. Gold obtains its price from its rarity.

While at the Sorbonne, in December 1750, Turgot wrote a Latin dissertation (On the successive advances of the Human Mind) which provided an early view of human progress.

Turgot hailed American optimism: Let us turn our eyes away from those sad sights, let us cast them on the immense plains of the interior of America. . . . The soil, hitherto uncultivated, is made fruitful by industrious hands. Laws faithfully observed maintain henceforth tranquillity in these favoured regions. The ravages of war are there unknown. Equality has banished from them poverty and luxury, and preserves there, with liberty, virtue and simplicity of manners; our arts will spread themselves there without our vices. Happy peoples!

By this time, Turgot had second thoughts about entering the priesthood. He confided to his friend Du Pont de Nemours (1739-1817) that it is impossible for me to give myself up, all my life, wearing a mask. Turgot obtained his father’s permission to pursue a law career, and he left the Sorbonne.

With his obvious intelligence and learning, he met many of the leading thinkers of the day, including political philosopher Charles Louis de Secondat (Baron de Montesquieu), philosopher Claude Adrien Helvetius, and mathematician Jean Le Rond D’Alembert. In January 1752, Turgot secured an appointment to a minor government post, deputy councillor of the procurator-general. The following year, he was appointed—presumably after having paid a consideration—to the royal parliament, which functioned as a court. There wasn’t any elected legislative assembly.

Early Work

Turgot’s first published work, Le Conciliateur, appeared in 1754. It was a pamphlet protesting plans to renew religious persecution. As a Catholic addressing Catholics, he wrote: I know of how many wars heresies have been the source, but is not this because we have persisted in persecuting them? The man who believes earnestly believes with still more firmness if we would force him to change his belief without convincing him; he then becomes obstinate, his obstinancy kindles his zeal, his zeal inflames him; we wish to convert him, we have made of him a fanatic, a madman. Men, for their opinions, demand only liberty; if you deprive them of it, you place arms in their hand. Give them liberty, they remain quiet, as the Lutherans were at Strasburg. It is then the very unity in religion we would enforce, and not the different opinions we tolerate, that produces trouble and civil wars.

If the prisons of the Inquisition were terrible, he continued, France itself has had only too many which have echoed the cries of the oppressed conscience. If the former were unjust, why should the latter be authorized? We who condemn with horror the minister of the Church who, by torture, compelled the mind, should we give to our king the right still to subjugate it? We regard with indignation the inflictions which, in Italy and in Spain, obstruct the rights of conscience; the least reflection should prevent our feeling less for the conscience of our own citizens.

Meanwhile, Turgot had befriended Jacques Claude Marie Vincent, Marquis de Gournay (1712-1759), whom intellectual historian Joseph A. Schumpeter called one of the greatest teachers of economics who ever lived. Widely traveled throughout Europe and especially knowledgeable about English and Dutch business practices, the Marquis de Gournay was a follower of Richard Cantillon, the author of Essai Sur La Nature Du Commerce En Général, which offered perhaps the first comprehensive view of free-market operations.

In 1748, Gournay had come into an inheritance, retired from business, and bought himself a government position as inspector of factories. Between 1753 and 1756, he invited Turgot to join him as he visited companies in Anjou, Bourgogne, Bretagne, Dauphine, Languedoc, Lyonnais, Maine, and Provence. Turgot could see that commerce was crucial. Moreover, Gournay’s free-trade principles had an impact on Turgot.

The year Gournay died, Turgot wrote his loge de Gournay [Elegy for Gournay] in which he explained why government officials couldn’t run an economy. For instance: If the Government limits the number of sellers by exclusive privileges or otherwise, it is certain that the consumer will be wronged and that the seller, made sure of selling, will compel him to buy dearly bad articles. If, on the other hand, it is the number of buyers which is diminished by the exclusion of foreigners or of certain persons, then the seller is wronged, and if the injury be carried to the point when the price cannot cover his expenses and risks, he will cease to produce the commodity, its regular supply will thus be endangered, and a famine may be the consequence. The general liberty of buying and selling is therefore the only means to insure on the one side to the seller a price sufficient to encourage production; on the other side to the consumer the best merchandise at the lowest price.

To desire that government should be obliged to prevent fraud from ever occurring would be to desire it to provide head pads for all children who might fall. To assume, by regulations, successfully to prevent all the possible malversations of this nature, is to sacrifice to a chimerical perfection the whole progress of industry.

The Physiocrats

Turgot defended economic liberty in Fondations [Foundations] and Foires et Marchés [Fairs and Markets], articles for Denis Diderot’s famous and widely influential 17-volume Encyclopédie (1751-1772). Somewhere along the line, Turgot had become familiar with the views of the Physiocrats. Economist, editor, and government official Du Pont de Nemours (1739-1817) coined the term from the Greek words physis [let nature] and kratein [rule]. His book Physiocratie appeared in 1768. The brash, bold Du Pont de Nemours became a close friend of Turgot, who was godfather to his third son and suggested the name of this boy—Eleuthere Irénée (freedom and peace)—destined to launch the family colossus, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Cie.

Physiocrat referred to ideas popularized by Francois Quesnay (1694-1774), a nobleman’s son who made himself a surgeon and bought his post as physician to King Louis XV and his influential courtesan Madame de Pompadour. Historians Will and Ariel Durant wrote that although Quesnay was a self-confident dogmatist in his works, he was in person a kindly soul, distinguished by integrity in an immoral milieu.

Quesnay attacked taxes and trade restrictions in his articles for the Encyclopédie (1756), his own little book Tableau économique (1758), and elsewhere. There will be prosperity, he insisted, if each person is free to cultivate his in fields such products as his interests, his means, and the nature of the land suggest to him.

According to historians Will and Ariel Durant, Louis XV asked Quesnay what he would do if he were king. ‘Nothing,’ answered Quesnay. ‘Who, then, would govern?’ ‘The laws’—by which the physiocrat meant the ‘laws’ inherent in the nature of man and governing supply and demand. On September 17, 1754, the king issued an edict abolishing all restrictions on trade in wheat, rye, and corn, but a subsequent crop failure led to higher prices, and there was a clamor for restoring controls. The edicts were rescinded on December 23, 1770.

The political philosophy of the Physiocrats was perhaps best expressed in the 1767 book L’ordre natural et essentiel des sociétés politiques [The Natural and Essential Order of Political Societies] by Pierre-Paul Mercier de la Riviere (1720-1793). Do you wish a society to attain the highest degree of wealth, population, and power? Trust, then, its interests to freedom, and let this be universal. By means of this liberty (which is the essential element of industry) and the desire to enjoy—stimulated by competition and enlightened by experience and example—you are guaranteed that everyone will always act for his own greatest possible advantage, and consequently will contribute with all the power of his particular interest to the general good, both to the ruler and to every member of the society.

On August 8, 1761, Turgot was appointed an intendant (chief administrator) for the provinces of Angomois, Basse-Marche, and Limousin, a region in central France later known as Limoges. As the nineteenth-century historian and thinker Alexis de Tocqueville explained, The intendant was in possession of the whole reality of Government. All the powers which the Council of State itself possessed were accumulated in his hands. Like the Council he was at once administrator and judge. He corresponded with all the Ministers, and in the province was the sole agent of all the measures of the Government.

Limoges was among the poorest regions of France. Almost all the approximately 500,000 people were peasants who lived on chestnuts, rye, and buckwheat. According to the Physiocrat Marquis de Mirabeau (1715-1789), peasants dressed in rags and lived in huts made of clay with a thatch roof, and the most prosperous Limoges farmers could afford to slaughter only one pig a year. Historian Hippolyte Taine, who gathered a tremendous amount of material on living conditions, reported that many peasants used plows which were no better than those of ancient Rome. Turgot remarked, I have seen with pain that in some parishes the curate alone has signed, because no one else could write.

Peasants in Limoges, as elsewhere, were crushed by taxes. Economic historian Florin Aftalion reported there were some 1,600 customs houses throughout France to collect traites as goods passed various points along roads and rivers. For instance, explained Cornell University scholar Andrew Dickson White, on the Loire between Orléans and Nantes, a distance of about two hundred miles, there were twenty-eight custom-houses; and that between Gray and Arles, on the rivers Saone and Rhone, a distance of about three hundred miles, the custom-houses numbered over thirty, causing long delays, and taking from twenty-five to thirty per cent in value of all the products transported.

There were a host of other taxes, including one on salt. The taille amounted to about a sixth of the income of peasants. This came on top of feudal duties and church tithes. Peasants got to keep about a fifth of their income. The taille, from which some 130,000 clergymen and 140,000 aristocrats were exempted, was based on a tax collector’s estimate of a peasant’s ability to pay, which meant appearances. Du Pont de Nemours observed: they [the peasants] did not dare to procure for themselves the number of animals necessary for good farming; they used to cultivate their fields in a poor way so as to pass as poor, which is what they eventually became; they pretended that it was too hard to pay in order to avoid having to pay too much; payments that were inevitably slow were made still slower; they took no pleasure or enjoyment in their food, housing, or dress; their days passed in deprivation and sorrow.

Turgot focused on the most obnoxious taxes, starting with the taille. It wasn’t within his power as a regional official to abolish the taille, but he did what he could. Traditionally, national government finance officials had guessed how much money they were going to spend on wars, maintaining Versailles, bureaucrats, and other things, which determined the amount of tax revenue needed. They demanded about the same portion of taxes from each district as they always had, even though there had been an economic decline in some districts, which effectively meant higher tax rates.

Turgot attributed the economic decline of Limoges to high taxes. He asked that his district’s tax quota be cut by 400,000 livres. It was cut 190,000. Year after year for the 13 years that he was an intendant in Limoges, he pleaded for tax cuts.

Turgot did have the power to abolish the corvée—forced labor—which was the most hated tax on peasants. A remnant of serfdom, this originated as a feudal obligation for peasants to perform a certain amount of labor without pay. The corvée became a demand that peasants work as much as 14 days a year on the king’s roads, breaking, carting, and shoveling stones. Often this came at the worst time, such as when peasants were busy with their harvest. Landlords, who stood to gain more from roads, contributed nothing. As might be expected, forced labor resulted in poor work, and the roads were terrible.

Turgot hired competent contractors to build and improve roads, and some 450 miles of roads were built in Limoges. He defrayed the costs with a moderate tax. Clergymen and aristocrats remained exempt, but at least peasants were free to work their land. Limoges became known as a district with superior roads—the wonder of all travellers, as Turgot biographer W. Walker Stephens put it.

Turgot did much to help improve agriculture. Because tons of grain were lost to the grain moth and corn weevil, he helped the Limoges Society of Agriculture find better storage methods. To help diversify food sources, he urged that peasants grow potatoes. As the Marquis de Condorcet observed in his biography of Turgot, The people at first regarded the potato with disdain and as beneath the dignity of the human species, and they were not reconciled to it till the intendant [Turgot] had caused it to be served at his own table, and to the first class of citizens, and had given it vogue among the fashionable and rich.

Turgot was in touch with others who embraced ideas of liberty. He dined with the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith when he visited Paris in 1765, and later Turgot helped supply Smith with books for his work on The Wealth of Nations. But as intellectual historian Peter Groenewegen has shown, Turgot had little impact on Smith’s writing, since Smith had already formed his principal views. Like the Physiocrats, both men believed in economic liberty, and unlike the Physiocrats, they recognized the importance of commerce.

In 1766 Turgot wrote an 80-page summary of his views for two Chinese students in Paris. This became Réflexions sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses [Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches]. It explained much about how free markets work and made a case for laissez-faire policy. Although Turgot wasn’t a Physiocrat, he shared their commitment for economic liberty. Du Pont de Nemours published Réflexions in the November and December 1769 issues of Ephémérides du Citoyen, the Physiocratic journal. But without consulting Turgot, Du Pont de Nemours made a number of changes, and Turgot wasn’t pleased.

Turgot made clear his opposition to slavery: This abominable custom of slavery has once been universal, and is still spread over the greater part of the earth.

He affirmed the importance of sound money: Thus, then, we come to the constitution of gold and silver as money and universal money, and that without any arbitrary convention among men, without the intervention of any law, but by the nature of things. They are not, as many people have imagined, signs of values; they have themselves a value. If they are susceptible of being the measure and the pledge of other values, they have this property in common with all the other articles that have a value in Commerce. They differ only because being at once more divisible, more unalterable, and more easy to transport than the other commodities, it is more convenient to employ them to measure and represent the values.

Turgot banished the ancient dogma that interest was immoral. The price of borrowed money is regulated, he wrote, like that of all other merchandise, by the balance of supply and demand: thus, when there are many borrowers who need money, the interest of money becomes higher; when there are many holders of money who offer to lend it, interest falls. It is, therefore, another mistake to suppose that the interest of money in commerce ought to be fixed by the laws of Princes.

During the famine of 1769-1772, he mortgaged his estate to get money for famine relief. He organized relief efforts financed almost entirely by voluntary contributions. French treasury officials claimed taxes were due from Turgot’s relief organization because its records weren’t written on stamped paper. He issued an ordinance suspending the stamp tax laws in Limoges. The bakers’ guild of Limoges moved to raise bread prices, and Turgot responded by suspending their monopoly privileges. He encouraged people to bring bread from other towns, and they did. He insisted that the best remedy for famine was free trade.

Turgot further defended laissez faire by writing Lettres sur le commerce des grains, seven letters to Comptroller-General Abbé Terray. Turgot warned that government is incapable of guaranteeing economic security. He declared: Government is not the master of seasons, and they should be taught that they have no right to violate the property of the agricultural labourers or the dealers in corn.

Terray was deaf to Turgot’s appeal. In December 1770, the Comptroller-General ruled that grain could be sold only in government-controlled marketplaces. Speculation was outlawed. A subsequent measure outlawed grain trading by any merchant who didn’t have a license. Grain monopolists regained their power.

Abbé Terray asked Turgot for help protecting iron smelters, and Turgot replied with a letter known as Sur la Marque des Fers [On the Mark of Iron]. The title referred to the stamp on iron indicating that it was smelted in France, part of the effort to keep out iron from other countries. I know no other means of quickening any commerce whatever than by granting to it the greatest liberty, Turgot wrote, and the freedom from all taxes, which the ill-understood interest of the Exchequer has multiplied to excess on all kinds of merchandise, and in particular on the fabrications of iron. Then, talking about how trade retaliations back fire: The truth is, that in aiming at injuring others, we injure only ourselves.

Conscription

Turgot had to deal with the consequences of military conscription. The repugnance to service in the militia, he wrote the Minister of War in January 1773, was so widespread among the people, that each drawing was the signal for the greatest disorders throughout the country, and for a kind of civil war between the peasantry; the one party seeking to escape the drawing, taking refuge in the woods, the other, with arms in hand, pursuing the fugitives, in order to capture them and subject them to the same lot with themselves. Loss of life and minor outrages were common. Depopulation of many of the parishes, with cultivation abandoned, often followed. When the time came to assemble the battalions, it was necessary for the syndics of the parishes to lead on their militia-men escorted by the horse-police, and sometimes bound with cords. Turgot let people voluntarily contribute cash to a pool for those conscripted, and many enlisted for the money.

There was much resentment against the practice of forcing local people to provide room and board for soldiers, and Turgot took action. He rented some buildings as barracks and spread the cost among all the taxpayers. Military discipline reportedly improved.

On May 10, 1774, King Louis XV died of smallpox. He was succeeded by his awkward, timid 19-year-old grandson, who became Louis XVI. His queen was the 19-year-old Marie Antoinette, a beautiful and frivolous daughter of the arrogant Austrian Empress Maria Theresa.

At the time, France had the biggest government in Europe except for Russia. The French government was in desperate shape, having incurred massive debts during the Seven Years War (1756-1763) with Britain. The royal palace of Versailles was an enormous drain. On the payroll were eight architects, 47 musicians, 56 hunters, 295 cooks, 886 nobles with their wives and children, plus secretaries, couriers, physicians, and chaplains, and some 10,000 soldiers who guarded the place. Almost every week, there were two banquets, two balls, and three plays held at Versailles.

Marie Antoinette aggravated the public by her extravagance with taxpayer money. Married to an impotent king, she squandered large sums at card tables and lavished costly gifts on her court favorites. She spent hundreds of thousands of livres on dresses. Austrian ambassador Mercy d’Argentau warned her mother, Maria Theresa: Although the King has given the Queen, on various occasions, more than 100,000 écus’ worth of diamonds, and although her Majesty already has a prodigious collection, she nevertheless resolved to acquire . . . chandelier earrings from Bohmer. I did not conceal from her Majesty that under present economic conditions it would have been wiser to avoid such a tremendous expenditure, but she could not resist.

The Parlements of Paris protested taxes. This body, whose members bought their way in, was the most influential of 13 French parliaments. It had acquired the prerogative of approving royal edicts on taxes before they could go into effect. If the Parlement opposed a tax edict, there would be a lit de justice: members would meet the king in his throne room, and he would make a final decision which everyone must obey. But this proceeding was widely resented.

Louis named the 73-year-old Count de Maurepas as his chief adviser. He had held a number of official positions until 1749, when he was dismissed on suspicion of having written some lines critical of courtesan Madame de Pompadour. But Maurepas knew how to pull strings. As royal playwright and historian Jean Francois Marmontel described him, he possessed a lynx-eye to seize upon the weak or ridiculous in men, and an imperceptible art to draw them to his purposes . . . he made sport of everything, even of merit itself. Maurepas knew that with his scandalous reputation, he needed some respected figures in the government, and his wife recommended Turgot. On July 20, 1774, Turgot was nominated to a minor post, Minister of Marine.

In Limoges, as biographer Leon Say reported, the aristocrats could not forgive Turgot for having broken with traditions which had hitherto been favourable to them . . . it was not the same with the peasantry. His departure was announced publicly from the pulpit by all the curés of the province, who celebrated mass everywhere on his account. The countrymen suspended their work in order to be present, and all cried: ‘It is wisely done by the king to have taken M. Turgot, but it is very sad for us that we have lost him.’

During the few weeks that Turgot was Minister of Marine, he spoke out for taxpayers against the politically powerful French shipbuilding industry. He recommended that the government buy ships in Sweden rather than France, which would cut costs 40 percent. Turgot countered protectionist objections by observing that the Swedes drank French wines and wore French clothes.

On August 24, 1774, Louis met with Turgot and discussed the country’s economic situation. Prodded by Maurepas, the king named Turgot as Comptroller-General. Turgot recognized that the kind of spending and tax cuts he envisioned would encounter ferocious opposition, and he had to have the backing of the king, so he sought an interview.

The king promised his support, and afterward Turgot sent him this memo: I confine myself to recall to you these three words—

No Bankruptcy.

No Increase of Taxes.

No Loans.

No bankruptcy, either avowed or disguised by illegal reductions.

No increase of taxes; the reason for this being in the condition of your people, and still more, in that of your Majesty’s own generous heart.

No loans; because every loan diminishes always the free revenue and necessitates at the end of a certain time, either bankruptcy or the increase of taxes. In times of peace it is permissible to borrow only in order to liquidate old debts, or in order to redeem other loans contracted on less advantageous terms.

To meet these three points there is but one means. It is to reduce expenditure below revenue, and sufficiently below it to insure each year a saving of twenty millions, to be applied in redemption of the old debts. Without that, the first gunshot will force the State into bankruptcy.

The question will be asked incredulously, ‘On what can we retrench?’ and each one, speaking for his own department, will maintain that nearly every particular item of expense is indispensable. They will be able to allege very good reasons, but these must all yield to the absolute necessity of economy.

It is, then, of absolute necessity for your Majesty to require that the heads of all the departments should concert with the Minister of Finance. It is indispensable that he should discuss with them, in presence of your Majesty, the degree of necessity for all your proposed expenses. It is above all necessary, as soon as you, Sire, shall have decided upon the strictly necessary scale of maintenance of each department, that you prohibit the official in charge of it to order any new expenditure without having first arranged with the Treasury the means of providing for it. . . .

Turgot’s top priority was to establish freedom of the grain trade, as he had done in Limoges. On September 13, 1774, Turgot issued an edict and wrote: it shall be free to all persons whatever to carry on, as it may seem best to them, their trade in corn and flour, to sell and to buy it, in whatever places they choose throughout the kingdom.

Voltaire was incredulous: I learned that a Minister of State who was neither a lawyer nor priest had just published an edict by which, in spite of the most sacred prejudices, it was permitted to every Perigourdin to sell and buy wheat in Auvergne. . . . I saw in my canton a dozen of labourers, my brethren, who read the edict. ‘How then?’ said an old man; ‘for sixty years I have been reading these edicts which, in unintelligible language, have always stripped us of natural liberty; now here is one that restores us our liberty, and I can understand every word without difficulty. This is the first time a king reasons with his people.’

France had long penalized foreigners, and in November 1774, Turgot overturned some of the worst laws. For instance, the law which held that the property of a deceased foreigner would revert to the government. Such laws, observed Du Pont de Nemours, debarred the settling in France of a great number of clever men and industrious artists, of capitalists, and useful merchants, who would have desired nothing more than to make France the centre of their affairs, and which debarred even retired foreigners of wealth attracted by the pleasures of society and the agreeableness of the climate. Du Pont emphasized that Turgot proceeded without demanding reciprocity, since the good of its operation would be certain for France, and the evil would be but for those countries which did not imitate her.

In January 1775, Turgot suffered an attack of gout which involved inflammation and severe pain in his legs. During the next four months, he was carried in a chair to the king’s working quarters. From there, he directed a quarantine of regions devastated by cattle-plague. The king agreed to pay a third of the value of diseased animals which were slaughtered and buried, and this frustrated efforts to control government spending.

Turgot set new standards for integrity. For instance, it had long been the custom for the Farmers-General, the private firm which collected a substantial amount of tax revenue, to give the Comptroller-General about a 100,000-livre bribe upon signing a new contract. Turgot declined the bribe and abolished the practice.

Turgot worked to curtail the rapaciousness of bureaucrats. People complain also, he wrote, of the embarrassments they are thrown into by the extreme severity of the penalties, often for the slightest faults. It is indispensable to remedy this, as well as the inconveniences manufacturers suffer from the contradictions in the regulations, and to shield them from the abuse of the authority by the Bureaux of Inspection. Then issuing orders: You are not to seize anything belonging to them [workers and small manufacturers], any stuff or merchandise, on the pretext of its faultiness. You will confine yourselves to exhorting these poor artificers to make the things better, and to indicate to them the means of doing so.

On April 20, 1775, corn riots erupted in Dijon, reflecting fears that grain produced in that region might be sold elsewhere—and wouldn’t be available to relieve hunger in Dijon. Rioting quickly spread to other cities. Mobs stormed through the countryside, yelling Monopoly! and Famine! They broke into markets, demanding corn and flour for less than what merchants were charging. By May 2, mobs marched on Paris, and an estimated 8,000 people raided flour stores around Versailles. The Parlement of Paris issued a decree and posted notices urging people to petition the king for lower bread prices, and he gave in. Turgot advised the king that violence must be put down swiftly, and he was given command of a 25,000-man force which protected an orderly flow of grain to the markets. He had parliament’s notices removed. His rivals at the royal court weren’t pleased.

Between June and August 1775, Turgot issued edicts abolishing duties imposed by major towns like Beaune, Bordeaux, Dijon, and Pontoise.

Freedom of Speech

Turgot practiced freedom of speech. For instance, financier and politician Jacques Necker wrote a pamphlet Sur la Législation et le Commerce des Grains which criticized laissez-faire views and defended government restrictions on the grain trade. Turgot let it be published.

Although Turgot never challenged the legitimacy of a monarchy, he became convinced that people should prepare for self-government. Together with Du Pont de Nemours, he outlined a plan for parish assemblies, village assemblies, district assemblies, provincial assemblies, and a General Assembly. Participation would be open to those who owned land (any amount) and earned at least 600 livres per year. Individuals earning less than 600 livres of land would have fractional votes. Unfortunately, with everything else going on, this plan was never presented to the king.

The king’s coronation brought Turgot into conflict with the establishment. Traditionalists wanted the coronation at the magnificent cathedral of Rheims, and the clergy wanted the king to take the oath for intolerance, I swear . . . to exterminate, &c., entirely from my States all heretics . . . condemned by the Church. Church officials insisted, It is reserved for you to deal the last blow to Calvinism in your kingdom. Order the schismatic assemblies of the Protestants to be dispersed; exclude the sectaries without distinction from all the branches of public administration. Your Majesty will thus assure among your subjects the unity of the Catholic worship.

Because the government was deep in debt, Turgot wanted a much cheaper coronation in Paris, and he objected to the oath. He wrote a memo to the king, Sur la tolerance, saying the oath was a bad idea even if nobody seriously contemplated a murderous Inquisition. The prince who orders his subject to profess a religion he does not believe, Turgot wrote, commands a crime; the subject who obeys acts a lie, he betrays his conscience, he does an act which, he believes, God forbids. The Protestant who through self-interest or fear makes himself a Catholic, and the Catholic who by the same motives makes himself a Protestant, are both guilty of the same sin. The king decided to throw budgetary considerations to the wind and be coronated at Rheims. He agreed to the dreaded oath, but he mumbled it, and nobody could make out the words.

There seemed to be a favorable omen for Turgot when the king followed his recommendation and appointed Chrétien Lamoignon de Malesherbes as Maison du Roi (Minister of the Royal Household), a post which put him in a position to influence the king and help curb extravagance at Versailles.

The budget was a bitter battleground. At the beginning of 1775, the government had revenue of 337 million livres, but only 213 million was left after interest on the debt. The costs of government would be 235 million—hence, a deficit of 22 million livres. Turgot cut many expenses, including sinecures for idle aristocrats.

Meanwhile, Turgot had become convinced that the severity of his country’s problems required decisive action. He conceived what became known as the six edicts.

Two were of monumental importance. Turgot would abolish the jurandes—guilds—which monopolized various trades. Like modern labor unions, they enforced barriers to entry for the enrichment of members. Consequently, there were few skilled workers, and they concentrated on making luxury goods. Turgot would permit anyone, including foreigners, to enter any trade except barbering and wig-making. The reason for exceptions was that Turgot offered to compensate people for the loss of their special privileges, and because of the government’s financial situation it wasn’t possible to compensate members of these two professions.

Turgot’s second crucial edict would abolish the corvée, the practice of forcing peasants to work on roads without pay. He proposed that all property owners, the primary beneficiaries of road improvements, pay a tax which would provide money for hiring road contractors.

Turgot thought of making these explosively controversial proposals more politically palatable by presenting them with four other proposals which had more support. He proposed abolishing restrictions on the grain trade within France. He wanted to discharge officials who imposed restrictions on the operation of Parisian markets, ports, and docks. He recommended abolishing the Caisse de Poissy, a tax on the cattle and meat industry. Finally, he proposed to cut the tax on suet.

During the last several months of 1775, Louis XVI weighed the compelling case for these edicts and the firestorm of opposition they would surely provoke. Turgot suffered another attack of gout and was absent as opposition intensified. Malesherbes cautioned Turgot to go slow, but Turgot, then 48, replied: The needs of the people are enormous, and in my family, we die of gout at fifty.

Over the objections of his brothers and all of his advisers except Turgot and Males-herbes, Louis XVI endorsed the six edicts, and on February 5, 1776, he presented them to the Parlement of Paris. They resisted, and the king declared, My Parlement must respect my wishes.

The Parlement supported guilds because many of the members were red-robed lawyers, and guilds were a lucrative source of litigation. One notorious case between the guild of tailors and the guild of used-clothes dealers had dragged on for more than 250 years. Led by the Prince de Conti, who expected to lose about 50,000 livres annually if the guilds were abolished, local officials went on the attack to protect their special privileges.

As if these six edicts weren’t enough of a challenge for the establishment, Turgot presented another which would abolish laws restricting the wine trade. In Bordeaux, for instance, it was illegal to sell and drink wine from another district. Wines from Languedoc couldn’t be shipped down the Garonne River before St. Martin’s Day. Wines from Périgord, not before Christmas. Turgot declared: It is the interest of the whole kingdom we have to consider, the interests and the rights of all our subjects, who, as buyers or as sellers, have an equal right to find a market for their goods and to procure the object of their needs on the terms most advantageous to them.

Lawyers, noblemen, monopolists, clergymen—all were against Turgot. Maurepas, who had appointed Turgot, criticized him in public and maneuvered behind his back. As biographer Douglas Dakin explained, Merely by refraining from defending Turgot, and merely by confirming Louis’s growing suspicions with a word here and there, he was bound in the long run to achieve his object. For everything that came to Louis’s ears—facts endlessly distorted, fortuitous happenings which in normal times would have had little significance, the fatuous lies concocted by Turgot’s detractors—all came to assume a unity and to take on the character of incontrovertible evidence. . . . Marie Antoinette, outraged at Turgot’s efforts to sack incompetents and cut spending by the royal household, schemed against him. She had no interest in ideas. I must admit I am lazy and dissipated when it comes to serious things, she told her mother.

I cannot conceal from your Majesty, Turgot wrote the king on April 30, the deep pain I have suffered by your cruel silence towards me on Sunday last, after I had in my preceding letters described to you so distinctly my position, your Majesty’s own position, the danger that your authority and the glory of your reign were incurring, and the impossibility of my continuing to serve you unless you give me your firm and steady support. Your Majesty has not deigned to reply to me. . . . Your Majesty gives me neither assistance nor consolation. How can I believe that you any longer esteem me? Sire, I have not deserved this. . . . The king didn’t reply.

On May 12, 1776, Turgot was dismissed. He reportedly warned Louis XVI: Remember, sire, that it was weakness which brought the head of [England's King] Charles I to the block.

Voltaire expressed the feeling of many who hoped for reform. Ah, mon Dieu, what sad news I hear! he wrote three days after Turgot’s fall. France would have been too fortunate. . . . I am overwhelmed in despair. The Marquis de Condorcet wrote: Adieu! We have had a beautiful dream.

Government spending zoomed out of control. Guilds regained their monopoly power. Restrictions again throttled trade. The regime brought back forced labor.

Turgot had probably achieved as much as any human being could without organizing popular support to buck special interests. His experience revealed how fragile were reforms which depended on the goodwill of a ruler. Edicts, it turned out, were no substitute for education of the people.

Turgot moved to a house on the rue de Bourbon, Paris, and he quietly studied science, literature, and music. For Benjamin Franklin, representing American interests in Paris, he wrote Mémoire sur l’impot to explain his laissez-faire economic policy.

In one of his last surviving writings, a controversial March 22, 1778 letter to English radical minister Dr. Richard Price, Turgot expressed his support for American independence, although he didn’t think the French government could afford to provide financial help. Turgot criticized American state constitutions for establishing a strong executive—an unreasonable imitation . . . of the usages of England—rather than lodge all power in a legislature. Turgot denounced chimerical state taxes and tariffs. He urged that Americans reduce to the smallest possible number the kinds of affairs of which the Government of each State should take charge. . . . He declared that The asylum which America affords to the oppressed of all nations will console the world. The letter provoked John Adams to make his case for a separation of powers, writing the three-volume Defense of the American Constitution which wasn’t published until 1787, after Turgot’s death. Adams, prickly pear that he was, liked Turgot and described him as grave, sensible, and amiable.

Turgot suffered more attacks of gout, and after 1778 he could walk only with crutches. His situation became critical in early 1781. He died at home around 11:00 P.M., March 18, 1781. He was 53. His friends Mme. Blondel, the Duchesse d’Enville, and Du Pont de Nemours were by his side.

Having rejected Turgot’s peaceful reforms, the French government stumbled from one crisis to another. By 1788, military spending took a quarter of the budget, and half the budget was needed for payments on the national debt which had soared to 4 billion livres. There were riots against taxes. The government was broke, and the king and queen were a pitiful sight as they handed over their silverware to the royal mint. Desperate for funds, the king agreed to summon the Estates-General, an assembly of nobles, clergy, and taxpayers, which hadn’t met for one-and-a-half centuries. This became the National Assembly, to which Du Pont de Nemours had been elected. It rebelled against the nobles, and the king made the fateful decision to back the nobles. The National Assembly abolished guilds and some of the worst taxes, and it confiscated church properties. Hatred bred of oppression boiled over, as Turgot had anticipated. On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was led to a Paris guillotine and beheaded. Marie Antoinette—ridiculed as Madam Deficit—followed him to the guillotine on October 16, 1793. The French people suffered through runaway inflation, the Reign of Terror, and the military takeover by Napoleon Bonaparte who plunged the country into more than a decade of war.

Turgot’s steadfast friend Du Pont de Nemours, who had been scheduled for the guillotine the very day the Reign of Terror ended and was later rescued by Madame Germaine de Stael, made sure he wouldn’t be forgotten. After emigrating to America, Du Pont de Nemours edited a nine-volume edition of Turgot’s works (1808-1811). Another French edition of Turgot’s works appeared in 1844. And there was G. Schelle’s Oeuvres de Turgot et documents le concernant (1913-1923), with many documents from the Turgot family. More than a dozen books about Turgot were published during the nineteenth century.

Turgot inspired the economist Jean-Baptiste Say who, in turn, helped inspire the resurgence of libertarian writings in Europe. Leon Say, Jean-Baptiste’s grandson, wrote in his 1887 biography of Turgot: if he failed in the eighteenth century, he has in fact dominated the century following. He founded the political economy of the nineteenth century, and, by the freedom of industry which he bequeathed to us, he has impressed on the nineteenth century the mark which will best characterize it in history. In recent years, Turgot’s most ardent admirer has been intellectual historian Murray N. Rothbard who affirmed that If we were to award a prize for ‘brilliancy’ in the history of economic thought, it would surely go to Anne Robert Jacques Turgot.

He had a liberating vision. He told the truth. He pursued justice. He was fearless in challenging special interests who everywhere capture government power. He showed why liberty is absolutely essential if the poorest among us are to improve their lives. He displayed the courage and compassion to help set people free.

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—Jim Powell, Guest Editor

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3. Salute to Von Mises

The author thanks Virginia Heinlein for making corrections and suggestions on this article.

A pioneering master of speculative fiction, Robert Heinlein has captured the imagination of millions for liberty.

Five of his novels chronicle rebellion against tyranny, other novels are about different struggles for liberty, and his writings abound with declarations on liberty. For instance, in Requiem (1939): It’s neither your business, nor the business of . . . paternalistic government, to tell a man not to risk his life doing what he really wants to do. If This Goes On— (1940): I looked up Tom Paine, which led me to Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson and others—a whole new world was opened up to me. . . . Very inspiring stuff. Coventry (1940): You are free to seek danger and adventure if you wish . . . but you are not free to expose us to the violence of your nature. Beyond This Horizon (1948): The private life and free action of every individual must be scrupulously respected. The Puppet Masters (1951): The price of freedom is the willingness to do sudden battle, anywhere, any time and with utter recklessness. Double Star (1956): free trade, free travel, common citizenship, common currency, and a minimum of imperial laws and restrictions. Citizen of the Galaxy (1957): slavery . . . the most vicious habit humans fall into and the hardest to break. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966): no circumstances under which State is justified in placing its welfare ahead of mine. Time Enough for Love (1973): The purpose of my government is never to do good, but simply to refrain from doing evil. To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987): unlimited spending on ‘social’ programs ends in national bankruptcy.

Heinlein is the world’s most celebrated science fiction author. In July 1969, as Apollo 11 astronaut Neil A. Armstrong set foot on the moon, Heinlein was a guest commentator with CBS-TV anchorman Walter Cronkite, speaking to millions around the world. When the Science Fiction Writers of America began to hand out their Grand Master Awards in 1975, Heinlein received the first by general acclamation, noted Isaac Asimov, himself the respected author of more than 300 books, including much science fiction. Heinlein is the only author to have won four Hugo awards for best science fiction novel—for Double Star, Starship Troopers (1959), Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. He was the first science fiction author to make the New York Times bestseller list (Stranger in a Strange Land), and his last five books made it, too. Heinlein’s work—56 short stories and 30 novels—have been variously translated into Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. They’ve sold over 30 million copies in the United States and 100 million worldwide.

The “Best Science Fiction Writer in Existence”

Isaac Asimov, whose astonishing career began at the same time as Heinlein’s got underway, disagreed with many of Heinlein’s views but declared: From the moment his first story appeared, an awed science fiction world accepted him as the best science fiction writer in existence, and he held that post throughout his life. Best-selling fantasy writer Stephen King declared, Following World War II, Robert A. Heinlein emerged as not only America’s premier writer of speculative fiction, but the greatest writer of such fiction in the world. He remains today as a sort of trademark for all that is finest in American imaginative fiction.

The New York Times Book Review hailed Heinlein as One of the most influential writers in American literature. Gene Roddenberry, creator, writer, and producer of the hugely popular Star Trek TV series, acknowledged that Heinlein was among the few authors at whose feet I’d gladly sit. Robert Silverberg, author of over a hundred science fiction books, explained: Heinlein’s belief that a story had to make sense, and the irresistible vitality of his storytelling, delighted the readership of Astounding, who called for more and even more of his material. John Campbell had found the writer who best embodied his own ideals of science fiction: In one flabbergasting two-year outpouring of material for a single magazine Heinlein had completely reconstructed the nature of science fiction, just as in the field of general modern fiction Ernest Hemingway, in the 1920s, had redefined the modern novel. No one who has written fiction since 1927 or so can fail to take into account Hemingway’s theory and practice without seeming archaic or impossibly naive; no one since 1941 has written first-rate science fiction without a comprehension of the theoretical and practical example set by Heinlein.

Added best-selling thriller writer Tom Clancy: What makes Mr. Heinlein part of the American literary tradition is that his characters do prevail. His work reflects the fundamental American optimism that still surprises our friends around the world. As Mr. Heinlein taught us, the individual can and will succeed. The first step in the individual’s success is the perception that success is possible. It is often the writer’s task to let people know what is possible and what is not, for as writing is a product of imagination, so is all human progress.

Heinlein holds a special place in the hearts of millions who discovered him during their teenage years. Before he emerged as a best-selling author of adult books, he had established his reputation with more than a dozen classic juveniles—Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), Space Cadet (1948), Red Planet (1949), Farmer in the Sky (1950), Between Planets (1951), The Rolling Stones (1952), Starman Jones (1953), Star Beast (1954), Tunnel in the Sky (1955), Time for the Stars (1956), Citizen of the Galaxy (1957), Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958), and Starship Troopers (1959). Author J. Neil Schulman spoke for many when he confided that If Robert Heinlein hadn’t written the books he wrote, and I hadn’t read them, I doubt very much that I would have had the intellectual background necessary to climb out of the hole I was in between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. He wrote about futures that were worth living for. He wrote about talented people who felt life was worth living and made it worth living, no matter what the breaks that fell their way. His characters never had an easy time of it, but they persevered.

Teacher and Benefactor

Heinlein’s work has inspired readers around the world. For instance, Tetsu Yano: I had lost all my books during the war and had little money then to buy new ones. I wanted to and had to read something. Despite my lack of proper education in English, I found science fiction magazines quite readable. I became particularly inspired by the stories written by Robert Heinlein and Anson McDonald [one of Heinlein's pseudonyms]. His exhilarating tales gave me the will, hope, and courage to go on living in the devastations of the postwar Japan. Robert Heinlein was my teacher and benefactor. I learned English reading his stories and became a translator. It has been an honor to translate many of Heinlein’s books into Japanese.

Science fiction critic Alexei Panshin described Heinlein as about five feet eleven inches tall, with brown hair and brown eyes. He is solidly built and carries himself with an erect, almost military bearing. He has worn a trim moustache for years and is reputedly the sort of man who would always dress for dinner, even in the jungle. . . . His voice is a strong, very even, somewhat nasal baritone with a good bit of Missouri left in it. As Isaac Asimov remembered, In some ways, my most important friendship was with Robert Anson Heinlein . . . a very handsome man . . . with a gentle smile, and a courtly way about him that always made me feel particularly gauche when I was with him. I played the peasant to his aristocrat.

Robert Silverberg recalled Heinlein as a delightful human being, courtly, dignified, with an unexpected sly sense of humor. I met him first . . . at the 1961 World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle, where he was Guest of Honor. He amazed everyone there by holding an open-house party in his suite and inviting the entire convention to attend. That would be unthinkable today, when five or six thousand people go to such conventions. The attendance in 1961 was only about two hundred, but it was still a remarkable gesture. . . . I remember telling him that I had already published seven million words of fiction . . . to which he replied, ‘There aren’t that many words in the language. You must have sold several of them more than once.’

Early Life

Robert Anson Heinlein was born July 7, 1907, in a two-story frame house at 805 North Fulton Street, Butler, Missouri, about 65 miles south of Kansas City. His father, Rex Ivar Heinlein, the son of a plow salesman, had a series of jobs as clerk and bookkeeper. His mother, Bam Lyle, was a doctor’s daughter. The Heinlein family descended from German, Irish, and French people.

In 1910, his 10-year-old brother Lawrence took him to see Halley’s Comet streak across the sky, and it was a sight he would never forget. He became fascinated with astronomy, and by the time he was a teenager, he had read all the astronomy books in the Kansas City Public Library. He built himself a small telescope and mounted it on the roof of his parents’ home.

He became an avid reader of adventure stories, science fiction in particular. He bought secondhand copies of the Frank Reade Weekly, which serialized adventure stories. He read stories about the young inventor Tom Swift. He got Electrical Experimenter, a magazine put out by pioneering science fiction editor Hugo Gernsback. He relished such authors as Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and H. Rider Haggard.

After graduating from local schools, he spent a year at the University of Missouri, then transferred to the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, where he became a champion swordsman. He graduated in June 1929, 20th in a class of 243, as a mechanical engineer. Soon after his graduation, he married Leslyn McDonald. He served in destroyers and aircraft carriers until he contracted tuberculosis and was retired from the Navy in 1934, a lieutenant junior grade. He enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles, for graduate study of physics and mathematics, but frail health forced him to drop out. Following doctors’ orders to recuperate, he acquired an interest in the Shively & Sophie Lodes silver mine in Silver Plume, Colorado, but he couldn’t make a go of it. He tried selling real estate. He entered the Democratic primary to run for state representative, but he lost.

The beginning of 1939 found me flat broke, Heinlein recalled. I was highly skilled in ordnance, gunnery, and fire control for Naval vessels, a skill for which there was no demand ashore—and I had a piece of paper from the Secretary of the Navy telling me that I was a waste of space—‘totally and permanently disabled’ was the phraseology. I ‘owned’ a heavily-mortgaged house.

About then Thrilling Wonder Stories ran a house ad reading (more or less): Giant Prize Contest—Amateur Writers!!!!! First prize $50 Fifty Dollars $50. In 1939 one could fill three station wagons with fifty dollars worth of groceries. . . . So I wrote the story Life-Line. It took me four days—I am a slow typist. But I did not send it to Thrilling Wonder. I sent it to Astounding, figuring they would not be so swamped with amateur short stories.

Life Line was about a man who invented a machine which could tell people how long they would live. Editor John W. Campbell, Jr., bought it for $70 and published it in the August 1939 issue. Heinlein was 32. There was never a chance that I would ever again look for honest work, he wrote.

He appeared on the scene as science fiction was bursting into the modern era. The month before his debut, Astounding Science-Fiction had published the first story by an emerging star named A.E. Van Vogt, and the following month it published the first story by Theodore Sturgeon, another emerging star. Earlier that year, Thrilling Wonder Stories published the first story by Alfred Bester, and Amazing Stories magazine had introduced the world to Isaac Asimov.

Heinlein’s Juvenile Novels

Heinlein thought writing science fiction was an easy way to make a living, but his next several stories were rejected. His second story to be published was Misfit, in the November 1939 Astounding Science-Fiction. This was about some teenage troublemakers relocated by the government to an asteroid and how one of them became a mathematical genius who saved their spaceship. While this was generally considered a minor work, it was the first of Heinlein’s many juveniles, aimed at young readers.

In January 1940, Astounding Science-Fiction published Requiem. The hero, an entrepreneur named Delos D. Harriman, recalling the nineteenth-century American railroad entrepreneur Edward Harriman, built a company that developed communities on the moon. He fights damn persnickety regulations issued by a government bureaucracy which, because of his frail health, opposes his planned trip to the moon. But he goes anyway and dies happy.

If This Goes On— (Astounding Science-Fiction, February, March 1940) is the story of the Second American Revolution, against twenty-first-century tyranny. Narrator John Lyle tells how he developed a philosophy of freedom. I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy, censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, ‘This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,’ the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

Coventry (Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1940) shows how a reasonably free society might be based on a voluntary social contract called the Covenant. As Heinlein explains: Citizens were forbidden by the Covenant to damage another. Any act not leading to damage, physical or economic, to some particular person, they declared to be lawful . . . social offenders were examined and potential repeaters were given their choice of psychological readjustment, or of having society withdraw itself from them—Coventry. The story focuses on one individual, David Mackinnon, who comes to terms with the Covenant.

In Sixth Column (Astounding Science-Fiction, January, February, and March 1941), written under Heinlein’s pseudonym Anson McDonald, Free Nations were conquered, and America stood alone. Freedom fighter Jefferson Thomas everywhere found boiling resentment, a fierce willingness to fight against the tyranny, but it was undirected, uncoordinated, and, in any modern sense, unarmed. Sporadic rebellion was as futile as the scurrying of ants whose hill has been violated. PanAsians could be killed, yes, and there were men willing to shoot on sight, even in the face of the certainty of their own deaths. But their hands were bound by the greater certainty of brutal multiple retaliation against their own kind. As with the Jews in Germany before the final blackout in Europe, bravery was not enough, for one act of violence against the tyrants would be paid for by other men, women, and children at an unspeakable compound interest. Even more distressing than the miseries he saw and heard about were the reports of the planned elimination of the American culture as such. The schools were closed. No word might be printed in English. There was a suggestion of a time, one generation away, when English would be an illiterate language, used orally alone by helpless peons. Fortunately, a secret weapon is developed by a half-dozen scientists holed up in the Rocky Mountains, the conquerors are repelled, and freedom is regained.

Logic of Empire (Astounding Science-Fiction, March 1941) tells how Sam Houston Jones exposes slavery on Venus. His adversary is lawyer Humphrey Wingate, representing the authorities who control Venus. Wingate insists that people on Venus are a damn sight better off than most people of their own class here on earth. They are certain of a job, of food, and a place to sleep. If they get sick, they’re certain of medical attention. The trouble with people of that class is that they don’t want to work. Jones counters: I know human slavery when I see it. That’s what you’ve got on Venus. Jones helps see that Wingate was taken as a slave to Venus, and he is assigned work in the swamps. He witnesses brutal conditions, and after Jones secures his release, he writes a book about the horrors.

In Methuselah’s Children (Astounding Science-Fiction, July, August, and September 1941), Heinlein chronicles the adventures of Americans who had interbred to achieve longevity three times greater than average. As their presence becomes widely known, they are subject to envy, hatred, and persecution. Heinlein tells how they board a spaceship and seek a place where they can be free. The story introduces Lazarus Long, a character who reappears in Heinlein’s later work.

In Beyond This Horizon (Astounding Science-Fiction, April and May 1942), the story goes in several directions, but what’s most interesting is Heinlein’s vision of a libertarian society with highly sophisticated social cooperation. Among other things, people carry guns and protect themselves. I describe a utopia—largely anarchistic, he told interviewer J. Neil Schulman. There isn’t enough government to matter.

“Future History”

Heinlein described many of his stories as future history, aimed at working out the implications of various developments during the next couple of hundred years, especially the struggle for freedom. He got a lot of attention when he published a time chart relating these stories to a general background, although they actually had little relationship with one another. He conceded these stories were never meant to be a definitive history of the future (concerning which I know no more than you do), nor are they installments of a long serial (since each is intended to be entirely independent of all the others). They are just stories, meant to amuse and written to buy groceries.

The stories did, however, reflect Heinlein’s passion for freedom. Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, he explained, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. This is equally true whether the faith is Communism or Holy-Rollerism; indeed, it is the bounden duty of the faithful to do so. The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.

In just a few years, Heinlein had changed the face of science fiction, as critic Alexei Panshin put it. His narrative technique eliminated a lot of stodgy writing, and this faster, smoother writing coupled with Heinlein’s wide range of interests meant a new sophistication that spread quickly through science fiction writing.

Surprisingly, by September 1941 Heinlein was pondering his future. At the present time, he wrote Campbell, I am the most popular writer for the most popular magazine in the field and command (I believe) the highest word rate. Where is there for me to go but down? I can’t go up in this field; there is no place to go. . . . Frankly the strain is wearing on me. I can still write, but it is a terrific grind to try each week to be more clever than I was the week before. And if I do, to what purpose. First is the highest I can stand; a cent and a half a word is the most I can hope to be paid.

I will not attempt to pep up my stories by introducing a greater degree of action-adventure. It is not my style. It seems to me that the popularity of my stuff has been based largely on the fact that I have continually enlarged the field of S-F and changed it from gadget motivation to stories more subtle in their themes and more realistically motivated in terms of human psychology. In particular I introduced the regular use of high tragedy and completely abandoned the hero-and-villain formula.

Campbell replied, Science fiction is normally read as light, escape literature. The reader does not expect or seek heavy philosophy; particularly, he does not expect or prepare himself for heavy philosophy when he reads a story that shows every sign of being action-adventure. . . .

So far as going up goes, I’ll agree you can’t very well. I can agree with your desire to retire, under your circumstances. But look—when you don’t have to, writing’s a lot of fun. When you have to fill magazines as I do, good manuscripts are godsends. Be god for a little while longer and send more, willya?

After the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Heinlein tried to enlist in the Navy, but they rejected him because he had had tuberculosis and was quite nearsighted. So he went to Philadelphia where he served as an engineer at the Naval Air Experimental Station’s Materials Laboratory. He helped arrange for science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp to work there, too.

Heinlein resolved to expand his horizons when the war was over. He asked science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard about literary agents and was referred to Lurton Blassingame, who helped him sell Green Hills of Earth to the Saturday Evening Post, which paid the highest rates for fiction. That weekly magazine appeared on newsstands throughout the country and it was famous for its Norman Rockwell covers. It was the premier market for short stories as well as serialized novels. My first reaction had been of miserable envy, recalled Isaac Asimov. Bob could make the Post and I couldn’t even make Thrilling Wonder. It didn’t take much thought, however, for me to see that Bob had done us all a terrific favor, and that there was reason to rejoice. Every science fiction writer would find the world easier for him because Heinlein had made the field more respectable and, sooner or later, we would all profit as a result. Between Heinlein and the atom bomb, it became difficult to think of science fiction as childish and silly anymore.

In 1946, Heinlein told Blassingame that friends had convinced me that my own propaganda purposes will be served best by writing a series of boys’ books in addition to the adult items previously described. I have purchased several of the popular boys’ series novels and feel confident that I can produce salable copy—copy which can be sold to one of these markets: Westminster, Grosset and Dunlap, Crown, or Random House. His first effort was Rocket Ship Galileo, about three boys who cobble together a rocket, fly to the moon, and encounter a nest of Nazis determined to win back the earth. Blassingame sold it to Scribner’s, the same firm which had published work by mainstream novelists like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe.

Heinlein was divorced in 1947, and the following year, on October 21, he married Virginia Doris Gerstenfeld, whom he had known from his days in Philadelphia. My wife Ticky is an anarchist-individualist, he exulted. She was, explained science fiction author Poul Anderson, his full partner, as strong and intelligent in every way as himself. He remarked once with a grin that during World War II, when they were both in naval service, she was his superior officer.

The Heinleins honeymooned in the Colorado Rockies and decided they’d like to live there. They bought property between 1700 and 1800 Mesa Drive, Colorado Springs and picked the address they wanted: 1776. Out front they had a brass house sign which evoked the famous Archibald Willard painting Spirit of ‘76—three marchers, a man playing a fife, and a man and a boy with drums. The Heinleins were to live in Colorado Springs for the next 17 years. Among their friends was Freedom School founder Robert M. Lefevre.

Heinlein turned to motion pictures. In 1948, he adapted Rocket Ship Galileo into a script for a movie, Destination Moon. It showed how private entrepreneurs might arrange the first trip to the moon and take care of all the things that might go wrong. Although he didn’t anticipate developments like the multistage rocket, Destination Moon nonetheless has been described as the first modern science fiction movie, and it was reasonably successful.

Writer versus Editor

Heinlein scrapped with his Scribner’s editor, Alice Dagliesh, who didn’t know much about science fiction except that there was a demand for it. Her view goes something like this, he explained to Blassingame in March 1949: Science fiction consists of stories about the wonderful machines of the future which will go striding around the universe, as in Jules Verne. Her definition is all right as far as it goes, but it fails to include most of the field and includes only that portion of the field which has been heavily overworked and now contains only low-grade ore. Speculative fiction (I prefer that term to science fiction) is also concerned with sociology, psychology, esoteric aspects of biology, impact of terrestrial culture on the other cultures we may encounter when we conquer space, etc., without end. However, speculative fiction is not fantasy fiction, as it rules out the use of anything as material which violates established scientific fact, laws of nature, call it what you will.

Lurton, he went on, I’m fed up with trying to work for her. She keeps poking her nose into things she doesn’t understand and which are my business, not hers. . . . I’m tired of trying to educate her diplomatically. From my point of view she should judge my work by these rules and these only: (a) will it amuse and hold the attention of boys? (b) is it grammatical and as literate as my earlier stuff? (c) are the moral attitudes shown by the author and his protagonists—not his villains—such as to make it suitable to place in the hands of minors?

And Dagliesh seemed to sneer at the humble origins of science fiction. She asked me to suggest an artist for Rocket Ship Galileo, he told Blassingame. I suggested Hubert Rogers. She looked into the matter, then wrote me that Mr. Rogers’ name was ‘too closely associated with a rather cheap magazine’—meaning John Campbell’s Astounding S-F. To prove her point she sent me tear sheets from the magazine. It so happened that the story she picked to send me was one of my ‘Anson MacDonald’ stories, ‘By His Bootstraps’—which at the time was again in print in Crown’s Best in Science Fiction! I chuckled and said nothing. If she could not spot my style and was impressed only by the fact that the stuff was printed on pulpwood paper, it was not my place to educate her. I wondered if she knew that my reputation had been gained in that same ‘cheap’ magazine and concluded that she probably did not know and might not have been willing to publish my stuff had she known.

Heinlein had ideological disagreements with her, too. For instance, he wrote her in April 1949 that I have one of my characters say that the right to bear arms is the basis of all human freedom. I strongly believe that, but you required me to blue-pencil it. The second point concerns licensing guns. I had such licensing in the story, but I had one character strongly object to it as a piece of buttinsky bureaucracy, subversive of liberty—and I had no one defending it. You required me to remove the protest, then build up the licensing into a complicated ritual, involving codes, oaths, etc.—a complete reversal. . . . I have been writing from reasons of economic necessity something that I do not believe. I do not like having to do that. . . .

I am opposed to all attempts to license or restrict the arming of individuals, such as the Sullivan Act of the State of New York. I consider such laws a violation of civil liberty, subversive of democratic political institutions, and self-defeating in their purpose. . . . France had Sullivan-type laws. When the Nazis came, the invaders had only to consult the registration lists in a district. Whether the authorities be invaders or merely local tyrants, the effect of such laws is to place the individual at the mercy of the state, unable to resist. . . .

As to such laws being self-defeating, the avowed purpose of such laws as the Sullivan Act is to keep weapons out of the hands of potential criminals. You are surely aware that the Sullivan Act and similar acts have never accomplished anything of the sort? That gangsterism ruled New York while this act was already in force? That ‘Murder, Inc.’ flourished under this act? Criminals are never materially handicapped by such rules; the only effect is to disarm the peaceful citizen and put him fully at the mercy of the lawless.

Despite such backstage disagreements, Heinlein made dazzling contributions to juvenile literature—he is among the few major literary talents who took the trouble to write many works for young readers. Fellow science fiction author Jack Williamson marveled that Juvenile science fiction, as a labeled category, begins with Heinlein. . . . The Heinlein series was a pioneer effort, quickly imitated . . . Heinlein never writes down. His main characters are young, the plots move fast, and the style is limpidly clear. And here, as in Heinlein’s other work, the theme of liberty runs strong.

Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) is perhaps Heinlein’s most outstanding juvenile. It’s about a ragged boy named Thorby, who, brought in chains to Sargon, is sold as a slave. The buyer turns out to be Baslim, a one-legged undercover agent for the Hegemonic Guard, reporting on the slave trade. Before he’s caught and beheaded, he gives Thorby an education. The boy ventures from one place to another, struggling to find a place for himself. Slavery, Hegemonic Guard Colonel Brisby declares, starts up in every new land, and it’s terribly hard to root out. After a culture falls ill of it, it gets rooted in the economic system and laws, in men’s habits and attitudes. You abolish it; you drive it underground—there it lurks, ready to spring up again, in the minds of people who think it is their ‘natural’ right to own other people. You can’t reason with them; you can kill them but you can’t change their minds.

Thorby turns out to be the heir of Rudbek, a giant trading company which operates throughout much of the universe—and trades slaves. Thorby is determined to get his company out of this wretched business: It means being so devoted to freedom that you are willing to give up your own, be a beggar, or a slave, or die—that freedom may live.

I’ve taken great pride in these juveniles, Heinlein told Blassingame. It seemed to me a worthwhile accomplishment to write wholesome stories which were able to compete with the lurid excitements of comic books. But I am really very weary of being required to wipe my feet and straighten my tie before being allowed in the house by those who stand between me and my juvenile readers.

Other Novels

Besides juveniles, Heinlein wrote The Puppet Masters (1951), which tells how the earth is invaded by flying saucers loaded with parasitic collectivist slugs which enslave millions. They get on people’s backs, gain control of their bodies and minds, wiping out their individuality. U.S. security forces put a slug on the back of secret agent Sam Cavanaugh, so it could be observed closely, and during the experiment he becomes a slug voice. He promises Peace and contentment—and the joy of surrender. With the slug removed, he remarks: I could not stand the thought of dying while possessed by a parasite. Somehow I felt that to die would be to die already consigned to an endless and unbearable hell. Even worse was the prospect of not dying once the slug touched me. In the name of fighting these slugs, government assumes enormous power to monitor the population, and Cavanaugh says: Everybody watching everybody else. Might as well be behind the [Soviet Iron] Curtain. Fortunately, a disease is discovered which is fatal to the slugs, and they are infected and killed. But Cavanaugh warns there surely will be more invasions in the future. Eternal vigilance, he says, is our legacy to free human beings.

In Double Star (1956), John Joseph Bonforte, leader of the minority Expansionist Party, wants native populations of Venus and Mars to have the same rights as earthlings, and he’s kidnapped by the ruling Humanists who want earthlings to dominate those populations. Since the disappearance of Bonforte could cripple the Expansionist cause, an actor, Lorenzo Smythe, is asked to serve as a stand-in for Bonforte. Although he despised Martians, he soon embraces Bonforte’s libertarian views. I suddenly got a glimpse of what Bonforte was driving at, Smythe reflects. If there were ethical basics that transcended time and place, then they were true both for Martians and for men. They were true on any planet around any star—and if the human race did not behave accordingly they weren’t ever going to win to the stars because some better race would slap them down for double-dealing. Resignation of the Humanist government—it works like British parliamentary democracy—means that Smythe/Bonforte must function as the majority leader. He promotes tolerance, peace, and freedom. He must continue in this role after Bonforte dies of a stroke. Smythe/Bonforte becomes a better person and helps make a better world.

Heinlein plunged ahead with a new kind of science fiction novel that he had worked on periodically for years. The novel is really giving me a lot of trouble, he wrote Blassingame. This is the one I told you about long ago, I believe—a Man-from-Mars job, infant survivor of first expedition to Mars is fetched back by second expedition as a young adult, never having seen a human being in his life, most especially never having seen a woman or heard of sex. He has been raised by Martians, is educated and sophisticated by Martian standards, but is totally ignorant of Earth. What impact do earth culture and conditions have on him? What impact does he have on Earth culture?

Such success as I have had, Heinlein continued, has come from being original, not from writing ‘safe’ stuff—in pulps, in movies, in slicks, in juveniles. In pulp SF I moved at once to the top of the field by writing about sociology, sex, politics, and religion at a time (1939) when those subjects were all taboo. Later I cracked the slicks with science fiction when it was taken for granted that SF was pulp and nothing but pulp. You will recall that my first juvenile was considered an experiment by the publisher—and a rather risky one.

I have never written ‘what was being written’—nor do I want to do so now. Oh, I suppose that, if it became financially necessary, I could imitate my own earlier work and do it well enough to sell. But I don’t want to. I hope this new and different book sells. But, whether it does or not I want my next book to be still different—neither an imitation of The Man from Mars, nor a careful ‘mixture as before’ in imitation of my juveniles and quasi-juveniles published as soi disant adult SF books. I’ve got a lot of things I’d like to write about; none of them fits this pattern.

The book tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, descended from earthlings who went to Mars and was brought up by Martians. He comes to the earth after World War III. Liberty is lost, and the United States is just a small part of the World Federation of Free States. Smith arrives as a helpless child and is protected by a crusty individualist named Jubal Harshaw. Smith reveals magical powers acquired from the Martians. Harshaw encourages him to profit from his powers by establishing a religion, and he does. It involves grokking (empathizing with others) and free love. Heinlein aims a good deal of satire at conventional ways of thinking. Stranger in a Strange Land popularized waterbeds, acquired quite a following, made national bestseller lists, and sold some two million copies. Heinlein won his third Hugo Award for the book.

In Glory Road (1963), former football star and soldier Evelyn Cyril Oscar Gordon responds to an advertisement for an adventure, and he’s off on a rousing sword-and-sorcery fantasy. Among other things, he grumbles about taxes: Do you know how much tax a bachelor pays on $140,000 in the Land of the Brave and the Home of the Free? $103,000, that’s what he pays. That leaves him $37,000. . . . But suppose I wangled some way to beat the tax. . . . I wouldn’t be ‘cheating’ Uncle Sugar; the USA had no more moral claim on that money (if I won) than on the Holy Roman Empire. What had Uncle Sugar done for me? He had clobbered my father’s life with two wars, one of which we weren’t allowed to win—and thereby made it tough for me to get through college quite aside from what a father may be worth in spiritual intangibles to his son (I didn’t know, I never would know)—then he had grabbed me out of college and had sent me to fight another unWar and damn near killed me. And when he finds himself in another universe, Gordon says places are so crowded that the privilege of staying alive is subject to tax—and delinquents are killed out of hand by the Department of Eternal Revenue. . . .

By 1965, Virginia Heinlein had begun to suffer the effects of high altitude in Colorado Springs, and they moved to Bonny Doon, a lovely rural area about 16 miles north of Santa Cruz, California. He described their place to interviewer J. Neil Schulman: It’s circular because Mrs. Heinlein wanted a circular house. I did the design work on it, but I did very largely what she wanted to accomplish. Got a big atrium in the middle of it—twelve feet across, open to the sky—which has a tree and flowers. And it has all sorts of things I put in to make housekeeping easier. We’re getting old enough, and neither one of us cares too much for servants. Everything is either built-in or on wheels, with the exception of her baby grand.

In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), Heinlein offers perhaps his most well-developed libertarian vision. The story is narrated by computer expert Manuel O’Kelly Davis. The moon, referred to as Luna, is a colony of the Earth which uses it as a place to keep convicts and political dissidents. They resent the Earth’s trade monopoly, which means selling Earth products at steep prices, buying Luna products for little—and ultimately starving people on Luna. They don’t like laws, but they respect customs. They cherish individual initiative and enterprise. They tolerate other people’s lifestyle choices and mind their own business. They resolve to take charge of their own destiny and declare Independence on July 4, 2076. The conspirators recruit Mycroft Holmes, or Mike, the computer who runs Luna to help the revolution.

Wyoming Knott, an individualist feminist, says: Here in Luna, we’re rich. Three million hardworking, smart, skilled people, enough water, plenty of everything, endless power, endless cubic. But . . . what we don’t have is a free market. We must get rid of the Authority! And Professor Bernardo de la Paz (Prof), revolutionary philosopher replies: You are right that the Authority must go. It is ridiculous—pestilential, not to be borne—that we should be ruled by an irresponsible dictator in all our essential economy! It strikes at the most basic human right, the right to bargain in a free marketplace.

Asked to expand on his views, Prof says: I’m a rational anarchist. . . . A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame . . . as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world. . . . In terms of morals, there is no such thing as ‘state.’ Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts.

TANSTAAFL

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress sounds one of Heinlein’s favorite philosophical themes: ‘tanstaafl.’ Means ‘There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch’ . . . anything free costs twice as much in long run or turns out worthless. . . . One way or other, what you get, you pay for. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress depicts a free society where private individuals, not government, do what needs to be done, including education, insurance, security, and conflict resolution. The book sold almost a million copies.

The violence of the 1960s discouraged Heinlein, and this was reflected in I Will Fear No Evil (1970). It’s the story of a terminally ill 94-year-old multibillionaire named Johann Sebastian Bach Smith who’s determined to survive a world gone wrong. He reflects on the time before the government gave up trying to guarantee safety in the streets . . . now we are under . . . an elected dictator even though we still have laws and legislatures and Congress. Smith arranges an operation to transplant his brain into the first healthy young body available, which turns out to be that of his black female secretary. Smith maintains his free will and explores the meaning of sexuality. While many of Heinlein’s fans didn’t care for the book, it was a huge commercial success.

The same year, Heinlein nearly died of peritonitis. His life was saved by many blood donations. He was especially appreciative because he had a rare blood type (A2 negative). He urged people with rare blood types to make donations and soon realized that all types of blood were badly needed. He used science fiction conventions as forums for promoting blood donation and rewarded people who gave blood there with autographed books.

Time Enough for Love (1974): Lazarus Long refuses to stop loving life and he becomes his own ancestor. The book includes wise and witty sayings from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long. For instance: The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. . . . The greatest productive force is human selfishness. . . . A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain. . . . Of all the strange ‘crimes’ that human beings have legislated out of nothing, ‘blasphemy’ is the most amazing—with ‘obscenity’ and ‘indecent exposure’ fighting it out for second and third place. . . . Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’

Heinlein, approaching 70, continued to travel as he and his wife had done for years. We went around the world four times, recalled Virginia. One of the most interesting, but not to be repeated trips was to the Soviet Union. . . . We visited Antarctica and went through the Northwest Passage to Japan. When China opened up to travel, we went there, among other parts of the East.

In late 1978, while traveling near Tahiti, Heinlein experienced double vision and had trouble walking—warning signs of a stroke. Back in the United States, he had an operation to relieve blockage of the carotid artery to the brain. Fortunately, Virginia had already taken over management of his affairs. By assuming most of the time-consuming, spirit-consuming burdens of their business, Poul Anderson observed, she made it possible for him to write unhampered; and so we are all in her debt.

Late Novels

In The Number of the Beast (1980), Zeb and Deety, Jake and Hilda fight alien Black Hats out to vaporize them. The book features an admirable American individualist named Grandpa Zach. He hated government, hated lawyers, hated civil servants . . . public schools. . . . He once threw an agent out of his office and required him to return with a search warrant . . . supported female suffrage. . . . Grandpa Zach ducked into Canada, applied for Swiss citizenship, got it, and thereafter split his time between Europe and America, immune to inflation and the confiscatory laws that eventually caused us to knock three zeros off the old-dollar in creating the new dollar. . . . His will was probated in Switzerland and the U.S. Revenue Service could not touch it . . . with over half this country’s population living on the taxes of the lesser number it is not as easy to get rich as it was in Grandpa’s day.

In Friday (1982), a heroic courier named Friday carries out dangerous missions throughout North America, which has become a tangle of contentious states. She says: with all governments everywhere tightening down on everything wherever they can, with their computers and their Public Eyes and ninety-nine other sorts of electronic surveillance, there is a moral obligation on each free person to fight back wherever possible—keep underground railways open, keep shades drawn, give misinformation to computers. Computers are literal-minded and stupid; electronic records aren’t really records . . . so it is good to be alert to opportunities to foul up the system. If you can’t evade a tax, pay a little too much to confuse their computers. Transpose digits. And so on . . . all public employees have larceny in their hearts or they wouldn’t be feeding at the public trough. These two facts are all you need—but be careful!—a public employee, having no self-respect, needs and demands a show of public respect.

In Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984), Heinlein explores the shocks of moving suddenly from one era to another. Among other things, he talks about money. I had figured out, the narrator says, that while paper money was never any good after a world change, hard money, gold and silver, would somehow be negotiable, as bullion if not as coin. So, when I got a chance to lay hands on hard money, I was stingy with it and refused to take paper money in change for hard money. Later, he adds that We’ll buy some heavy gold jewelry for each of us, then I’m going to try to find a coin dealer—buy some silver cartwheels, maybe some gold coins. But my purpose is to get rid of most of this paper money.

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985) tells the tale of philosopher/rogue Colonel Colin Campbell, who embarks on whirlwind adventures and among other things explores the free-enterprise zones of the moon. One dreary character is described like this: Bill has the socialist disease in its worst form; he thinks the world owes him a living. He told me sincerely—smugly!—that of course everyone was entitled to the best possible medical and hospital service—free, of course, unlimited, of course, and of course the government should pay for it. He couldn’t even understand the mathematical impossibility of what he was demanding. But it’s not just free air and free therapy. Bill honestly believes that anything he wants must be possible . . . and should be free. . . . In all seriousness he explains how things should be, then it’s up to the government to make it happen. Just pass a law.

Heinlein’s farewell was To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987), which, inspired by his own experiences growing up, became a family reunion for many of his most beloved characters. He tells how the father of the narrator (a woman named Maureen Johnson) loved Mark Twain’s work and corresponded with him. She affirms the principles of personal responsibility and individualism. I don’t steal, she says, because I’m too stinkin’ proud! And her father exclaims: For the same reason you don’t cheat in school, or cheat in games. Pride. Your own concept of yourself. ‘To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day.’

“I Am Proud to Be a Human Being”

During the fall of 1987, Heinlein’s frail health forced him and Virginia to move away from Bonny Doon. They had to be closer to a major hospital—twice in 1987 he suffered hemorrhages and was rushed to San Francisco. They bought a home at 3555 Edgefield Place, in the hills above Carmel, with a spectacular view of the Pacific.

Heinlein radiated optimism even as his health declined. I believe in my whole race, he declared. Yellow, white, black, red, brown. In the honesty, courage, intelligence, durability, and goodness of the overwhelming majority of my brothers and sisters everywhere on this planet. I am proud to be a human being. I believe that we have come this far by the skin of our teeth. That we always make it just by the skin of our teeth, but that we will make it. Survive. Endure. I believe this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes will endure. Will endure longer than his home planet—will spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his honesty and his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his noble essential decency.

But overwhelmed by heart ailments and emphysema, Heinlein died of heart failure, in his sleep at home, Sunday, May 8, 1988. About ten days later, Virginia Heinlein boarded a U.S. Navy ship in Monterey, sailed into the Pacific and committed his ashes to eternity.

Tributes came from all over. For instance, Isaac Asimov said: He had kept his position as greatest science fiction writer unshaken to the end. Tom Clancy: We proceed down a path marked by his ideas. British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke: Goodbye, Bob, and thank you for the influence you had on my life and career. And thank you too, Ginny, for looking after him so well and so long. Catherine Crook de Camp, wife of Heinlein’s friend L. Sprague de Camp: The last telephone call I made to Robert Heinlein was about a month before he died, while he was at home between two hospital stays. His voice seemed resonant and almost young that evening as we recalled the many happy times we’d shared. He described the splendid vistas from the windows of his new home as he looked towards his beloved sea. Finally, Bob and I said how much we’d always loved each other and always would. It was a heart-to-heart recap of forty-six years of tender friendship. And when there was nothing left to say, I sat beside the silent phone and wept.

Today Robert Heinlein inspires young people much as he inspired their parents and grandparents, an extraordinary phenomenon. Tunnel in the Sky is a popular CD-ROM game. In 1994, Disney released the movie Puppet Masters. Later this year, Disney and TriStar will release the movie Starship Troopers. Major studios currently have movie options on Glory Road, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Orphans of the Sky, and Stranger in a Strange Land. Robert Heinlein, now and forever—a great soaring spirit for liberty. []

Related posts:

1. Robert Louis Stevenson: Champion of Liberty
2. Robert Nozick, Philosopher of Liberty
3. Perspective: Spirit of Liberty

The author thanks long-time FEE senior staffer Bettina Bien Greaves for making available the Dean Russell Collection, quite possibly the world’s most extensive archive of Bastiat material.

Frederic Bastiat ranks among the most spirited defenders of economic freedom and international peace.

Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek called Bastiat a publicist of genius. The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises saluted Bastiat’s immortal contributions. Best-selling economics journalist Henry Hazlitt marveled at Bastiat’s uncanny clairvoyance. Said intellectual historian Murray N. Rothbard: Bastiat was indeed a lucid and superb writer, whose brilliant and witty essays and fables to this day are remarkable and devastating demolitions of protectionism and of all forms of government subsidy and control. He was a truly scintillating advocate of an untrammelled free market.

The Provisioning of Paris

Witness the eloquence with which Bastiat expressed the seeming miracle of free-market prosperity and predicted the failure of government intervention: On coming to Paris for a visit, I said to myself: Here are a million human beings who would all die in a few days if supplies of all sorts did not flow into this great metropolis. It staggers the imagination to try to comprehend the vast multiplicity of objects that must pass through its gates tomorrow, if its inhabitants are to be preserved from the horrors of famine, insurrection, and pillage. And yet all are sleeping peacefully at this moment, without being disturbed for a single instant by the idea of so frightful a prospect. On the other hand, eighty departments have worked today, without co-operative planning or mutual arrangements, to keep Paris supplied.

How does each succeeding day manage to bring to this gigantic market just what is necessary—neither too much nor too little? What, then, is the resourceful and secret power that governs the amazing regularity of such complicated movements, a regularity in which everyone has such implicit faith, although his prosperity and his very life depend upon it? That power is an absolute principle, the principle of free exchange. We put our faith in that inner light which Providence has placed in the hearts of all men, and to which has been entrusted the preservation and the unlimited improvement of our species, a light we term self-interest, which is so illuminating, so constant, and so penetrating, when it is left free of every hindrance.

Where would you be, inhabitants of Paris, if some cabinet minister decided to substitute for that power contrivances of his own invention, however superior we might suppose them to be; if he proposed to subject this prodigious mechanism to his supreme direction, to take control of all of it into his own hands, to determine by whom, where, how, and under what conditions everything should be produced, transported, exchanged, and consumed? Although there may be much suffering within your walls, although misery, despair, and perhaps starvation, cause more tears to flow than your warm-hearted charity can wipe away, it is probable, I dare say it is certain, that the arbitrary intervention of the government would infinitely multiply this suffering and spread among all of you the ills that now affect only a small number of your fellow-citizens.

Bastiat’s work offers an enormous wealth of such gems. For instance: The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

•       Nothing enters the public treasury for the benefit of a citizen or a class unless other citizens and other classes have been forced to put it there . . . heavy government expenditures and liberty are incompatible.

•       War, slavery, imposture, inequitable taxation, monopoly, privilege, unethical practices, colonialism, the right to employment, the right to credit, the right to education, the right to public aid, progressive taxation in direct or inverse ratio to the ability to pay—all are so many battering rams.

•       If nations remain permanently in the world market; if their interrelations cannot be broken without their peoples’ suffering the double discomfort of privation and glut; they will no longer need the mighty navies that bankrupt them or the vast armies that weigh them down.

•       To be free, on one’s own responsibility, to think and to act, to speak and to write, to labor and to exchange, to teach and to learn—this alone is to be free.

Bastiat was a blazing light of French classical liberalism, which developed awesome intellectual firepower. The most illustrious names include Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), Francois Quesnay (1694-1774), Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781), Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), Gabriel-Honoré Mirabeau (1749-1791), Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), Germaine de Stael (1766-1817), Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), Jean Baptiste Say (1767-1832), Victor Hugo (1802-1885), and Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859). Bastiat stood on the shoulders of his predecessors, helped keep alive a vision of natural rights, inspired his compatriots, and won new converts. He reached out to free-trade crusader Richard Cobden in England, and he inspired John Prince Smith, who launched the free-trade movement in Germany. Bastiat’s influence extended into Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden as well.

He certainly didn’t look impressive. In 1845, his friend Gustave de Molinari recalled: With his long hair, his small hat, his large frock coat and his family umbrella, he could have been easily mistaken for an honest peasant who had come to Paris for the first time to see the sights of the city. Another friend, Louis Reybaud, added: under the country costume and good-natured attitude, there was a natural dignity of deportment and flashes of a keen intelligence, and one quickly discovered an honest heart and a generous soul. His eyes, especially, were lighted up with singular brightness and fire.

Biographer George Roche noted that the Bastiat of 1848 was far more cosmopolitan, arriving dressed in the styles of the time. More important, though his emaciated face and hollow voice betrayed the ravages of disease within him, there was something about the glitter of his dark eyes which made immediately clear to all his associates that Bastiat now possessed both the worldly experience of Parisian society and a strong sense of mission.

Claude Frederic Bastiat was born on June 30, 1801, in Bayonne, a seaport in the department of Landes in southwestern France. Bayonne was a quiet medieval town, a political backwater. His father, Pierre, worked with the family banking and export firm, which did business in Spain and Portugal. His mother, Marie-Julie Frechou, died when he was seven. After his father died two years later, Frederic moved in with his aunt Justine Bastiat and his paternal grandfather, Pierre Bastiat.

They sent him to schools in Bayonne, then to the Benedictine college of Soreze, which attracted students from Britain, Greece, Italy, Holland, Poland, Spain, and the United States, contributing to his cosmopolitan outlook. He learned English, Italian, and Spanish. He read literature and philosophy, and he played the violoncello.

When Bastiat was 17, he left Soreze to join his uncle Henry de Monclar in the same banking and export firm where his father had worked. While he didn’t want a commercial career, he was interested in the civilizing influence of commerce and the many ways that laws hurt people. He observed, for instance, how the 1816 French tariff throttled trade, resulting in empty warehouses and idle docks around Bayonne. In 1819, the government put steep tariffs on corn, meat, and sugar, making poor people suffer from needlessly high food prices. High tariffs on English and Swiss cotton led to widespread smuggling.

Jean Baptiste Say

Bastiat explored books about political economy, as economics was called. I have read the Traité d’économie politique by Jean Baptiste Say, an excellent and methodical study, he wrote a friend. Say descended from Protestants who had fled France during religious persecution. He worked for a while in Britain before joining a Paris insurance company. There his boss suggested that he read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The book thrilled him, and he resolved to learn more about how an economy works. His first literary work was a 1789 pamphlet defending freedom of the press. He co-founded a republican periodical, La Décade philosophique, which published many of his articles about economic freedom. He embraced the ideals of the French Revolution and in 1799 became a member of the governing Tribunate.

The Traité d’économie politique, Say’s major work, appeared in 1803. He reintroduced free-market views to France and Europe generally. Back before the French Revolution, Turgot and other intellectuals known as physiocrats had done much to promote economic freedom—and coined the immortal phrase laissez-faire (let us be), which became a battle cry—but these intellectuals all accepted royal absolutism. Moreover, early physiocrats thought land was the most important source of wealth, which suggested support for the landholding aristocracy. These were major reasons why they fell out of fashion after the French Revolution. As a republican, Say was in a position to help convince future generations about the importance of economic freedom. He held that the most productive economy must rest on private property, private enterprise, and private initiatives, noted Princeton University historian Robert R. Palmer in his recent intellectual biography of Say.

Say discarded Smith’s labor theory of value, insisting that value was determined by customers. Say recognized the creative role of entrepreneurs. He rejected the dark pessimism of British economist T.R. Malthus, who feared that population growth would outstrip the capacity of private food producers. Say believed free-market capitalism could achieve unlimited progress.

He viewed taxation as theft. Consider these comments: The moment that value is parted with by the tax-payer, it is positively lost to him; the moment it is consumed by the government or its agents, it is lost to all the world, and never reverts to, or re-exists in society. . . . It is a glaring absurdity to pretend, that taxation contributes to national wealth, by engrossing part of the national produce . . . seized on and devoured by taxation . . . the act of levying is always attended with mischief.

Among other things, Say’s Traité d’économie politique condemned wild government spending, military conscription, and slavery (the most shameful traffic in which human beings have ever engaged). Since Napoleon had reintroduced slavery in French Caribbean colonies, pursued imperial conquest, and spent money at a ruinous rate, it’s no wonder that Say’s book was censored. In addition, he was dismissed from the Tribunate. He turned to business and started a cotton-spinning mill which grew to employ more than 400 people.

It was Napoleon Bonaparte who popularized the word idéologue as a derisive term aimed at defenders of freedom like Say. All the misfortunes that our beautiful France has been experiencing, Napoleon declared, have to be ascribed to ideology, to that cloudy metaphysics which goes ingeniously seeking first causes. Not until after Napoleon’s downfall was it possible to bring out a revised edition; all together, there were a half-dozen editions during his life, the last in 1829. Say gave up cotton-spinning, became a professor at the College de France, and Thomas Jefferson reportedly wanted to hire him for the University of Virginia.

After meeting Say in Paris, the English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill called him the ideal type of French republican. The radical republican publicist Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) remarked that Say detested at the same time the Bourbons [French royal dynasty] and Bonaparte, an apparent contradiction which filled me with astonishment.

Say inspired a new generation of French liberals devoted to laissez-faire principles. Among these was Say’s lively son-in-law Charles Comte, who, with the scholarly Charles Dunoyer (1786-1863), founded and edited Censeur européen, the most important libertarian periodical in the decade after Napoleon’s downfall. Dunoyer wrote De la liberté du travail (Freedom to work, 1825), and Comte’s Traité de legislation (Treatise on legislation) came out the following year. Comte went on to contribute articles for Revue Americaine, established by the Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American and French revolutions. Dunoyer and Comte attacked the socialist doctrines of Comte de Saint-Simon (Claude Henri de Rouvroy) and his followers. Dunoyer and Comte opposed government interference with private property, labor markets, or trade, and they strongly believed that voluntary association and market competition were absolutely essential for human progress. Wary of violent revolution, they did their best to change the world by educating people. They discussed issues with the leading French liberals of their day, including philosopher Benjamin Constant, novelist Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle, 1783-1842), historian Augustin Thierry (1795-1856), and Belgian-born economist Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912).

From Say, Bastiat learned that economic freedom works better than government intervention and that he might gain influence by explaining fundamental principles. Bastiat surely must have been cheered to discover a growing community of French liberals. They displayed much deeper understanding of freedom than the better-known English economists who embraced Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism and subsequently succumbed to socialism.

“Solitary Studies”

In 1824, Bastiat dreamed of going to Paris and somehow making a difference, but his ailing grandfather asked him to live on the 617-acre family property near Mugron, a small town, and that’s what he did. I am putting aside all ambitious projects and am returning again to my solitary studies, he remarked. His grandfather died the following year, and he inherited the property. Like the early physiocrats, Bastiat promoted better farming techniques among the tenants who worked his property, but they weren’t much interested. What would you have if you had a philharmonic society composed of the deaf? he lamented. He spent most of his time with books.

Bastiat came across a copy of Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1827. He wrote a friend: I have discovered a real treasure—a small volume of the moral and political philosophy of Franklin. I am so enthusiastic about his style that I intend to adopt it as my own.

For a sounding board, he turned to his neighbor Félix Coudroy, a young lawyer who shared his passion for ideas. Coudroy, however, revered Jean Jacques Rousseau and favored socialism. Coudroy frequently read books, marked telling passages, passed the book to Bastiat, and then they talked about it. Bastiat learned a great deal about biography, history, politics, religion, and philosophy this way. Eventually, he converted Coudroy to classical liberalism. They were to be close friends for two decades.

Around 1830, Bastiat decided I would like a wife. He married one Marie Hiard but, as biographer Louis Baudin noted, He left the bride at the church after the wedding and continued to live as a bachelor. Somehow, a son was born, but his wife continued to live with her parents.

On July 26, 1830, King Charles X suspended freedom of the press, dissolved the French Chamber of Deputies, took away the right to vote from middle-class people, and called for new elections in which only aristocrats could participate—a scheme to restore royal absolutism. This triggered a revolution, and after three days of upheaval, he abdicated. The revered Marquis de Lafayette threw his support behind Louis Philippe, who, though related to the long-ruling Bourbon dynasty, agreed to serve as a Citizen King. He stood astride a moderate, middle-class regime which was corrupted by power as the aristocracy had been corrupted before. Louis-Philippe’s chief minister Francois Guizot encouraged people to Enrichissez vous, enrichissez vous (enrich yourselves).

Bastiat began to play a minor role in public affairs. Soon after the 1830 Revolution, he was appointed a justice of the peace in Mugron, and he was elected to the General Council of Landes. While traveling through Spain and Portugal, he again witnessed the folly of trade restrictions, which kept people poor.

Bastiat submitted an article to the Journal des économistes, and although the editors had rejected his previous submissions they published this one in October 1844. The article made a case that tariffs were bad for both Britain and France, and it caused a sensation. The article inspired congratulatory letters from Charles Dunoyer and from Michel Chevalier (1806-1879), who was an economics professor at the College de France. Chevalier had favored the ideas of the socialist Saint-Simon and the authoritarian Joseph de Maistre. As Chevalier biographer Marlis Steinert noted, He read Bastiat, and he was converted.

Cobden and Bright

While going through some London newspapers, Bastiat was thrilled to read about how textile entrepreneurs Richard Cobden and John Bright led the Anti-Corn-Law League, a crusade for free trade. Bastiat began gathering material for a book on the Anti-Corn-Law League, and he started corresponding with Cobden. The Englishman was then about 40, and according to a friend, he could often be seen half skipping along a pavement, or a railway platform, with the lightness of a slim and dapper figure, and a mind full bent upon its object.

In July, Bastiat crossed the English Channel to see Cobden. They told me that Cobden was on the point of starting for Manchester, Bastiat wrote a friend, and that he was most likely preparing for the journey at that moment. . . . I hurried to Cobden’s house, where I found him, and we had a conversation which lasted for two hours. He understands French very well, speaks it a little, and I understand his English. I explained the state of opinion in France, the results that I expect from my book, and so on.

According to biographer John Morley, Cobden told Bastiat that he ought to take up his quarters at the hotel of the League, and to spend his evenings there in listening to the fireside talk of [Cobden's compatriot] Mr. Bright and the rest of the band. A day or two afterwards, at Cobden’s solicitation, Bastiat went down to Manchester. His wonder at the ingenious methods and the prodigious scale of the League increased with all that he saw. His admiration for Cobden as a public leader grew into hearty affection for him as a private friend, and this friendship became one of the chief delights of the few busy years of life that remained to him.

Bastiat’s book Cobden et la Ligue scooped all other French journalists. He was the first Frenchman to talk about the English free trade movement that soon reached a climax when Parliament, in June 1846, approved a bill to begin repealing grain tariffs. This marked a dramatic departure from traditional tariff negotiations based on the principle of reciprocity: one nation would cut tariffs only if another nation would make comparable concessions. Tariff negotiations tended to be slow, unproductive, and acrimonious. Cobden and Bright persuaded Parliament to unilaterally abolish grain tariffs without asking concessions from any nation, including France, which had fought England through many bitter wars. Cobden and Bright had made a compelling case that free trade would benefit England, especially poor people who needed access to cheap food, even if other nations kept their borders closed. Moreover, they maintained, unilateral free trade would contribute to international peace by taking politics out of trade, reducing the risk that economic disputes might escalate into political and military conflicts. Unilateral free trade was a bold gesture for goodwill among nations.

Economic Sophisms

Bastiat wrote a series of articles for Journal des économistes, attacking the fallacies of protectionism. For instance, the fallacy that tariffs would mean high living standards, that labor-saving machinery destroys jobs, that tariffs are needed to maintain economic independence and national security. Bastiat viewed everything from the standpoint of consumers. His essays were lucid, dramatic, insightful, often amusing satires. He gathered 22 of the essays in a book, Sophismes économiques (Economic Sophisms), which appeared in late 1845. A second volume of 17 essays appeared three years later. They were translated into English and Italian.

Bastiat’s wit is on display in An Immense Discovery: There are men lying in wait along the whole length of the frontier, armed to the teeth and charged with the task of putting difficulties in the way of transporting goods from one country to another. They are called customs officials. They act in exactly the same way as the mud and the ruts. They delay and impede commerce; they contribute to the difference that we have noted between the price paid by the consumer and the price received by the producer.

Bastiat’s most famous satire was his A Petition, in which candlemakers appealed to the French Chamber of Deputies for protection against an insidious competitor. We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a foreign rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly that we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion [England]. . . .

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s eyes, deadlights, and blinds—in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses. . . .

In late 1845, the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce took a step toward free trade by urging that France and Belgium form a customs union, and Bastiat was asked to help. He wrote articles for a Bordeaux newspaper and he delivered speeches aimed at encouraging France to go beyond a customs union and pursue free trade with people everywhere.

Mindful that the English free trade movement had been launched in a regional city—Manchester—Bastiat helped form the Association bordelaise pour la liberté des échanges (Bordeaux Association for Free Trade) on February 23, 1846. Cobden had gone national after a regional free trade association was underway, and Bastiat adopted the same strategy. He went to Paris and launched the Association pour la liberté des échanges (Free trade association) on May 10, 1846. Among those who helped Bastiat were Auguste Blanqui, Michel Chevalier, Charles Dunoyer, Gustave de Molinari, and Jean Baptiste Say’s son Horace. On August 18, they kicked off their campaign with a dinner featuring Richard Cobden. The French free trade association held a succession of public meetings in Paris at Montesquieu Hall, named after the eighteenth-century French philosopher who had advocated a separation of government powers.

I cherish all forms of freedom, Bastiat subsequently wrote Cobden, and first among them that freedom which is the most universally beneficial to all men, which they enjoy every minute of the day and under all circumstances of their lives—freedom of labor and freedom of exchange. I realize that the right to possess the fruits of one’s toil is the keystone of society and even of human life. I realize that exchange is implicit in the idea of property, and that restrictions on exchange shake the foundations of our right to own anything.

In another letter to Cobden, Bastiat made clear he recognized how much was at stake in the fight for free trade: Rather than the fact of free trade alone, I desire for my country the general philosophy of free trade. While free trade itself will bring more wealth to us, the acceptance of the general philosophy that underlies free trade will inspire all needed reforms.

Bastiat encouraged others to organize free trade associations in Marseilles and Lyons. He reported to Cobden: Unquestionably, we are making progress. Six months ago, we didn’t have even one newspaper for us. Today we have five in Paris, three in Bordeaux, two in Marseilles, one in Le Havre, and two in Bayonne.

Le Libre-Échange

On November 29, Bastiat began publishing Le Libre-Echange, a four-to-eight-page weekly free trade newspaper. Free trade! Bastiat exulted, It is a phrase that will level the mountains. . . . Do you imagine that we have organized ourselves to get some small reduction in tariffs? Never. We demand for all of our fellow citizens, not only freedom to work but also freedom to exchange the fruits of their work.

Bastiat was an inspiration for people who organized free trade associations in Belgium, Spain, and Italy. He also had an impact on intellectuals in Germany. The Englishman John Prince Smith (1809-1874), who had gone to Prussia and become a citizen, was influenced by Bastiat, and widely promoted free trade ideas. As historian Ralph Raico notes, Prince Smith worked at disseminating good translations of the works of Frédéric Bastiat and in gathering about him a circle of like-minded enthusiasts.

During 1847, Bastiat advised Cobden that free trade was only the first step toward promoting solid peace with France. The policy taken by you and your friends in Parliament will have an immense influence on the course of our undertaking. If you energetically disarm your diplomacy, if you succeed in reducing your naval forces, we shall be strong. If not, what kind of figure shall we cut before our public? When we predict that Free Trade will draw English policy into the way of justice, peace, economy, colonial emancipation, France is not bound to take our word for it. There exists an inveterate mistrust of England, I will even say a sentiment of hostility, as old as the two names of French and English. . . . England ought to bring her political system into harmony with her new economic system.

Cobden and Bastiat collaborated on many things. On one occasion, for instance, Cobden wrote: My first speech . . . cost me a good deal of time with the aid of Bastiat to write and prepare to read it. My good friend Bastiat has been two mornings with me in my room, translating and teaching, before eight o’clock.

Bastiat continued to do the lion’s share of organizing work in France. He wrote Coudroy: My friend, I am not only the Association, I am the Association entirely. While I have zealous and devoted collaborators, they are interested only in speaking and writing. As for the organization and administration of this vast machine, I am alone.

Unfortunately, while entrenched interest groups aggressively defended French tariffs and import prohibitions, there wasn’t any interest group willing to back free trade. I am losing all my time, he wrote Coudroy, the association is progressing at a turtle’s pace. The lack of money and social connections discouraged Bastiat, as he admitted to Cobden: I suffer from my poverty; yes, instead of running from one to the other on foot, dirtied up to my back, in order to meet only one or two of them a day and obtain only evasive or weak responses, I would like to be able to unite them at my table in a rich salon, then the difficulties would be gone! Ah, it is neither the heart nor the head that I lack, but I feel that this superb Babylon is not my place and that it is necessary that I return to my solitude.

In 1847, the French government debated a bill which would abolish about half of the French tariffs, but protectionist lobbyists killed it, and the free traders never recovered. Bastiat wrote Cobden: Our adversaries are full of audacity and ardor. Our friends, on the contrary, have become discouraged and indifferent. What good does it do to be a thousand times right if we can’t get anyone to listen. The tactics of the protectionists, concurred in by the newspapers, are to ignore us completely. The French free trade association held its last public meeting on March 15, 1848, and Le Libre Echange ceased publication after the April 16 issue.

Reform of the corrupt government had become the hottest political issue, and the situation had reached a climax on February 21, 1848, when National Guards shot about 20 republican demonstrators in Paris. Suddenly, the city exploded into revolution. The king abdicated three days later, and the Chamber of Deputies proclaimed France a republic. Ten republican leaders, including the socialist Louis Blanc, headed a provisional government that would run things until the election of a Constituent Assembly. Blanc demanded a Ministry of Progress, nationalization of industry, and national workshops. The workshops, a make-work scheme for socialists and the unemployed, were set up, and by mid-June they had some 120,000 people working mostly on roads.

Amidst the upheaval, Bastiat published about a dozen issues of La République francaise, a two-page periodical defending libertarian principles. He insisted that people must be secure in all rights, those of the conscience as well as those of intelligence; those of property, like those of work; those of the family as those of the commune; those of the country as those of humanity. I have no other ideal than universal justice; no other banner than that of our flag: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

Election as Deputy

Just as Cobden had become convinced that he would be more effective working within Parliament and stirring up popular support for libertarian principles, Bastiat concluded he must try to influence the Constituent Assembly. In April 1848, with universal manhood suffrage, he was elected a Deputy from Landes. Then on May 15, disgruntled welfare recipients from the national workshops invaded the hall where the Constituent Assembly met and drove out the deputies. National Guards crushed the rebels, and the Constituent Assembly declared martial law and proceeded to dismantle the national workshops. During the Bloody June Days (June 24-26), an estimated 20,000 armed socialists from the national workshops fought for power, but backed by the National Guards, the Constituent Assembly got tough. Some 10,000 people were killed or wounded, and another 11,000 were imprisoned.

For several weeks, Bastiat issued a two-page revolutionary paper, the daily Jacques Bonhomme, edited by Charles Coquelin and Gustave de Molinari. Bastiat recognized that revolutionary violence occurred not because there was too much freedom but because there wasn’t enough. Can we imagine citizens, otherwise completely free, he wrote to Félix Coudroy, moving to overthrow their government when its activity is limited to satisfying the most vital, the most keenly felt of all social wants, the need for justice? We have tried so many things; when shall we try the simplest of all: freedom?

Bastiat produced articles for the Journal des Economistes, Journal des Débats, Courrier francais, Journal du Havre, Courrier de Marseille, Sentinelle des Pyrénées and others. He contributed two essays to the Dictionnaire de l’Economie politique (Dictionary of Political Economy), which Ambrose Clement, Charles Coquelin, Horace Say, Gustave de Molinari, and others developed as a means to popularize free-market ideas. Moreover, Bastiat wrote letters for the opposition press, including l’Epoque, Journal de Lille, Minoteur industriel, la Presse, and Voix de Peuple (where, through 14 remarkable letters, Bastiat debated the bombastic socialist Pierre Joseph Proudhon). Professor Dean Russell is convinced that Bastiat took the lead exposing the fallacies of socialism.

Bastiat ridiculed claims that government could increase the total number of productive jobs. The state opens a road, builds a palace, repairs a street, digs a canal; with these projects it gives jobs to certain workers. That is what is seen. But it deprives certain other laborers of employment. That is what is not seen. . . . do millions of francs descend miraculously on a moonbeam into the coffers of [politicians]? For the process to be complete, does not the state have to organize the collection of funds as well as their expenditure? Does it not have to get its tax collectors into the country and its taxpayers to make their contributions?

When, in the name of compassion, socialists demanded more powerful government, Bastiat fired away with tough questions: Is there in the heart of man only what the legislator has put there? Did fraternity have to make its appearance on earth by way of the ballot box? Does the law forbid you to practice charity simply because all that it imposes on you is the obligation to practice justice? Are we to believe that women will cease to be self-sacrificing and that pity will no longer find a place in their hearts because self-sacrifice and pity will not be commanded by the law?

Bastiat warned socialism must mean slavery, because the state will be the arbiter, the master, of all destinies. It will take a great deal; hence, a great deal will remain for itself. It will multiply the number of its agents; it will enlarge the scope of its prerogatives; it will end by acquiring overwhelming proportions.

The Constituent Assembly decided France must have a strong president—even before it had finished drafting a new constitution! The candidates included a vague idealist, a watered-down socialist, a tough law-and-order man, and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who mainly traded on his name as conqueror Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew. Twice Louis Napoleon had attempted to seize power (Strasbourg in 1836 and Boulogne in 1840), for which he spent some time in prison. He wrote an anticapitalist tract and appealed to people who looked back nostalgically on Napoleon Bonaparte’s wars. In December 1848, he easily won election as French President.

Legislative Assembly

The Constituent Assembly concluded its business in May 1849 and was succeeded by the Legislative Assembly. Bastiat was elected a deputy. As member of the Budget Commission and vice president of the Assembly’s powerful Finance Committee, he urged lower government spending, lower taxes, and free trade.

The following month there was an attempted socialist rebellion which brought widespread support for repressive measures. Again and again, Bastiat voted to defend civil liberties. He opposed a bill banning voluntary labor unions. He voted against imposing martial law. When his socialist enemy Louis Blanc was charged with inciting an insurrection, Bastiat voted to acquit him. Even Proudhon had to acknowledge that Bastiat is devoted, body and soul, to the Republic, to liberty, to equality, to progress; he has clearly proved that many times with his vote in the Assembly.

Bastiat was discouraged. He remarked that while the French people have been in advance of all other nations in the conquest of their rights, or rather of their political guarantees, they have nonetheless remained the most governed, regimented, administered, imposed upon, shackled, and exploited of all.

Here I am in my solitude, he lamented. Would that I could bury myself here forever, and work out peacefully this economic synthesis which I have in my head, and which will never leave it! For, unless there occur some sudden change in public opinion, I am about to be sent to Paris charged with the terrible mandate of a Representative of the People. If I had health and strength, I should accept this mission with enthusiasm. But what can my feeble voice, my sickly and nervous constitution, accomplish in the midst of revolutionary tempests?

Diagnosed with tuberculosis, Bastiat needed a lot of rest to preserve his health, but he kept at it. I rise at six o’clock, dress, shave, breakfast, and read the newspapers, he told Felix Coudroy. This occupies me till seven, or half-past seven. About nine, I am obliged to go out, for at ten commences the sitting of the Committee of Finance, of which I am a member. It continues till one, and then the public sitting begins, and continues till seven. I return to dinner, and it very rarely happens that there are not after-dinner meetings of Sub-Committees charged with special questions. The only hour at my disposal is from eight to nine in the morning, and it is at that hour that I receive visitors. . . . I am profoundly disgusted with this kind of life.

The Law

In June 1850, Bastiat returned to Mugron and produced one of his most beloved works, The Law. He affirmed the natural rights philosophy, the most powerful intellectual defense of liberty which, except for the American abolitionist movement, had virtually vanished from the English-speaking world. It is not because men have passed laws that personality, liberty, and property exist, he declared. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and property already exist that men make laws. . . . Each of us certainly gets from Nature, from God, the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since they are the three elements constituting or sustaining life, elements which are mutually complementary and which cannot be understood without one another. For what are our faculties, if not an extension of our personality, and what is property, if not an extension of our faculties?. . . . Law is the organization of the natural right to legitimate self-defense.

Bastiat went on to attack what he called legal plunder—laws which exploit some people to benefit politically connected interests. He described how such laws tend to politicize private life: It is in the nature of men to react against the inequity of which they are the victims. When, therefore, plunder is organized by the law for the profit of the classes who make it, all the plundered classes seek, by peaceful or revolutionary means, to enter into the making of the laws. And once again, Bastiat demonstrated vivid understanding of what socialism was all about: socialists consider mankind as raw material to be fitted into various social molds . . . inert matter, receiving from the power of the government life, organization, morality and wealth.

In The Law, Bastiat celebrated liberty, whose name alone has the power to stir all hearts and set the world to shaking . . . freedom of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of movement, of labor, of exchange; in other words, the freedom of everyone to use all his faculties in a peaceful way; in still other words, the destruction of all forms of despotism, even of legal despotism, and the restriction of the law to its sole rational function, that is, of regulating the right of the individual to legitimate self-defense.

Bastiat plunged into his next work, Les Harmonies économiques (Economic Harmonies). He expanded on a cherished theme, that free people cooperate peacefully and gain the benefits of voluntary exchange. Men’s interests, he wrote, left to themselves, tend to form harmonious combinations and to work together for progress and the general good.

The book reflected both his deep pessimism and fervent optimism. We see plunder usurping the citizens’ liberty in order the more readily to exploit their wealth, and draining off their substance the better to conquer their liberty, he wrote. Private enterprise becomes public enterprise. Everything is done by government functionaries; a stupid and vexatious bureaucracy swarms over the land. The public treasury becomes a vast reservoir into which those who work pour their earnings, so that the henchmen of the government may tap them as they will.

Yet Bastiat never gave up. Oh liberty! he cried. We have seen thee hunted from country to country, crushed by conquest, nigh unto death in servitude, jeered at in the courts of the mighty, driven from the schools, mocked in the drawing room, misinterpreted in the studio, anathematized in the temple. . . . But if thou shouldst surrender in this last haven, what becomes of the hope of the ages and of the dignity of man? The first volume of Harmonies économiques was published in late 1850, and he never finished the work.

By August 1850, Bastiat’s tuberculosis worsened. He wrote Cobden lamenting these unfortunate lungs, which are to me very capricious servants. I have returned a little better, but afflicted with a disease of the larynx, accompanied with a complete extinction of voice. The doctor enjoins absolute silence; and, in consequence, I am about to pass two months in the country, near Paris.

Doctors ordered Bastiat to Italy. In his last letter to Félix Coudroy, from Rome, he wrote: Here I am in the Eternal City, but not much disposed to visit its marvels. . . . I should desire only one thing, to be relieved of the acute pain which the disease of the windpipe occasions. This continuity of suffering torments me. Every meal is a punishment. To eat, drink, speak, cough are all painful operations. Walking fatigues me—carriage airings irritate the throat—I can no longer work, or even read, seriously. You see to what I am reduced. I shall soon be little better than a dead body, retaining only the faculty of suffering. When he was too ill to write, he asked his friend P. Paillottet to tell Michel Chevalier how grateful I am for his excellent review of my book (Harmonies économiques).

On Tuesday, December 24, 1850, Bastiat was in bed, and Paillottet remarked that his eye sparkled with that peculiar expression which I had frequently noticed in our conversations, and which announced the solution of a problem. Bastiat uttered two words: la vérité (the truth). He took his last breath a few minutes after five in the afternoon. He was only 49. His cousin, the priest Eugene de Monclar, was at his side. Two days later, there was a funeral service at Rome’s Saint-Louis des Francais church, and he was buried in the adjacent cemetery.

He had done much to expand the ranks of French classical liberals. The Paris group, as intellectual historian Joseph Schumpeter called them, controlled the Journal des économistes, the new dictionary, the central professional organization in Paris, the College de France, and other institutions as well as most of the publicity—so much so that their political or scientific opponents began to suffer from a persecution complex.

Bastiat’s Influence on Michel Chevalier

Bastiat’s most important single influence was probably on Michel Chevalier. Until 1845, noted historian J.B. Duroselle, Michel Chevalier was a moderate protectionist. Then in April of 1846, he published his profession of faith as a free trader in an article in the Journal des Débats. How can that evolution be explained? I believe it can be attributed almost entirely to the intellectual influence of Frédéric Bastiat.

In 1852, Chevalier published Examen du systeme commercial connu sous le nom de systeme protecteur (Examination of the Commercial System known as Protectionism). He often drew from Bastiat. For instance, he noted that To demonstrate the evil effects of protectionism, I will cite an argument by Bastiat. . . . In one of his excellent pamphlets, Bastiat proposed to show that the principle of protectionism and communism is the same.

Chevalier gained influence in the French government and used it to promote free trade. After the 1855 Industrial Exposition, he declared that French industry was so competitive it didn’t need tariff protection anymore. He persuaded the Emperor and the Council of State to introduce a free trade bill in the national assembly, but it was shot down. In 1856, Cobden offered Chevalier some encouragement: I am pleased indeed that you are carrying on the defense of the principles of free trade, for since the untimely death of our dear friend Bastiat, it is you whom we regard as the champion of free trade.

Chevalier began thinking that trade might be liberalized via the French emperor’s treaty-making power. In 1859, he visited England to seek Cobden’s support for a trade treaty between England and France. He talked with Chancellor of the Exchequer William Ewart Gladstone. Cobden took the lead in negotiations. Although the resulting treaty left many tariffs at 30 percent, it abolished all French import prohibitions, and many tariffs were cut. The treaty marked a momentous breakthrough. Despite the predictable outrage from special interests, France went on to negotiate trade liberalization treaties with Austria-Hungary, German states, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Moreover, the most-favored-nation principle became widely adopted—whenever a nation negotiates lower import barriers in a new treaty, the benefits will be extended to everyone else with whom that nation has a trade treaty.

Biographer P. Ronce remarked that If the free trade campaign [which Bastiat spearheaded from 1845-1850] did not bring an immediate result, at least it accustomed people to the idea of free trade, and it brought serious doubts about the benefits of protection; it prepared the way for the ‘qualified’ free trade system represented by the Treaty of Commerce of 1860.

Richard Cobden offered this tribute: My enthusiasm for Bastiat, founded as much on a love of his personal qualities as on an admiration for his genius, dates back nearly twenty years. . . . The works of Bastiat, which are selling not only in France, but throughout Europe, are gradually teaching those who by their commanding talents are capable of becoming the teachers of others; for Bastiat speaks with the greatest force to the highest order of intellects. At the same time, he is almost the only Political Economist whose style is brilliant and fascinating, whilst his irresistible logic is relieved by sallies of wit and humor which makes his Sophisms as amusing as a novel. His fame is so well established that I think it would be presumptuous to do anything to increase it by any other means than the silent but certain dissemination of his works by the force of their own great merits.

Bastiat’s seven-volume Oeuvres completes (complete works) appeared between 1861 and 1864. There continued to be French interest in classical liberalism, as evidenced by a succession of books about Bastiat: A.B. Belle’s Bastiat et le Libre-Echange (Bastiat and Free Trade, 1878), Edouard Bondurand’s Frédéric Bastiat (1879), Alphonse Courtois’s Journal des Economistes (1888), A. D. Fouville’s Frédéric Bastiat (1888), C.H. Brunel’s Bastiat et la reaction contre le pessimisme économique (Bastiat and the reaction against pessimistic economics, 1901) and G. de Nouvion’s Frédéric Bastiat, Sa Vie, Ses Oeuvres, Ses Doctrines (Frédéric Bastiat, his life, work and doctrines, 1905). The glorious French laissez-faire tradition passed into history with the death of Bastiat’s friend Gustave de Molinari on January 28, 1912, although Molinari influenced American individualists like Benjamin Tucker, whose radical ideas persist to this day.

Bastiat in the Twentieth Century

Most twentieth-century academics banished Bastiat’s name from serious discussion. Economist Joseph Schumpeter, for instance, wrote that he might have gone down to posterity as the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived—were it not for Bastiat’s Les Harmonies économiques, which ventured into economic theory. I do not hold that Bastiat was a bad theorist, Schumpeter sniffed, I hold that he was no theorist. In their History of Economic Doctrines, Charles Gide and Charles Rist remarked that It is easy to laugh . . . and to show that such supposed harmony of interests between men does not exist.

A few scholars did acknowledge Bastiat’s contributions. Economist John A. Hobson called Bastiat the most brilliant exponent of the sheer logic of Free Trade in this or any other country. The respected economic historian John H. Clapham hailed Bastiat for the best series of popular free trade arguments ever written . . . the text-book for controversialists of his school throughout Europe. The scholarly 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1913) offered these stirring words: He alone fought socialism hand to hand, body to body, as it were, not caricaturing it, not denouncing it, not criticizing under its name some merely abstract theory, but taking it as actually presented by its most popular representatives, considering patiently their proposals and arguments, and proving conclusively that they proceeded on false principles, reasoned badly and sought to realize generous aims by foolish and harmful means. Nowhere will reason find a richer armoury of weapons available against socialism than in the pamphlets published by Bastiat. . . .

In 1946, former Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce General Manager Leonard E. Read established the Foundation for Economic Education and resolved to make Bastiat’s work better known. He persuaded economics scholar Dean Russell to prepare a new translation of The Law. Over the years, it has sold several hundred thousand copies. Russell went on to earn his Ph.D. under famed free-market economist Wilhelm Ropke at the University of Geneva, writing his dissertation on Bastiat. Russell adapted this into Frederic Bastiat, Ideas and Influence (1965), which remains the best single book on him.

Meanwhile, New York Times editorial writer Henry Hazlitt produced a book with the audacious title Economics in One Lesson (1946). My greatest debt, Hazlitt acknowledged, is Frederic Bastiat’s essay, ‘What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,’ now nearly a century old. The present work may, in fact, be regarded as a modernization, extension and generalization of the approach found in Bastiat’s pamphlet. Economics in One Lesson has sold an estimated one million copies.

Recent evidence dramatically affirms Bastiat’s most fundamental view that government is the primary source of chronic violence and that a free society tends to be peaceful. Respected political scientist R.J. Rummel, who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, analyzed almost 8,200 estimates of deaths from domestic violence, war, genocide, and mass murder. In his 1995 book Death by Government, he reported that throughout history, governments have murdered more than 300 million people—not counting war deaths. In his 1997 book Power Kills, Rummel surveyed experience of the past 180 years and reported that he didn’t find a single case of war between two democratic governments with limited power. Moreover, there were decidedly fewer civil wars and other types of domestic violence in nations with limited-power democratic governments.

And so that frail Frenchman whose public career spanned just six years, belittled as a mere popularizer, dismissed as a dreamer and an ideologue, turns out to have been right. Even before Karl Marx began scribbling The Communist Manifesto in December 1847, Frederic Bastiat knew that socialism is doomed. Marx called for a vast expansion of government power to seize privately owned land, banks, railroads, and schools, but Bastiat warned that government power is a mortal enemy, and he was right. He declared that prosperity is everywhere the work of free people, and he was right again. He maintained that the only meaningful way to secure peace is to secure human liberty by limiting government power, and he was right yet again. Bastiat took the lead, he stood alone when he had to, he displayed a generous spirit, he shared epic insights, he gave wings to ideas, and he committed his life for liberty. He earned his place among the immortals. []

Picture: Frederic Bastiat

Related posts:

1. Bastiat: Champion of Economic Liberty
2. In Defense of Freedom: Frederic Bastiat
3. William Penn: America’s First Great Champion for Liberty and Peace

Benjamin Franklin pioneered the spirit of self-help in America. With less than three years of formal schooling, he taught himself almost everything he knew. He took the initiative of learning French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish. He taught himself how to play the guitar, violin, and harp. He made himself an influential author and editor. He started a successful printing business, newspaper, and magazine. He developed a network of printing partnerships throughout the American colonies.

When Franklin saw that something needed doing, he did it. In Philadelphia, he helped launch the city’s first police force, the first volunteer fire company, the first fire insurance firm, the first hospital, the first public library, and the academy that became the first institution of higher learning (the University of Pennsylvania). As postmaster, he doubled and tripled the frequency of mail deliveries.

Franklin, who reportedly amassed early America’s largest private library, helped expand the frontiers of science and invention. He started the American Philosophical Society, which was this country’s first scientific society and maintained the first science library, first museum, and first patent office; more than 90 members of this society went on to win Nobel Prizes. On his eight trans-Atlantic crossings, Franklin made measurements that helped chart the Gulf Stream. He pioneered the study of water flowing around a hull—hydrodynamics. He investigated meteorology. He invented bifocal spectacles. He was most famous, of course, for his experiments with electricity, especially lightning. His lightning rod helped banish the terror of thunderstorms.

Franklin had more to do with founding the American republic than anyone else. As American representative in London, he helped persuade Parliament to repeal despised Stamp Act taxes, giving America an additional decade to prepare for armed conflict with Britain. He was on the committee that named Thomas Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence. He went to France and secured military help as well as a formal alliance, without which America probably wouldn’t have won the Revolutionary War. He helped negotiate the peace with Britain. He crafted a compromise that helped prevent the collapse of the Constitutional Convention, and he was the one who moved that the Constitution be adopted.

Franklin, more than anybody, linked the emerging international movements for liberty. James Madison recalled that he never passed half an hour in his company without hearing some observation or anecdote worth remembering. Franklin dined with Wealth of Nations author Adam Smith. The Scottish philosopher David Hume told Franklin: America has sent us many good things, Gold, Silver, Sugar, Tobacco, Indigo, &c. But you are the first Philosopher, and indeed the first Great Man of Letters for whom we are beholden. Edmund Burke, who had opposed Britain’s war against America, called Franklin the friend of mankind. When the French wit Voltaire met William Temple Franklin, he quipped: God and Liberty! It is the only benediction which can be given to the grandson of Franklin. Laissez-faire economist Anne Robert Jacques Turgot remarked that Franklin snatched the lightning from heaven and the scepter from tyrants.

Franklin was a late-blooming radical. During his 30s, he brokered the sale of some slaves as a sideline for his general store. He and his wife owned two slaves. In 1758, when he was 52, he suggested establishing Philadelphia’s first school for blacks. He abandoned his support for the British Empire and committed himself to the American Revolution when he was 70. Philadelphia Quakers had launched the abolitionist movement by organizing the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (1775), but its activities ceased during the Revolution; this pioneering society revived in 1787 when Franklin became its president, at 81. Two years later he voiced his support for the ideals of the French Revolution.

Franklin was famous for his charm and tact, which enabled him to get the most out of people, but he had detractors. For instance, John Adams complained that I could never obtain the favour of his Company in a Morning before Breakfast which would have been the most convenient time to read over the Letters and papers. . . . Mr. Franklin kept a horn book always in his Pockett in which he minuted all his invitations to dinner, and Mr. [Arthur] Lee said it was the only thing in which he was punctual . . . and after that went sometimes to the Play, sometimes to the Philosophers but most commonly to visit those Ladies. . . . John Dickinson, head of Pennsylvania’s delegation to Congress, hated Franklin so much that he refused to install a lightning rod on his Philadelphia mansion—and it was struck by lightning.

While Franklin was generous with his friends and adopted families, he could be insensitive with his own. He disregarded pleas from his dying wife, Deborah, whom he hadn’t seen in almost a dozen years, to return home from Britain where he represented American colonial interests. He refused to approve his daughter’s proposed marriage to the man she loved. His son’s decision to side with Britain during the American Revolution provoked a bitter break that never healed.

As biographer Ronald W. Clark noted, Franklin was only an inch or two less than six feet in height, thickset and muscular, with dark brown hair above friendly hazel eyes. He was obviously able to look after himself, a distinct advantage in the rougher eighteenth century. . . . These physical attributes were compounded by a nimbleness of mind, so that in argument as well as in action he tended to be off the mark quicker than most men. Above all, and largely concealed by his instinctive hail-fellow-well-met nature, there was a steely determination to succeed and some impatience with those who got in his way.

Childhood and Youth

Benjamin Franklin was born in a Milk Street, Boston, house January 17, 1706, the tenth son of Abia Folger, daughter of an indentured servant. His father Josiah Franklin was a candlemaker.

At eight, he was sent to Boston’s Latin school with the idea of entering Harvard, which would prepare him for the ministry. But Harvard required unquestioning devotion, and Franklin exhibited some religious skepticism. At one point, for instance, he suggested that his father shorten his lengthy mealtime prayers and say Grace over the whole cask—it would be a vast saving of time. Within two years, Franklin was transferred to a more practical Boston school for writing and arithmetic. He apprenticed in his father’s candlemaking shop.

But by age 12, he had become restless. Apparently because he began to enjoy books, his father arranged for him to apprentice with his 21-year-old brother James, who had set himself up as a Boston printer. I was fond of reading, Franklin recalled, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Among other titles, he read Plutarch’s Lives, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

Franklin gained experience writing when his brother began publishing a newspaper, the New-England Courant. At 16, he anonymously wrote 14 articles known as the Dogood Papers, satirizing religious dogmas and government officials, and his brother published them apparently without ever knowing the identity of the author. As a consequence, the Massachusetts Governor’s Council sentenced James Franklin to a month in jail, and it ordered him to stop publishing the New-England Courant. The paper continued to appear, however—under Benjamin Franklin’s name. But the brothers began squabbling, apparently over control. Impatient to become his own man, he ran away from home in September 1723.

Somewhere along the line, Franklin learned how to be more tactful and persuasive. He expressed himself in Terms of modest Diffidence, never using when I advance any thing that may possibly be disputed, the Words Certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the Air of Positiveness to an Opinion; but rather say, I conceive, or I apprehend a Thing to be so and so, It appears to me, or I should think it so or so for such & such Reasons, or I imagine it to be so, or it is so if I am not mistaken.

Franklin went to Philadelphia, where he heard a printer was looking for help. I was dirty from my Journey, he wrote about his arrival at the Market Street Wharf, my Pockets were stuff’d out with Shirts & Stockings; I knew no Soul, or where to look for Lodging. I was fatigued with Travelling, Rowing & Want of Rest. I was very hungry, and my whole Stock of Cash consisted of a Dutch Dollar and about a Shilling in Copper. Yet as biographer Ronald Clark noted, Franklin was distinctly presentable, a well-set-up young man in his early twenties, lacking the plumpness of his later years and radiating an apparently inexhaustible energy.

Young Ben Franklin in London

Franklin got a job and somehow met Pennsylvania’s governor William Keith, who needed a good printer. Although Franklin was just 18, his evident intelligence made him a standout. The governor offered to provide financing so Franklin could establish his own print shop. Accordingly, in November 1724 he sailed for England to buy about P100 of printing equipment, but the governor’s promise turned out to be worthless. During the next 20 months, Franklin worked for a couple of big London printers. He wrote a pamphlet which, questioning certain religious doctrines, served as a calling card. Franklin met Bernard Mandeville, the Dutch doctor who wrote The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits, anticipating Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand.

London, an intellectual capital of Europe, had expanded Franklin’s vision. He had become a first-class printer and met many sophisticated people. During the tedious 79-day voyage home, he wrote down some principles for success. His original draft was lost, but the main points were probably similar to what he remembered later: 1. It is necessary for me to be extremely frugal for some time, till I have paid what I owe. 2. To endeavor to speak truth in every instance, to give nobody expectations that are not likely to be answered, but aim at sincerity in every word and action; the most amiable excellence in a rational being. 3. To apply myself industriously to whatever business I take in hand, and not divert my mind from my business by any foolish project of growing suddenly rich; for industry and patience are the surest means of plenty. 4. I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever, not even in a matter of truth; but rather by some means excuse the faults I hear charged upon others, and, upon proper occasions, speak all the good I know of everybody.

Within months after his return in late 1726, he was in business for himself. He landed a contract to print Pennsylvania’s currency—and, alas, promoter that he was, he touted it in a pamphlet, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency. Franklin printed a wide range of things, including the first novel published in America (Samuel Richardson’s Pamela), and sold material printed by others, including Bibles and all kinds of legal forms. Moreover, Franklin served as a moneylender for the poor, providing as little as two shillings.

The Pennsylvania Gazette and “Poor Richard”

Franklin bought a failing newspaper, changed its name to The Pennsylvania Gazette, wrote many of the articles himself and made money. The December 28, 1732, issue announced that he would be offering Poor Richard: an Almanack. It was published annually until 1758, offering memorable aphorisms about success. For instance: God helps them that helps themselves. . . . Diligence is the Mother of Good-Luck. . . . Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. . . . Well done is better than well said. . . . He that has a Trade, has an Office of Profit and Honour. . . . Life with Fools consists in Drinking; With the wise Man Living’s Thinking. . . . Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure. . . . As Pride increases, Fortune declines. . . . Be always asham’d to catch thy self idle. . . . Wink at small faults; remember thou hast great ones. . . . Folly and Wickedness shortens Life. . . . Drive thy business; let not that drive thee. . . . When you’re good to others, you are best to yourself. . . . Love, and be lov’d. Poor Richard’s Almanack sold some 10,000 copies a year—a big number in those days—and helped make Franklin a household name.

Meanwhile, in 1727, Franklin started a group called the Junto, which he described as a Club for mutual Improvement. Participants—many of whom were young apprentices—suggested one or more Queries on any Point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss’d by the Company, and once in three Months produce & read an Essay of his own Writing on any Subject he pleased. They met weekly on Friday evenings, initially at a tavern and later in a rented room. When the Junto reached what Franklin considered an optimum size (12), he encouraged interested people to form their own groups, and they sprouted all around Philadelphia.

During the next three decades, Franklin’s Junto helped pioneer many of Philadelphia’s institutions, starting with the city’s first public library. After members discussed the idea, it was considered by people in the other groups. Then Franklin talked about it in the columns of The Pennsylvania Gazette. The library began by charging an entrance fee and an annual subscription fee. Next, to provide greater security against crime, Franklin started City Watch, which organized teams of constables patrolling neighborhoods at night. Through the Junto, Franklin promoted the paving, cleaning, and lighting of streets.

Reflecting his cosmopolitan view, Franklin decided that The first drudgery of settling new colonies, which confines the attention of people to mere necessaries, is now pretty well over. . . . He believed it was time to cultivate the finer arts and improve the common stock of knowledge. In 1744, he and fellow Junto members helped organize the American Philosophical Society; he served as its first secretary.

Franklin thought college education should be available to people in Pennsylvania—as it was available in Connecticut (Yale), Massachusetts (Harvard), and Virginia (William and Mary). He discussed his idea with members of the Junto and wrote a pamphlet, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania. He recommended that the curriculum focus on basic skills like writing and speaking. His proposed reading list included works by the seventeenth-century radical author Algernon Sidney and Cato’s Letters, the influential early eighteenth-century case for natural rights. In 1749, Franklin was elected the first president of this new Academy, helping to recruit trustees, raise money, rent a house, and hire teachers. The Academy prospered and went on to become the University of Pennsylvania.

A doctor named Thomas Bond tried to establish Philadelphia’s first hospital, but he couldn’t get support. People assumed that if the project were worthwhile, Franklin would be involved. So Bond approached Franklin, who became a subscriber and enthusiastically solicited support from others. This was the beginning of Pennsylvania Hospital.

Franklin was becoming a successful self-made man, but his life wasn’t complete. He had some romantic adventures, one of which brought a son, William. On September 1, 1730, he began a common-law marriage with Deborah Read, a carpenter’s daughter. They had a son, Francis, who died four years later from smallpox, and a daughter, Sally (Sarah), who was born in 1743. Franklin’s first son, William, lived with them. Deborah seems to have been a barely literate homebody, and she couldn’t begin to keep up with her husband. During the next 45 years, she displayed phenomenal patience as he spent decades away on business throughout the colonies and Europe.

By 1748, Franklin turned over management of his printing business to a partner and retired from it, while continuing to receive half the profits. He still edited The Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard.

With his buoyant curiosity, Franklin pursued myriad scientific interests. He investigated weather patterns. Before geology was a science, Franklin speculated about the origin of mountains. He invented a more efficient wood-burning stove, connected to a radiator. In 1744, he started popularizing this stove as the Pennsylvania Fire Place.

Experiments with Electricity

Franklin began to experiment with electricity. He determined that there were two kinds of charges, which he called positive and negative. In June 1752, he climbed a Philadelphia hill, flew a silk kite during a thunderstorm, touched one knuckle to a key on the wet string—and felt an electrical shock. Franklin published Experiments and Observations on Electricity, and it was translated into French, German, Italian, and Latin. The English editor and statesman Lord Brougham marveled, years later, that Franklin could make an experiment with less apparatus and conduct his experimental inquiry to a discovery with more ordinary materials than any other philosopher we ever saw. With an old key, a silk thread, some sealing-wax, and a sheet of paper, he discovered the identity of lightning and electricity. Franklin developed lightning rods that could draw lightning away from a house and protect it from fire. Lightning rods earned Franklin the gratitude of people throughout America and Europe. Harvard and Yale universities awarded him honorary degrees. He was elected a Fellow of the English Royal Society and the French Académie des Sciences.

By the time Franklin had become famous for his experiments on electricity, he was in the thick of Pennsylvania politics. He was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly in August 1751. As Britain and France struggled for control of North America, the French won over many Indian tribes as allies, and people in Pennsylvania were vulnerable to attack. The Penn family, known as the Proprietors because they owned the colony, refused to mount a defense. Franklin helped organize a people’s militia. In 1754, the British Board of Trade and Plantations asked nine colonies north of the Potomac River to participate in a Congress aimed at preventing the Iroquois Indians from becoming allies of the French. Pennsylvania’s governor appointed Franklin as a representative, and the conference took place in Albany, New York, the gateway to French Canada, as historian Catherine Drinker Bowen called it. A peace treaty was signed. Franklin proposed the Albany Plan of Union, which would have established a federal union of the colonies under the British crown. Although the plan wasn’t adopted, Franklin had emerged as a person whose vision and capabilities could take him far beyond Pennsylvania.

He prepared the 1758 Poor Richard and turned it into a pamphlet. Lacking fresh material, he rewrote some of his aphorisms. For instance: I will tell thee, my friend, what Poor Richard says, Employ thy time well if thou meanest to gain leisure; and, since thou art not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour. Leisure is time for doing something useful; this leisure the diligent man will obtain, but the lazy man never; so that, as poor Richard says A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. No, for as poor Richard says, Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease. Many without labour, would live by their wits only, but they break for want of stock. Whereas industry gives comfort, and plenty, and respect. This little work was issued as The Way to Wealth, which went into nine Spanish printings, 11 German printings, 56 French printings, and 70 English printings. Moreover, it also appeared in Bohemian, Catalan, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Gaelic, Greek, Polish, Russian, Swedish, and Welsh.

Pennsylvania politics intensified. Many people resented the Penns because their vast landholdings were tax-exempt. Since Franklin had been to England, was well known in Europe, and had proven himself as a negotiator, the Assembly sent him to London where, it was hoped, he could secure their interests against the Penns. After a fruitless discussion with Thomas Penn, William Penn’s son, it was clear that Franklin was in for a long stay. He learned the fine art of British-style lobbying. He brought to it his skill of writing letters and essays—he contributed 32 articles to the London Chronicle, 33 articles to the Public Advertiser, and additional articles in The Citizen and The Gentleman’s Magazine. He anonymously collaborated with fellow Pennsylvania agent Richard Jackson to produce An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania (1758), a polemic against the Penns; and The Interest of Great Britain Considered, With Regard to her Colonies, And the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadeloupe (1760), a pamphlet supporting the expansion of the British Empire. Franklin dined out six days a week, developing relationships with influential people. In April 1759, the Pennsylvania Assembly had passed a bill which aimed to raise P100,000 for defense against the French—by taxing all land. It specified that the long tax-exempt Penn properties would be taxed, at a rate no higher than any other property. The bill was upheld in London.

Soon after Franklin returned on November 1, 1759, battles resumed with the Penns. He was convinced Pennsylvania would be better run as a royal colony. The Pennsylvania Assembly agreed and sent him back to London the following October. He was appointed by assemblies in Massachusetts and Georgia to represent their interests, too.

The Stamp Act Crisis

Asking George III to take over Pennsylvania turned out to mean support for British taxation. Britain and France had concluded their costly Seven Years’ War, and Britain wanted the Colonies to help pay for it. Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which became law November 1, 1765. It called for taxes on legal documents, newspapers, and playing cards in the colonies, and Franklin accepted it as a fait accompli. He did speak out against the mistaken Notion . . . that the Colonies were planted at the Expense of Parliament, and that therefore the Parliament has a Right to tax them, &c. America, he emphasized, had not been conquer’d by either King or Parliament, but was possess’d by a free People.

Franklin was startled by the intensity of colonial resistance to the Stamp Act. He feared the Stamp Act could provoke a break with Britain. Accordingly, he launched one of his trademark propaganda campaigns against it. Writing under such pseudonyms as Homespun and Traveler, he presented a case that it was in Britain’s interest to repeal the Stamp Act. When Parliament held hearings on repeal, Franklin was among the 30 witnesses who testified. Asked if Americans would accept a more moderate tax, Franklin declared: No, never unless compelled by force of arms. The Stamp Act was repealed.

Parliament tried again to assert its supremacy over the colonies. It passed a Quartering Act that empowered the British commander in America to demand lodgings for his soldiers. In June 1767, Parliament enacted new colonial taxes on glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea. Franklin urged some kind of conciliation, but back in the colonies Boston patriots Samuel Adams and James Otis spurred the Massachusetts Assembly to call for renewed resistance against British policies. Public opinion radicalized after the Boston Massacre, in which British soldiers killed five Boston patriots.

In 1771, Franklin visited his friend Jonathan Shipley, bishop of St. Asaph, at his Twyford home, near Winchester. There he started work on his autobiography. Franklin, reported Yale University scholars, wrote the autobiography on large folio sheets, two leaves or four pages to a sheet. In initial composition he used only one vertical half of each page, leaving the other temporarily blank. As he later reviewed what he had written, he canceled words or phrases in the first draft, inserted between the lines new or revised phraseology, or, if more room was necessary, used the space in the adjoining blank column.

In Britain, Franklin met Anthony Benezet, the Philadelphia Quaker teacher who was probably the earliest abolitionist and an advocate of educating blacks and women. He encouraged Quaker merchants to get out of the slave trade. He introduced Franklin to leading abolitionists and prodded him to join the opposition to the slave trade. In 1772 Franklin wrote The Somerset Case and the Slave Trade, an unsigned article for the London Chronicle. He asked: Can sweetening our tea with sugar be a circumstance of such absolute necessity? Can the petty pleasure thence arising to the taste compensate for so much misery produced among our fellow creatures, and such a constant butchery of the human species by this pestilential, detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men? Franklin agreed to serve on the board of Bray Associates, an organization that established schools for black boys and girls in Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Williamsburg. In 1774, Franklin wrote the Marquis de Condorcet: Negroes . . . are not deficient in natural Understanding, but they have not the Advantage of Education.

Somehow, Franklin got his hands on six explosive letters by Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson. In one, drafted after the Stamp Act crisis, Hutchinson had written: There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties . . . there must be a great restraint of natural liberty. On December 2, 1772, Franklin secretly sent them to Thomas Cushing, Speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly, asking that they be kept confidential. But Samuel Adams broke the news, and the letters were published. The Massachusetts Assembly petitioned George III to remove Hutchinson as governor.

In London, Franklin became an outcast. Perhaps attempting to redeem himself, he publicly criticized the Boston Tea Party (in which Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty dumped 342 chests of British tea into Boston Harbor) and offered to pay for the lost tea. Franklin was summoned to a hearing before the British Privy Council. It cleared Hutchinson of any wrongdoing, and Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn denounced Franklin. Maverick member of Parliament Charles James Fox warned that all men tossed up their hats, and clapped their hands in boundless delight, at Mr. Wedderburn’s speech against Dr. Franklin, without reckoning the cost it was to entail upon them. As Fox anticipated, this experience irrevocably turned Franklin against Britain.

The “Shot Heard Round the World”

Before he sailed for America on March 21, 1775, he learned that his wife, Deborah, had died of paralysis. He hadn’t seen her in 11 years, and little is known about his feelings toward her. Whatever they were, Franklin became swept up with fast-breaking events. While he was at sea, Paul Revere warned his compatriots that British soldiers were preparing for action in Lexington, Massachusetts, and then came the shot heard round the world, as Ralph Waldo Emerson later immortalized it. Edmund Burke wrote a friend in the French army: What say you to your friend and brother Philosopher Franklin, who at upwards of seventy years of age, quits the Study of the Laws of Nature, in order to give Laws to new Commonwealth; and has crossed the Atlantick ocean at that time of Life, not to seek repose but to lunge into the midst of the most laborious and most arduous affairs that ever were.

On May 6, 1775, the day after Franklin reached Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Assembly made him a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, and a week later the British government issued an order for his arrest. My time was never more fully employed, Franklin wrote. In the morning, at six, I am at the Committee of Safety, appointed by the Assembly to put the province in a state of defense, which Committee holds till nine, when I am at the Congress, and that sits till after four in the afternoon. Franklin was named to the Secret Committee of Congress, responsible for acquiring war supplies; and the Committee of Secret Correspondence, the fledgling State Department, whose aim was corresponding with our friends in Great Britain, Ireland, and other parts of the world. Franklin met George Washington to learn what was needed, and since the government didn’t have any credit, Franklin advanced another American commander £353 in gold from his personal funds.

In October 1775, Franklin talked with an impassioned English immigrant whom he had met in London, suggesting the Englishman write a history of the present transactions. Indeed, the young man was already at work on such a project. He seems to have showed Franklin a draft in December. It was published as a 47-page pamphlet on January 10, 1776, and the author reportedly gave Franklin the first copy. The young man was Thomas Paine, and the pamphlet was Common Sense, whose eloquent call for independence electrified people throughout the colonies. In just a few months, Common Sense sold some 120,000 copies. With this single mighty blow, Paine banished efforts to achieve a reconciliation with Britain.

The Declaration of Independence

On June 21, 1776, Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston (New York), and Roger Sherman (Connecticut) were appointed to a committee for producing a declaration which would announce American independence. The committee asked Jefferson to draft it. Adams and Franklin read at least one version. Handwritten revisions suggest it was Franklin’s idea to change Jefferson’s description of sacred and undeniable truths to self-evident. Jefferson had written reduce them to arbitrary power, which Franklin changed to reduce them under absolute despotism. Franklin changed Jefferson’s phrase deluge us in blood to destroy us. And he had a number of other changes that tightened up Jefferson’s magnificent draft.

Jefferson later remembered that I was sitting by Dr. Franklin, who perceived that I was not insensible to these mutilations. ‘I have made it a rule,’ said he, ‘whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draftsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body.’

When time came to sign the Declaration on August 2, John Hancock, President of Congress reportedly remarked: We must be unanimous; there must be no pulling different ways; we must all hang together. According to legend—not any contemporary accounts—Franklin urged that the Declaration be adopted unanimously, saying we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.

With war underway, the best bet for help was France, which, having lost a war with Britain, would surely have wanted the British Empire to come apart. But the French were circumspect. They were at peace with Britain. The Americans were the underdogs, and nobody, including the French, wanted to publicly back a loser. King Louis XVI saw danger in supporting revolution against another monarchy. The Americans, for their part, felt some uneasiness seeking help from a king who claimed absolute power, and they didn’t want the French to know how desperate they were. In addition, the British had spies everywhere, so it was likely that whatever the Americans did would soon be known in London.

In Paris, a private outfit, Rodrique Hortalez and Company, was set up to acquire and ship war supplies. The Secret Committee of Congress thought they should have one of their own on the spot, so they dispatched Connecticut Congressman Silas Deane. But he wasn’t able to move things along. Unknown and unconnected in Europe, he acknowledged, I was without personal credit, and the accounts of our misfortunes in America, with the confident assurances of the British Ministry by their ambassadors and partisans in Paris, that everything would be finished. When Franklin was asked if he would go to France, he noted his gout and other infirmities and reportedly replied, I am old and good for nothing. But he agreed, then withdrew more than P3,000 from his bank and lent it to Congress. French intellectuals respected him for his pioneering experiments with electricity, and ordinary people knew that his lightning rods saved homes from fire. As John Adams put it: there was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a valet de chambre, coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in a kitchen, who was not familiar with [Benjamin Franklin], and who did not consider him as a friend to human kind.

Franklin in Paris

On October 26, 1776, Franklin secretly left Philadelphia with his grandsons William Temple Franklin and Benjamin Franklin Bache. They reached Paris on December 22. Franklin established his headquarters at Passy, a chateau in the town of Chaillot which was about one mile from Paris and seven miles from Versailles. The chateau belonged to Jacques Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont, an entrepreneur who had made money supplying uniforms to the French army. It was at Passy that Franklin gave dinner parties and cultivated business relationships. Among other things, he learned how to deal effectively with the French. Telling them their commerce will be advantaged by our success, and that it is in their interest to help us, seems as much as to say, help us, and we shall not be obliged to you. Such indiscreet and improper language has been sometimes held here by some of our people, and produced no good effects.

Franklin discovered how to make an appealing impression. He described himself as very plainly dressed, wearing my thin, gray straight hair, that peeps out under my only coiffure, a fine fur cap, which comes down my forehead almost to my spectacles. Think how this must appear among the powdered heads of Paris! Pictures of Franklin seemed to appear everywhere. Fashionable artists like Jean Honoré Fragonard did paintings of Franklin. His portrait was reproduced as engravings and aquatints. His likeness was on medallions, wall plaques, rings, bracelets, snuffboxes, and hats. He wrote his daughter, Sally: These, with pictures, busts and prints (of which copies upon copies are spread everywhere), have made your father’s face as well known as that of the moon.

On one occasion, Franklin was dining at a Paris restaurant and learned that Edward Gibbon, the British historian who chronicled ancient Rome’s decline and fall, was there, too. Franklin invited Gibbon to his table, but Gibbon declined, saying that since he was loyal to George III, he wouldn’t speak with a rebel. Franklin replied that if Gibbon ever wanted to write a history of Britain’s decline and fall, he would provide ample materials.

Despite all Franklin’s savvy, he might not have accomplished much without evidence that the Americans could win. Washington provided that when he crossed the Delaware River on Christmas Day 1776 and won the Battle of Trenton, capturing over 900 fierce Hessian soldiers, mercenaries for the British. Franklin negotiated two treaties (Alliance and Commerce) with France, giving important diplomatic recognition to the American republic. Franklin arranged a succession of shipments to America. That they included the most basic goods suggests how vulnerable America was. In one shipment, for instance: 164 brass cannon, 3,600 blankets, 4,000 tents, 4,000 dozen pairs of stockings, 8,750 pairs of shoes, 11,000 grenades, 20,000 pounds of lead, 161,000 pounds of gunpowder, 373,000 flints, and 514,000 musket balls. Altogether, Franklin secured some 26 million francs of military supplies.

Franklin handled many more tasks. For example, he met the Scottish-born naval captain John Paul Jones and encouraged his bold raids along Britain’s coast, undermining British morale. Jones’s flagship, the Bon Homme Richard, honored the Poor Richard of Franklin’s Almanack.

Franklin’s phenomenal diplomacy clinched victory. In 1781, the British General Charles Cornwallis retreated from advancing forces led by George Washington and the French Marquis de Lafayette. Cornwallis brought his 8,000-man army to Yorktown, a Virginia coastal town where he expected relief from the mighty British navy. But the ships off Yorktown were commanded by the French Admiral Francois Joseph Paul de Grasse, and Cornwallis was cornered. He surrendered on October 19, 1781, essentially ending the Revolutionary War.

Franklin had worked wonders even though London learned about practically every move. His chief assistant at Passy was his friend Dr. Edward Bancroft, an American who worked as a British spy. Jonathan Dull, author of Franklin the Diplomat, remarked that The American mission was so full of people stealing information it is surprising they did not trip over each other. British spies routinely opened Franklin’s letters, and sometimes the spies were able to alert British ships which captured war materials bound for America.

Despite his hard work and health complaints, Franklin seems to have enjoyed himself. You mention the Kindness of the French Ladies, he remarked to a friend. This is the civilest Nation upon Earth. Your first Acquaintances endeavour to find out what you like, and they tell others. . . . Somebody, it seems, gave it out that I lov’d Ladies; and then every body presented me their Ladies . . . as to the kissing of Lips or Cheeks it is not the Mode here, the first, is reckon’d rude, & the other may rub off the Paint.

Franklin’s work still wasn’t done. Congress named him to a committee which would negotiate peace terms with Britain. Negotiations dragged on because the British refused to acknowledge American independence and sovereignty. Finally, after eight and a half years, missions accomplished, Franklin left Paris on July 12, 1785. He took five days to go the 146 miles to Le Havre, and he bid farewell to friends and well-wishers all along the way. He sailed for America with Jean-Antoine Houdon, the sculptor who had done a noble bust of Franklin and would help immortalize Jefferson, Lafayette, and Washington.

Soon after arriving, Franklin declared: I shall now be free of Politicks for the Rest of my Life. He spent time with his daughter and grandchildren. He planned an expansion of his house. His most recent inventions, at age 80, included an eight-foot-long gadget with a wooden thumb and finger at the end, to help a reader retrieve a book from a high shelf; a chair which, turned upside down, could serve as a step-stool; and a bathtub with a book rest.

The Constitutional Convention

Franklin’s last great opportunity came as the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia, in the spring of 1787. He was elected to the Philadelphia delegation. When Washington arrived on May 13, he stopped first at Franklin’s Market Street house. The Convention met in the State House where the Second Continental Congress had met and where the Declaration of Independence had been signed.

When it looked like the Convention might collapse because of conflict between small states and big states (Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia) over how they would be represented, Franklin suggested that subsequent sessions begin with a prayer. Although the proposal was rejected, it seemed to help calm down the participants. Congress named a Grand Committee in hopes of proposing a solution. Franklin, a member of it, recommended there be two legislative bodies—an idea which others had suggested—because this made possible a compromise: states would have equal representation in one legislative body (the Senate) and representation according to population in the other legislative body (the House of Representatives), with the House having the power to originate money bills. This Great Compromise assured the small states that their interests would be protected, and they were more willing to compromise on other issues, helping to move the proceedings forward.

Finally, Franklin made a motion that the Constitution be adopted. When you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, he reflected, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinions, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does. . . . On the whole, Sir, I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.

In late 1787, Franklin had a bad fall going down steps to his garden, and he suffered excruciating pain from a kidney stone. He wrote his will and resumed work on his autobiography. He corresponded with friends. George Washington wrote: As long as I retain my memory, you will be thought of with respect, veneration and affection. Franklin declared that the new Constitution looked like it might last, but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. As the French Revolution exploded across the Atlantic, Franklin wrote his friend David Hartley: God grant that not only the love of liberty, but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man, may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface, and say, ‘This is my country.’

In March 1790, Thomas Jefferson visited him and reported: I found him in bed where he remains almost constantly. He had been clear of pain for some days and was cheerful & in good spirits. . . . He is much emaciated. I pressed him to continue the narration of his life, & perhaps he will. Franklin entrusted Jefferson—the only one outside his family—with a copy of some chapters from his Autobiography. The last letter Franklin ever wrote, nine days before his death, was to Jefferson.

Franklin developed a fever and complained about pain on the left side of his chest. His daughter expressed the hope that he would live for quite a while, but he replied: I hope not. A dying man can do nothing easy. Then a lung abscess burst, and breathing became ever more difficult. He died on April 17, 1790, about 11:00 at night. He was 84. Four days later, a funeral procession began at the State House, and he was buried at Christ Church cemetery. Some 20,000 people paid their respects, including officials, militia men, scientists, merchants, bankers, teachers, printers, apprentices, and others whose lives were touched by the extraordinary enterprising spirit of Benjamin Franklin.

He had written his wry epitaph long ago: B. Franklin, Printer; like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost, For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended By the Author.

John Adams, though a Franklin critic, acknowledged his reputation was more universal than that of Leibnitz and Newton, Frederick or Voltaire, and his character more beloved and esteemed than any or all of them. In Paris, Comte de Mirabeau, the orator and revolutionary leader, told the French National Assembly: Franklin is dead—he has returned to the bosom of God—the genius who has liberated America, and shed over Europe the torrents of his light.

Franklin’s Autobiography

Part One of Franklin’s Autobiography—a pirated French edition—was published in 1791. Then came two English editions. There were 14 reprintings before 1800. Franklin’s selected works, including the Autobiography, weren’t published until 1817 because of delays by the aimless William Temple Franklin, who had inherited his grandfather’s manuscripts. The rest of Franklin’s manuscripts were stored in a stable and eventually recovered by the American Philosophical Society. John Adams expressed appreciation for what was available, because there is scarce a scratch of his Pen that is not worth preserving.

The Autobiography had many factual errors, since Franklin recalled events years after they happened. The story only went up to 1760. Franklin revealed little about his feelings. But the book appealed to people because he chronicled his failures as well as his successes, and he identified principles for building strong character. He wrote in a refreshingly plainspoken manner.

Franklin, noted American historian Carl Becker, was a true child of the Enlightenment, not indeed of the school of Rousseau, but of Defoe and Pope and Swift, of Fontenelle and Montesquieu and Voltaire. He spoke their language, although with a homely accent, a tang of the soil, that bears witness to his lowly and provincial origin. . . . He accepted without question and expressed without effort all the characteristic ideas and prepossessions of the century . . . its healthy, clarifying skepticism; its passion for freedom and its humane sympathies; its preoccupation with the world that is evident to the senses; its profound faith in common sense, in the efficacy of Reason for the solution of human problems and the advancement of human welfare.

The book had significant impact around the world. Inspired by Franklin, the great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe organized a Friday Club whose aims and practices were similar to Franklin’s Junto. Franklin inspired Simón Bolvar and José de San Martn, who helped people in South America achieve independence. Franklin’s Autobiography was a hit in Japan, where Fukuzawa Yukichi and other thinkers promoted his principles, which inspired entrepreneurs. The Florentine painter Gaspero Barbera published an Italian translation, explaining: At the age of 35 I was a lost man. . . . I read again and again the Autobiography of Franklin, and became enamoured of his ideas and principles to such a degree that to them I ascribe my moral regeneration. . . . Now, at the age of fifty-one, I am healthy, cheerful and rich.

During the heyday of American individualism, Franklin’s story was taken up by educators whose books sold in the tens of millions. For instance, drawing on the Autobiography, Noah Webster included an 11-page account of Franklin’s life in his Biography For the Use of Schools (1830). Peter Parley wrote a Life of Benjamin Franklin (1832). William Holmes McGuffey included selections from the Autobiography in his enormously popular Readers.

By the 1850s, the Autobiography had been reprinted almost 100 times. Between 1860 and 1890, Franklin was reportedly the most popular subject for American biographers. Many successful Americans testified about the impact Franklin had on their lives. The Autobiography inspired James Harper to leave his Long Island farm and launch what became one of America’s most venerable publishing houses (now HarperCollins). Yes, sir, Harper told a friend, the basis on which we commenced was character, not capital—and he had an artist paint a profile of Franklin into his own portrait. Horace Greeley, a poor boy who became the famous editor of the New York Tribune, declared in 1862: Of the men whom the world currently terms Self-Made—that is, who severally fought their life-battles without the aid of inherited wealth, or family honors, or educational advantages, perhaps our American Franklin stands highest in the civilized world’s regard.

The Autobiography inspired Thomas Mellon to leave his farm for business; he became a banker and made his family fortune. I regard the reading of Franklin’s Autobiography as the turning point of my life, he wrote. Here was Franklin, poorer than myself, who by industry, thrift and frugality had become learned and wise, and elevated to wealth and fame. The Autobiography inspired steel entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie. Harvard University President Jared Sparks told how the Autobiography first roused my mental energies . . . prompted me to resolutions, and gave me strength to adhere to them. . . . It taught me that circumstances have not a sovereign control over the mind.

Mark Twain noted Franklin’s influence on millions. Savings banks across America were named after Franklin. Altogether, reported American historian Clinton Rossiter, Franklin’s Autobiography has been translated and retranslated into a dozen languages, printed and reprinted in hundreds of editions, read and reread by millions of people, especially by young and impressionable Americans. The influence of these few hundred pages has been matched by that of no other American book.

But as individualism fell out of fashion, intellectuals belittled personal responsibility and self-help. For instance, novelist D.H. Lawrence in 1923: The soul of man is a dark vast forest, with wild life in it. Think of Benjamin fencing it off! . . . He made himself a list of virtues, which he trotted inside like a gray nag in a paddock. . . . Middle-sized, sturdy, snuff-coloured Franklin. . . . I do not like him. In recent decades, some professors focused on his personality, claiming the Autobiography was an elaborate pose, covering up the allegedly hidden Franklin—complex, elusive, secretive, intriguing. One professor talked about Franklin’s dark side.

But none of the critics deny that Benjamin Franklin achieved stupendous things. He championed personal responsibility, intellectual curiosity, honesty, persistence, and thrift—principles that have helped people everywhere lift themselves up. He nurtured an entrepreneurial culture which creates opportunity and hope through peaceful cooperation. He affirmed that by improving yourself and helping your neighbors you can make a free society succeed. His most glorious invention was—and is—the American dream. []

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