French economists and Bernese agrarians: The marquis de Mirabeau and the economic society of Berne

ARTICLE IN PRESS

History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426 www.elsevier.com/locate/histeuroideas

French economists and Bernese agrarians: The marquis de Mirabeau and the economic society of Berne Michael Sonenscher King’s College, Cambridge, UK Available online 24 September 2007

Abstract Physiocracy is still sometimes seen as an oddly archaic programme of agricultural development. The aim of this paper is to show that one of the Physiocrats’ prime concerns was to take the subject of agriculture out of international relations. The fiscal regime that was central to Physiocracy was designed to make every large territorial state self-sufficient and, by doing so, to break the connection between modern great power politics, the international division of labour, and the politics of necessity. From this perspective, the memorandum that Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, sent to the Berne Economic Society in 1759, contains an early indication of what, had the Physiocratic programme ever been implemented in full, a world reformed on Physiocratic lines might have looked like. r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Physiocracy; Mirabeau; Quesnay; Machiavelli; Rousseau; International relations; Agriculture; Free trade; Berne; Switzerland

It has not been usual to pay much attention to the fact that Physiocracy took shape during the period of the Seven Years’ War or that, at the same time as the marquis de Mirabeau was writing the memorandum which he sent to the Economic Society of Berne late in 1759, he was also speculating (to put it no higher) about the possibility of a royal coup d’ e´tat to impose the new system upon a kingdom which had recently been humiliated by Prussia on land and Britain at sea.1 This paper is something of a guess about how the E-mail address: [email protected] George Weulersse, Le mouvement physiocratique en France (de 1756 a` 1770), 2 vols. (Paris, 1910), vol. 1, p. 73; Michael Sonenscher ‘‘The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic: the French Fiscal Deficit and the 1

0191-6599/$ - see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2007.07.004

ARTICLE IN PRESS 412

M. Sonenscher / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426

two activities may have been connected. As the Swiss scholar Jean Daniel Candaux showed in an article published nearly 40 years ago, the outbreak of the War, coming so soon after the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, led to a significant revival of interest in projects for perpetual peace, almost half a century after the phrase itself had entered the vocabulary of European political speculation with the publication of the abbe´ de SaintPierre’s Projet pour rendre la paix perpe´tuelle en Europe near the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. One small measure of this revival was the notable international success enjoyed by a poem entitled Ode sur la guerre, published in Geneva in 1758 and written by Jean Jacques Rousseau’s one-time patron, the Lyonnais magistrate Charles Borde.2 Borde’s poem, with its powerful attack on ‘‘Europe’s assassins’’, counterfeiting ‘‘the title of patriotism’’ to destroy ‘‘in an instant’’ the ‘‘fruits of a century of industry, virtue and happiness’’ was reprinted nearly a dozen times between 1758 and 1764 in at least four different countries.3 It was matched by a number of more elaborate attempts to put the question of peace back on the agenda of European public life. The best known of these now was a product of the abbe´ Gabriel Bonnot de Mably’s encouragement of Jean Jacques Rousseau to examine and rework Saint-Pierre’s peace plan. Rousseau published the rather discouraging results of his investigation in 1761. Mably himself contributed to the discussion, first in his Principes des Ne´gociations of 1757 and then in a new, heavily revised version of his Droit public de l’ Europe in 1763. Both works emphasised the extent to which reform at home (leading to a combination of mixed government, public frugality and close control of private consumption) was the key to reviving and maintaining the treaty-based system of international co-operation which Europe had managed to establish at the Westphalia settlement of 1648. It is now well known that the leading members of the Economic Society of Berne took a keen interest in Mably’s work. The aim of this paper is to try to describe the bearing of the subject of international relations and war on the memorandum which the marquis de Mirabeau sent to the Economic Society of Berne in 1759 and, by extension, on the wider question of the nature of Physiocracy itself. It is, of course, well-enough known (if only from its title) that Mirabeau’s first, most famous book, L’Ami des hommes, was as much concerned with relations between states as with questions of a purely domestic character. Many of the existing causes of war, Mirabeau argued, would no longer arise if the European states could be locked into a single common market. L’Ami des hommes, accordingly, set out ‘‘a system of universal pacification’’ in which a reformed French government was assigned the role of heading an agriculturally-based, free-trade system large enough and prosperous enough to make it all but impossible for any single state (and Britain in particular) to try to maintain a separate system without jeopardising its own wealth, trade and power.4 It is also well known that between the publication of the first three parts of L’Ami des hommes early in 1757 and the appearance of the sixth and final part in 1760 Mirabeau was ‘converted’ (as he repeatedly described it) by Franc- ois Quesnay to what came to be known (footnote continued) Politics of the Revolution of 1789’’, History of Political Thought 18 (1997), pp. 64–103, 267–325 (91). For fuller discussion of Physiocracy, see Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge. Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 173–253. 2 Jean Daniel Candaux, ‘‘Charles Borde et la premie`re crise d’antimilitarisme de l’opinion publique europe´enne.’’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 24 (1963), pp. 315–344. 3 Candaux, ‘‘Charles Borde’’, p. 316. 4 Victor Riquetti, marquis de Mirabeau, L’Ami des hommes. (Avignon, 1757), p. 563.

ARTICLE IN PRESS M. Sonenscher / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426

413

as Physiocracy. But it is not particularly clear what this conversion entailed. Mirabeau’s own various accounts of what it involved were largely confined to technical matters, so that the question of the relationship between Physiocracy and the broader themes addressed in L’Ami des hommes has been rather overlooked. This has meant that it is still quite usual to think of Physiocracy as a chapter in the history of economic thought, rather than (as the name itself means) as a model of a somewhat unusual system of government. The memorandum which Mirabeau sent to the Economic Society of Berne in 1759 (published in two instalments in 1760 in the Society’s Receuil de me´moires concernant l’oeconomie rurale) in answer to the prize-competition question it had advertised on whether the Swiss should give priority to the cultivation of corn, the nature of the obstacles they faced and the means they had at their disposal for overcoming them is a helpful starting point for trying to redress the balance.5 It was Mirabeau’s first opportunity to revise the message of L’Ami des hommes by presenting the results of his new collaboration with Quesnay to a wider public. It drew upon a new technical vocabulary, absent from Mirabeau’s earlier work, which was designed to single out the difference between the total product and the net product in analysing the resources available to states and in assessing the potential effects of promoting different types of agriculture or manufacturing industry on a state’s wealth and power. As Mirabeau emphasised, this technical vocabulary added a new political dimension to the examination of the interaction between population and production which had been the main concern of L’Ami des hommes. It led him to conclude that the reasons underlying the revival of interest in agriculture in France were not particularly relevant to Swiss conditions and that corn-cultivation in Switzerland was best promoted for moral and patriotic reasons and not for economic advantage. Switzerland, he wrote, faced too many natural and social obstacles to be able to promote a system of intensive cereal production based on substituting machine- and animal-power for human labour in the way that states endowed with fertile plains and large landed estates were able to do. But these same obstacles could, nonetheless, be seen as good reasons for trying to overcome them because the kind of cereal production most suitable to Swiss conditions was particularly appropriate in a republic. If, Mirabeau wrote, the proposition labor omnia vincit improbus was true, ‘‘the society’s question would be all the wiser and the more patriotic’’ (262). It would also, he added, have the further merit of promoting the best features of human nature. In this sense, if there is a government able simply to value a man, one with no ambition for power, but for innocence and tranquillity, that government will value the one art that supports the greatest number of men and, of the various means of doing so, will promote the one that uses the largest number of handsyyIt is true that these hands will at the least consume the surplus. But they will be laborious, innocent, virtuous—as long as they have what they need to subsist—healthy and strong. If the government of Switzerland is what its reputation has it to be, its policy should be to have the greatest possible number of this kind of men. If this is the case, it should not complain about the obstacles listed above but, on the contrary, give 5

Victor Riquetti, marquis de Mirabeau, ‘‘Me´moire pour concourir au prix annonce´ et propose´ par la tre`s louable socie´te´ d’agriculture a` Berne pour l’anne´e 1759.’’ Recueil de me´moires concernant l’œconomie rurale par une socie´te´ e´tablie a` Berne en Suisse, vol. 1, part 2 (Zurich, 1760), pp. 227–311, 443–77. In what follows, reference to pages in Mirabeau’s text will be made in brackets; reference to other works will be made in footnotes.

ARTICLE IN PRESS 414

M. Sonenscher / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426

thanks to providence for adapting the nature of its soil to the principles of its existence. (263) As one of Mirabeau’s early readers, an English writer named Walter Harte, noticed in his Essays on Husbandry of 1764, it was a conclusion that fitted readily into a wellestablished set of claims about the nature of republican systems of government and, in particular, the connection between the inhospitable and barren physical terrains on which, it was commonly said, republics had been founded and the moral qualities which they had been obliged to cultivate in order to survive and prosper. Harte, who was canon of Windsor and chaplain to the Earl of Chesterfield, had visited Berne as tutor to Chesterfield’s son, Philip Stanhope and sent a copy of the first edition of his Essays to the Economic Society’s head, Albrecht von Haller, in 1764.6 In the first of them, he made extensive use of the Society’s Receuil de me´moires (and Mirabeau’s memorandum in particular) to highlight the relationship between the advantages of adversity, the virtues of agriculture and the values of ‘‘free governments and Protestant countries’’.7 ‘‘The sagacious Machiavel’’, he noted (after a highly complimentary assessment of the Economic Society’s programme), seems to think that a rich soil tends to lessen the industry of people that inhabit it; and, if a nation like that of the Switzers, is contented with the portion of land it enjoys, and meditates no further acquisitions of territory, then a tract of earth which yields its productions with some difficulty, will, in the long run, make its inhabitants a wealthy, happy, and powerful community.8 Harte’s association of Mirabeau’s encomium of the Swiss with this feature of Machiavelli’s thought was not particularly surprising. Mirabeau himself had had Machiavelli very much in mind when he began to think about what became L’Ami des hommes, and its central message, that the first major power to adopt a system of free trade in corn would have a decisive advantage over all the rest, had powerful Machiavellian undertones.9 But Mirabeau did not present the free-trade argument in quite the same way in the memorandum which he sent to Berne. Where Harte, in his Essays on Husbandry, emphasised the value of promoting agriculture as the best way to reinforce Switzerland’s militia-based defence-system and maintain Berne’s tradition of exporting soldiers to serve foreign courts (as part of a more general warning to his British readers about the need to maintain ‘‘that superiority in husbandry’’ challenged by ‘‘our busy neighbours, the French’’), Mirabeau made no reference to this well-known feature of Swiss political and economic life.10 Instead, he emphasised that free trade had to be seen as the most fundamental principle of a much broader system of international co-operation in which unrestricted trade in grain had to have priority over every other consideration. No reason of state, he argued, could ever override that principle. 6 See Bonamy Dobre´e, The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, 6 vols. (London, 1932), vol. 6, p. 2607 (Chesterfield to Harte, 10 August 1764, thanking him for a copy of the Essays on Husbandry). 7 Walter Harte, Essays on Husbandry. (London, 1764), p. 64. 8 Harte, Essays, p. 75. 9 See the manuscript by Mirabeau in the Archives Nationales (Paris), M. 783, No. 14, ‘‘Siste`me politique sur l’inte´reˆt pre´sent de la France’’. 10 Harte, Essays, pp. 77–78, 204.

ARTICLE IN PRESS M. Sonenscher / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426

415

In sum, absolute, general, indefinite freedom of trade in corn, in war as in peace, with enemies as with friends, with no reason whatsoever—even the salvation of the Empire—for provisioning oneself in any other way than bargain against bargain, cash in hand, without it ever being thought bad for an individual or a company to buy any amount whatsoever, is the principal pivot of agriculture. It is the prime divine and physical law of humanity and any intervention by any authority whatsoever in this area should be set, by a wise and enlightened people, on the same level as the crimes of burners of temples, poisoners of wells and murderers of sovereigns and governments. (287) The message which Mirabeau presented to the Swiss thus had two components. The first was that promoting the cultivation of corn would reinforce what was morally attractive about Switzerland’s republican system of government and way of life. The second was that promoting the cultivation of corn had to go hand in hand with complete and unlimited freedom of the grain-trade. As many of Mirabeau’s critics (in France as much as in Berne) pointed out, the two parts of the message were not necessarily compatible. Free trade could mean the ruin of uncompetitive agriculture. To see why Mirabeau could claim that the two policies could be combined, the memorandum which he sent to Berne has to be placed within the broader setting of his ‘conversion’ to what became Physiocracy. It is not very likely that anyone in Berne knew of this change of course. There is, instead, some evidence that at least some of the members of the Berne Economic Society were not particularly sympathetic towards the idea of a new international order underpinned by French hegemony which Mirabeau had laid out in L’Ami des hommes. Several of them had connections with Prussia, or (via Hanover) with Britain. Swiss dependence on French imports for some of its corn was also well-known. It was not difficult, therefore, to see a call for free-trade in corn as a move designed to increase French control over the Swiss cantons. In 1760, the author of the Economic Society’s founding document, Johann Rudolf Tschiffeli, had to be defended from the accusation that he had copied its terms from L’Ami des hommes. In 1761 the Economic Society published a set of Re´flexions by the magistrate Samuel Engel in which he took issue with Mirabeau’s memorandum (along with Ange Goudar’s Inte´reˆts de la France mal-entendus and Claude Jacques Herbert’s Essai sur la police ge´ne´ral des grains) over what he described as ‘‘something specious’’ in the whole system of free and unlimited trade in grain.11 Three years later, Berne’s most famous citizen, the physiologist and natural philosopher Albrecht von Haller, informed his Genevan correspondent Charles Bonnet that he had just been made head of a ‘‘society opposed to luxury’’ (referring, presumably, to Berne’s recently established Socie´te´ morale). The society, he continued, was ‘‘as civic as the anti-gallican society’’, but ‘‘much more cosmopolitan’’, adding immediately afterwards, ‘‘I have always reproached M. de Mirabeau for being, at bottom, the friend of the French, when one ought to be the friend of mankind.’’12 Some of the members of the Economic Society were not wedded to the system to be found in L’Ami des hommes. But neither, by 1759, was Mirabeau himself. He may, 11 Samuel Engel, ‘‘Re´flexions sur la question: un commerce illimite´ en grains, serait-il un moyen propre a` mettre l’agriculture dans un e´tat florissant en Suissey’’, Recueil de me´moires concernant l’œconomie rurale, t. 2, part 3. (Zurich, 1761), pp. 536–598 (539). 12 Haller to Bonnet, 21 December 1764, in Ed. Otto Sonntag. The Correspondence between Albrecht von Haller and Charles Bonnet. (Bern: Hans Huber Verlag, 1983), p. 405.

ARTICLE IN PRESS 416

M. Sonenscher / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426

therefore, have had a number of reasons for sending his memorandum to the Economic Society. It could have been designed simply to present the first fruits of his collaboration with Quesnay to the wider world. It could also have been intended to be a reply to criticism of the kind made later by Engel and Haller. (Criticism of this kind was not, of course, confined to Berne. Nor is likely that Mirabeau, with his many contacts in the diplomatic circles associated with the duc de Nivernois and the comtesse de Rochefort’s salon, would have been ignorant of suspicion towards France in many parts of the German-speaking world in the wake of the French alliance with the house of Habsburg). The first objective was not, of course, incompatible with the second. The assumption on which this paper is based is that Mirabeau’s aim was to meet them both and that, by sending his memorandum to the Berne Economic Society, his purpose was to show that the new insights he had acquired from Quesnay amounted to a framework for envisaging a genuinely new international order, one which was immune to the charge that friendship for mankind was simply a covert way of promoting French interests. It was, in short, a kind of peace plan. Describing the new kind of international system that Mirabeau envisaged thus means asking what Physiocracy might have looked like if it had ever been established. It has been usual to assume that it would have been something like one of the enlightened monarchies of the eighteenth century (Quesnay and Mirabeau are still sometimes described as theorists of ‘enlightened absolutism’ or ‘enlightened despotism’).13 But if the description fits at all, it fits L’Ami des hommes (with its emphasis upon the qualities of a roi pasteur) much more readily than what came to be called despotisme le´gal (which, in the first instance, was lawful, not royal). The recent publication of the manuscript of Mirabeau’s Traite´ de la monarchie (written under Quesnay’s supervision and finished in April 1759, immediately before Mirabeau wrote the memorandum for the Economic Society of Berne) makes it a little easier to see what Physiocracy might have entailed.14 It shows not only how much of an influence Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois had upon both Mirabeau and Quesnay but also how differently they each reacted to Montesquieu’s two, controversial, claims that ‘‘intermediate, subordinate and dependent powers constitute the nature of monarchy’’ and, most strikingly, that ‘‘virtue is not the principle of monarchical government’’. In a lecturecourse on Montesquieu which he gave many years later, Mirabeau stated that the basic idea of L’Ami des hommes could be found in the tenth chapter of book 18 of The Spirit of the Laws, entitled ‘‘Of the number of men in proportion to their way of procuring subsistence’’. In it, Montesquieu suggested that there was a ratio between population and production on uncultivated and cultivated terrains and a further set of ratios applicable to people who cultivated both the land and the arts. ‘‘What the author says here is quite right’’, Mirabeau commented. ‘‘At that time, one needed a great deal of wit and reflection to have seen so far and someone I know rather well received many a fine compliment for saying the same thing after him in a manner which then pleased the public’’.15 But in L’Ami 13

See, for example, David McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism. A Reinterpretation. (Berkeley, California, 1988), pp. 129, 263. 14 Gino Longhitano (Ed.), Marquis de Mirabeau, Franc- ois Quesnay, Traite´ de la monarchie. (Paris, 1999). 15 ‘‘Ce que dit ici l’auteur est fort juste. Il fallait encore de son temps, bien de l’esprit et de la re´flexion pour en voir jusqu’ a` la`, et je connais d’asses pre`s tel a` qui l’on fit dans le temps de beaux compliments, pour avoir dit apre`s lui la meˆme chose d’une manie`re qui convient alors au public’’. Bibliothe`que royale, Brussels. Mss. 20797, fol. 178. I am grateful to Loic Charles (Centre d’histoire de la pense´e e´conomique, Universite´ de Paris I) for directing me to this source.

ARTICLE IN PRESS M. Sonenscher / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426

417

des hommes Mirabeau (like most of his contemporaries) was highly critical of the connection which Montesquieu made between changes in ratios like these and the idea of honour as the principle driving the scramble for pre-eminence which, indirectly, served to give a monarchy its prosperity and stability. ‘‘However fine and admirable the distinctions he sets out and however true they may well be’’, he wrote, ‘‘I am not sure whether he has not considered monarchies in a diseased state rather than their natural constitution’’.16 In Mirabeau’s terms, monarchy (properly constituted) was a system of government best able to maintain and promote sociability, or the human ability to behave morally without any coercion from the law. It was, if anything, better equipped to foster the virtues than any other kind of government and, if anything, more exposed to decadence and decline if subjected to the decay of political virtue brought about by excessive self-regard. If Mirabeau attacked Montesquieu’s moral parsimony, Quesnay’s criticism came from almost exactly the opposite direction. He was particularly critical of Montesquieu’s anxiety about monarchy’s potential for despotism because, he argued, it was based upon a misunderstanding of the nature of sovereignty.17 Sovereign power, according to Quesnay, was always representative. But it could represent part of a society against the whole. If it did, it would be despotic. But it was never the rule of a single individual in any literal sense. As Quesnay put it in the unpublished entry on Hommes which he wrote for the Encyclope´die (and which Mirabeau quoted extensively in the Treatise on monarchy), it was never the case that a single human being could ever physically exercise sovereign power over millions of others. ‘‘Despotism’’, he wrote, ‘‘is never anything other than a league between the sovereign and an organ (corps) of the state which has become more powerful than the sovereign himself. Monarchical despotism is a chimera. It has never existed and it is impossible that it can exist’’.18 Despotism was always either military, feudal or clerical. It could, Quesnay claimed, be robust and durable. But to be so, it had to maintain its ability to represent a particular part of society against the whole, either by maintaining superstition and ignorance if it was clerical, or by means of war and conquest if it was feudal or military. The real threat to absolute monarchy, Quesnay argued (in a note on Mirabeau’s manuscript), was not despotism but tyranny. Unlike despotism, tyranny was a short-term state. But it was also a state of acute political crisis. There is an intermediate period between monarchy and despotism which should not be confused and it this that is the period of the greatest internal revolutions in states. It is the tyrannical government of the sovereign and his minister. It is true that this form of government is of no more than brief duration, but is the most worthy of reflection for a political thinker.19 It followed that Montesquieu’s description of despotism as a peril inherent in absolute monarchy was not only wrong but dangerous. By raising an imaginary spectre, with all its potential for division and conflict, it could have the effect of producing the much more real possibility of tyranny. Tyranny, Quesnay wrote, would always produce oppression, violation of the rule of law and calls for the revival of the rights of the nation. In these circumstances, neighbouring powers would be likely to try to take advantage of the 16

Mirabeau, Mirabeau, 18 Mirabeau, 19 Mirabeau, 17

Ami des hommes, Part 2, ch. 4, p. 74. Traite´, p. 28. Traite´, p. 110 and note 24. Traite´, p. 176, note 396.

ARTICLE IN PRESS M. Sonenscher / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426

418

sovereign’s weakness, producing either a slide towards full-blown military despotism or a collapse into civil war, military defeat and conquest or, alternatively, the formation of a mixed, republican or aristocratic government, with all the potential for further division and conflict which they housed. These latter scenarios, Quesnay argued, were much more possible than military despotism. Thus monarchy does not always degenerate into military despotism and there are no states in Europe susceptible to this last type of government, a type which is too destructive for kingdoms surrounded by powerful neighbours to be able to survive the destruction of agriculture and population caused by military despotism. Thus this form of despotism is possible only in states of an extraordinary extent, separated by vast deserts from other nations. Despotism is rarely a consequence of tyrannical monarchy. But revolutions of another kind are as redoubtable to the sovereign as they are inevitable, because it is only too well-established from the history of the European states that tyrannical or arbitrary government cannot survive. This is why it should be studied with a great deal of attention and discernment by authors writing about the nature of governments. Above all, they should take care not to confuse these with military despotism as, by failing to distinguish absolute sovereignty from sovereignty which is dissolved and sovereignty which has been subjugated, M. de Montesquieu so crudely did.20 Monarchy, from Quesnay’s perspective, was either souverainete´ absolue, souverainete´ dissolue or souverainete´ subjugue´e. The point of the Treatise on Monarchy was to identify and secure the moral foundations of the first of these three states so that neither of the latter two could ever occur. While Mirabeau’s initial response to Montesquieu was to try to move back to a more conventional treatment of morality and politics, Quesnay’s response was to try to reinforce Montesquieu’s highly attenuated moral starting point. As Mirabeau noticed with some dismay, the revisions which Quesnay argued had to be made to the Treatise were couched in the idiom of seventeenth-century natural jurisprudence, forcing him (in a passage which he was told to excise) ‘‘to calculate according to the suppositions of that dry metaphysics whose pride eventuates in seeing humanity in its cradle as brute’’ and requiring him to adopt ‘‘a system which tends to replace the Creator by a fantastic idol called philosophy’’, all of which (Mirabeau emphasised) was not at all compatible with his own ‘‘fashion of thinking’’.21 Quesnay’s use of natural jurisprudence was, however, rather idiosyncratic. Its most notable feature was its total silence about the idea of a social contract. The omission may look rather odd. But it was also just what Physiocracy was supposed to mean. Quesnay’s big insight (taken either from Montesquieu or directly from his earlier research for the second edition of his Essai physique sur l’e´conomie animale or, in a more remote sense, from his reading of Malebranche and Locke) was to see that the idiom of natural jurisprudence could be re-described as the natural idiom of fallen man. Quesnay was a surgeon and a doctor, who had spent many years studying the way the human body worked. One feature of his physiological writing (particularly evident in the second edition of his Essai physique sur l’e´conomie animale) was a strong interest in the passions and, more particularly, in the cognitive abilities of the various organs of the human body. This 20

Mirabeau, Traite´, p. 177, note 396. Mirabeau, Traite´, p. 37, note 50.

21

ARTICLE IN PRESS M. Sonenscher / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426

419

interest had significant religious and anthropological implications because it could be used to fuse the conjectural history of seventeenth-century natural jurisprudence with the scriptural history of the Bible (it was probably this move which ‘converted’ Mirabeau). Fallen humanity might be morally corrupt but everything about the human body served to show that it was perfectly designed for the fallen state (it had, in particular, a built-in physiological ability to know that something like an apple was food to be eaten, not something to fall in love with or to recoil from in horror). In purely physical terms, the body was flawlessly suited to meeting the basic animal needs for food, rest and reproduction and was, therefore, entirely able to keep the human race alive, despite the fact that after the Fall each individual was condemned to die. Accordingly, Quesnay assigned the contractual component of natural jurisprudence to the non-political, natural societies which arose among men and women before any political society ever came into being. The kind of agreements involved in this purely physical version of natural law (between men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and sons) were all very simple and did not call for any ability for complicated abstract thought. They were no more than the products of physical need. In that simple sense they were just. The economists’ famous e´vidence was no more than this. Mirabeau later made this quite clear in a letter to Jean Jacques Rousseau in 1767 (after the latter had rebuffed a tentative invitation to adopt the new system). You do not understand our e´vidence and because of this you suspect us of a systematic spirit and of dreaming like the good abbe´ de Saint Pierre. You believe that we seek to pursue the improvement (perfectibilite´) of the human mind and to extend its limits. But far from wanting this, we want solely to bring it back to what is simple, to the primary notions of nature and instinct. All our laws can be reduced to conforming to the laws of nature with respect to the arrangements surrounding our labour and to the self-evident character of the right of property as it applies to the enjoyment of its fruits.22 These arrangements were entirely within the capacity of fallen human beings because the human body, unlike the human mind, was perfectly capable of supplying all the information needed for the simple agreements which physical need could generate. In the copious notes which he scribbled on Mirabeau’s manuscript, Quesnay repeatedly reminded him that natural society was (in this limited sense) contractual all the way through. (It is not difficult to see why, a few years later, Mirabeau thought that Rousseau might be a natural ally). Since humans were also equipped with minds, they were not condemned to depend instinctively upon the information supplied by the body in the way that animals were.23 But since the human mind was also corrupt (unlike the body, it still bore traces of humanity’s first, free, state, but could rarely prevent itself from basing its decisions upon misleading information), it was the cause of the force and violence that lay behind the formation of the first truly political societies. Quesnay had absolutely no qualms about describing the beginnings of every authentically political society (and monarchy in particular) in violence and bloodshed. (In doing so, he was also following Montesquieu). If the first societies were based on need and utility, the goods that they housed were an 22 Mirabeau to Rousseau, 30 July 1767, printed in Ralph Leigh, Correspondance comple`te de Jean Jacques Rousseau, vol. 33. (Oxford & Madison, 1979), p. 256 (Letter 5998). 23 Mirabeau, Traite´, p. 34.

ARTICLE IN PRESS 420

M. Sonenscher / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426

irresistible invitation to calculating minds to use force or fraud to obtain them. The first monarchies were generated by this calculating logic. They were not really monarchies at all, but simply bands headed by kings, formed for the purposes of attack or defence (France, Quesnay reminded Mirabeau, had only had kings, not monarchs, before the demise of the great feudal domains). Rulers could be kings, despots or sovereigns (sometimes, like Clovis, the original founder of the French monarchy, all three at the same time).24 But these violent and precarious systems of rule also housed a potential for reviving the original natural principle of human association because they were capable, ultimately, of exercising sovereign power in a way that no other kind of political society could. Sovereign power, according to Quesnay, was something that was not entirely human. ‘‘Scripture teaches us’’, he reminded Mirabeau, ‘‘that sovereign power is of divine right. But this cannot be applied to the sovereign, because sovereignty is no less legitimate when it resides in the nation, as in republics, as when it resides in the prince, as in monarchies’’.25 Sovereign power was designed to uphold the law. Laws were ‘‘moral beings which condense society’’.26 Moral beings were accessible to humanity only insofar as they were represented by physical beings. A representative could be one or many, making the system of government either a republic or a monarchy. But if there were many representatives, it would be impossible to separate the legislative from the executive attributes of sovereignty. This was the great weakness of republics. Monarchy necessarily entailed a separation between the legislative and executive functions of sovereignty, simply because it was physically impossible for a single individual to enforce the law. Since the fundamental principles of every political association were not hard to identify, the legislative functions of sovereignty did not have to be very elaborate. All its executive functions could (following Montesquieu) be transferred to a number of subordinate, dependent and intermediate powers. In a monarchy, Mirabeau wrote (again using a passage from Quesnay’s entry on Hommes), ‘‘distinct and separate orders, powerful because of their makeup, their privileges and the habit of respect shown towards them by the population, are assigned the execution of each part of the law. Restrained in turn by one another and condensed and compressed by the sovereign power, they form as unchangeable a whole as any human institution can be’’.27 As Quesnay put it in a note to Mirabeau, Monarchy is an organised body whose head continually changes, which makes this type of government extremely redoubtable, and experience proves its harmful effects only too well. It ought to be the organisation of the body that regulates the head. It is this organisation that has not yet been established securely, because monarchical government was originally a military government which seized hold of the civil and economical government.28 24

Mirabeau, Traite´, p. 77, note 144. Mirabeau, Traite´, p. 77, note 146 (see also p. 29, note 37). 26 Mirabeau, Traite´, p. 15. 27 Mirabeau, Traite´, pp. 15–16. See also p. 48. Compare to Franc- ois Quesnay, ‘‘Hommes’’, in Franc- ois Quesnay et la physiocratie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1958), vol. 2, p. 540: ‘‘Sovereign monarchical power can subsist only through the authority of the laws and through the balance of the bodies of the state, each restrained in turn by the other; and by the laws which concern them and which limit and guarantee their rights’’. 28 Mirabeau, Traite´, p. 181, note 409. 25

ARTICLE IN PRESS M. Sonenscher / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426

421

The art social (the term coined by Quesnay’s followers to refer to the application of the new theory) was to organise the military, legal, fiscal and administrative executive functions of monarchy in such a way as to open up a space for restoring the original, natural principles of human association. ‘‘In general’’, Mirabeau wrote, ‘‘the great art of governing is to prevent men from harming one another and from encroaching on the rights of monarchical authority and, for the rest, to let them get on with it’’.29 The combination amounted to a monarchy ruling over a subordinate republic. It was (in a passage inserted by Quesnay) the key to the state’s prosperity. Agriculture, supported, enlightened and delivered from the causes destroying it, restored to, and protected in, the free, general trade of its productsywill increase wealth; wealth will increase population, the increase of population will augment consumption; and together they will increase the progress of agriculture yet further. Free tradeywill guarantee the sale of agricultural products at the right price (le bon prix), the producers’ costs and profits, the progress of agriculture and the growth of the national income, which will be distributed to all the classes of the state by the landowners’ expenditure.30 The authority of the state would be separated almost entirely from the natural liberty of its members. This meant that a monarchy had to have a somewhat peculiar relationship to private property. It had to work against the grain of the ‘‘unnatural and retrograde order’’ (as the economists referred to it) on which every political society was based. As Quesnay emphasised, there was not much private property in a natural society (at most it amounted to what was acquired for use by human effort). It followed that almost all the property that was actually owned had originated in conquest and usurpation. But all landed property was capable (as it had been from the Creation) of producing a surplus. If that surplus could be taken away peacefully from the actual owners of property and assigned to the various executive branches of the state by a single tax on landed income, the impact of that tax (on rents, agricultural production, expenditure and investment) would gradually allow the original principle of justice underlying natural society to be restored. The art was to ensure that it was restored in such a way as to ensure that it did not ruin landed property’s capacity to continue to produce a surplus. The surplus would have to recur and, as population grew, would have to recur on an expanded scale. This meant allowing the actual owners to remain in possession of what they owned. But it also meant making the surplus (or net product) produced by the property they owned the sole source of the income needed by the military, legal, fiscal and administrative agencies responsible for the executive functions of the state. This was the promise of the famous zigzag. It supplied a framework which enabled a government to use the fiscal system both to maintain the state’s income and to regulate the landowners’ potential for profligacy (‘‘fantasies’’, Mirabeau warned, ‘‘have a greater empire over us than need’’).31 Taxing the landowners’ disposable income would allow a government to prevent an imbalance between the productive and sterile sectors of the economy from developing and, at the same time, would put the landowners under constant 29

Mirabeau, Traite´, p. 111. Mirabeau, Traite´, p. 112. 31 Mirabeau, Traite´, p. 140. 30

ARTICLE IN PRESS 422

M. Sonenscher / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426

pressure to make the most profitable use of their land. In this way, a true monarchy would be able to put justice back into an essentially unjust system of property ownership. It would keep justice alive at home and power intact abroad by forcing the landowners to keep reproducing the highest possible net product. The combination of applying a carefully calibrated fiscal policy to the landowners, leaving everyone else in a state of natural liberty, would have the effect of allowing a monarchy to be entirely self-sufficient in basic necessities at home and to be highly competitive in the price of its manufactured products abroad. Over the long term, it would also raise productivity and prosperity to such a level that inequality would virtually disappear. (Mirabeau envisaged a society in which all basic agricultural production would eventually be undertaken by animals and machines). It would, therefore, be entirely insulated from the imperatives of national survival in both wartime and peacetime. It would also be able to maintain peace with its neighbours without having to rely upon either their, or its own, benevolence. By doing so, it would be able to practise friendship for mankind without having to adopt the moral system of L’Ami des hommes. From this perspective, Physiocracy looked a little like Hobbes’ Leviathan, but a Leviathan based on different theological foundations, with no capacity for arbitrary power (a resemblance which Jean Jacques Rousseau was quick to spot—and reject—in his famous exchange with Mirabeau in the spring of 1767). Mirabeau acknowledged as much in an account of his conversion by Quesnay written in 1768 in the context of a discussion of sovereignty. ‘‘Inner feeling impassions us all for independence’’, he wrote, ‘‘and that sentiment leaves the least possible room for the reason which subjects us to authority’’. Study, experience, visible facts, popular judgement, restlessness, envy, unhappiness, the authenticity of titles and the most solemn contracts all serve to confirm us in this inveterate and time-honoured sentiment. Hobbes, the first and only political theorist who dared to confront this prejudice, and who went to the opposite extreme, is held by general opinion alongside Machiavelli, the shameless tutor of tyrants.32 He too, he added, had once been persuaded of this sentiment, but had since come to change his mind. I recall with the satisfaction of a man who has escaped from a shipwreck that I, like so many others, was once a sort of Manichean and thought that I had found the principles of good and evil in sociability and cupidity. Happily I have since come to know a true guide who set me on the right path, where I soon came to see the fixed and indelible outlines of the physical law and the brilliant, certain light of the natural order.33 32

‘‘Le sentiment inte´rieur nous passionne tous pour l’inde´pendance et ce sentiment ne donne que le moins de marge qu’il lui est possible a` la raison qui nous soumet a` l’autorite´. L’e´tude, l’expe´rience, les faits visibles, les jugemens populaires, l’inquie´tude, l’envie, le mal-eˆtre, l’authenticite´ des titres & des contrats les plus solemnels, tout nous confirme dans ce sentiment inve´te´re´ et re´pute´ tute´laire. Hobbes, le premier & le seul des publicistes qui osa affronter ce pre´juge´, & tomber dans l’exce`s contraire, marche dans l’opinion ge´ne´rale a` peu-pre`s a coˆte´ de Machiavel, pre´cepteur effronte´ des tyrans’’: [Victor Riquetti, Marquis de Mirabeau], ‘‘Onzie`me lettre de M. B. a` My & la cinquie`me sur la Restauration de l’ordre le´gal’’, Ephe´me´rides du citoyen, 1768 (t. 8), pp. 8–9. 33 ‘‘Je me rappelle avec la satisfaction d’un homme e´chappe´ d’un naufrage, d’avoir autrefois e´te´ Maniche´en en quelque sort, comme tant d’autres, & d’avoir cru trouver le bon & le mauvais principe dans la sociabilite´ et la cupidite´. Heureux d’avoir connu depuis un ve´ritable guide qui me mit sur la voie, d’ou` j’aperc- us bientoˆt la trace fixe et ineffac- able de la loi physique, la lumie`re e´clatante & sure de l’ordre naturel’’: Mirabeau, ‘‘Onzie`me lettre’’, p. 15.

ARTICLE IN PRESS M. Sonenscher / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426

423

Quesnay, in short, had revised and corrected what was unacceptable in Hobbes without having fallen back upon the standard moral criticism of Hobbes’ system. By doing so, he enabled Mirabeau to drop the opposition between sociability and cupidity underlying L’Ami des hommes. Peace did not have to mean friendship. If this was so, then the Swiss could have no reason to fear the designs of a government based on the principles of Physiocracy. The case which Mirabeau presented to the Economic Society of Berne was based upon this claim. It meant that he could repeat much of the argument of L’Ami des hommes, but could now emphasise that it applied to an exceptional case. It applied with particular force to the Swiss precisely because it did not apply to a large territorial monarchy like France. It was a mistake, he wrote, to think that agriculture was uniformly desirable. ‘‘In many respects’’, he noted, ‘‘it is a prejudice to believe that the more men are employed in agriculture, the more it favours population and the increase of wealth’’ (246). This, he acknowledged, had been the underlying principle of L’Ami des hommes. But there, he wrote, he had been considering things ‘‘more particularly from the point of view of humanity than from the point of view of politics’’ (247). From a political point of view, it was less obvious that agriculture was suitable to every country. ‘‘An agricultural state is made up of several classes of men’’, he explained. The more agriculture occupies men whose labour produces no more than their subsistence, the less the harvest, destined in the first instance to provide them with their food, is able to provide a surplus to form incomes. But it is that surplus, or net product, which provides for the subsistence of all the different classes of men in a state. Thus, products being equal, the more the industry and wealth of agricultural undertakers saves human labour, the more subsistence it makes available to other men (247). These ‘‘other men’’ would be the more available for any other activity-‘‘for the various professions, for war, for public works’’-if ‘‘their bread has already been baked’’ and ‘‘if they are not tied to the land for the annual reproduction of wealth’’ (247). It was, therefore, crucial to make a distinction between the total product and the net product to be able to evaluate the relative advantages of different types of productive activity. It was not necessarily the case, however, that the kind of highly developed division of labour based upon substituting animal power for human labour which cereal production entailed was consonant with Swiss circumstances. The size of units of property, the difficulties involved in crop-rotation and the impediments associated with using the plough in a system of small-scale agriculture were all obstacles to obtaining the highest possible net product from cereal production and reasons, instead, for placing more emphasis upon the development of a specialised system of pasture-farming and livestock production, able (as Mirabeau showed) to yield a higher net product in an open and internationally competitive trading system. There were, nonetheless, powerful reasons for favouring cereal production. In a republican system of government, agriculture of any kind was more conducive to political stability than manufacturing industry and the extreme inequality it tended to produce. This, Mirabeau wrote, entailed ‘‘a profound political reflection’’ about the incompatibility between manufacturing industry and the Swiss system of government. ‘‘The trader and the large manufacturer’’, he wrote, might have ‘‘all the machines to which they give motion and maintain’’ at their disposal. Some ‘‘might maintain ten thousand of them, also called

ARTICLE IN PRESS 424

M. Sonenscher / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426

workers’’. But what, Mirabeau asked, ‘‘would become of public liberty on an election day if these machines were to riot?’’ A trading republic ‘‘would necessarily and promptly become an oligarchy, or something worse.’’ (257) If encouraging precarious industry, avidity for gold and the desire to use one’s knowhow to profit from one’s neighbours serves to change the principles, spoil the manners and distort the policies of great states with but a single master, whose will gives movement to the whole machine and who cannot, either by estate or prejudice, be a trader or a manufacturer, how much more reason must there be for this mania to be dangerous in a country whose interest and public spirit can be summed up in a single word, liberty. (256) Nothing similar was to be feared from a rich landowner. A landowner living on his own estates would have an interest in promoting the well-being of his tenants by involving himself in their affairs. An absentee landowner would be too remote to build up any following at all. Factional conflict would, therefore, either work for the common good or would not occur at all. If promoting agriculture of any kind was preferable to promoting manufacturing industry, there was no very pressing reason from ‘‘the point of view of trade and calculation’’ (262) why corn should have preference over pasture. The two kinds of cultivation complemented each other very effectively. Pasture-farming was quite compatible with small-scale cereal production. It occupied hands when land lay fallow, supplied fertiliser for improving the soil and produced a range of primary goods which could be used for food and clothing. From an economically rational point of view, there was no strong reason to alter existing arrangements. But there was also ‘‘the point of view of humanity’’. From this point of view, ‘‘men are no longer machines, but our fathers, brothers and children, a privileged being, made in the image of he who is, a sensible, grateful being, a being able to smile, or to weep at another’s misfortune’’ (262). From this perspective, and the large number of people that a prosperous labour-intensive system of small-scale cereal production could maintain, there was every reason for the Swiss to give priority to the cultivation of corn, however much it meant sacrificing the net product to the size of the total product. The best justification for giving priority to the cultivation of corn was patriotic and humanitarian. Switzerland would be a moral example to the rest of Europe. Mirabeau’s memorandum was (either deliberately or inadvertently) almost a mirrorimage of the first essay published in the Economic Society’s Receuil de me´moires concernant l’oeconomie rurale, written by Georg Ludwig (or Georges Louis) Schmid von Auenstein. Schmid’s answer to the Economic Society’s question was that the Swiss had to promote the cultivation of corn because the new demands of modern power-politics meant that every state had to be in a position to feed its own population in order to be able to withstand the loss of its markets and industry and still survive. Mirabeau’s argument also ran against the logic of comparative advantage (the ‘‘point of view of trade and calculation’’ favoured a largely pastoral economy and dependence upon imported corn) but it placed very much less stress upon the imperatives of national survival. From one perspective, Switzerland was condemned to survive in a world of warring states and had to be able to strike a balance between the requirements of national survival and the most advantageous use of its natural endowments. From the other, Switzerland would be able to flourish as an exemplary setting of a prosperous system of small-scale, labour-intensive cereal production

ARTICLE IN PRESS M. Sonenscher / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426

425

in a stable and peaceful world. The difference turned on whether, or how quickly, it might be possible to establish a stable and peaceful international system. If Physiocracy could be established quickly (as, in the light of his abiding interest in royal coups, Mirabeau seems to have hoped), then the picture of Switzerland’s future outlined in the memorandum to the Berne Economic Society could be realised without the need to pay much attention to the possibility of another cycle of European war. As Mirabeau was quick to see, Hans Caspar Hirzel’s Socrate rustique (the title given to Hirzel’s account of the economic and moral conduct of a philosophical peasant when it was published in French translation in 1762) was a remarkably apt emblem of what that future might be. Even before it appeared, two of Hirzel’s friends pointed out how well his description of Kleinjogg (the Swiss small farmer whose agricultural practice and way of life formed the subject-matter of the book) matched the tenor of Mirabeau’s message.34 Hirzel also echoed Schmid’s warning about the dangers facing any country which relied upon exchanging the products of its industry for the primary goods needed for local subsistence. These, he wrote, were especially apparent in periods of war when Swiss access to German corn was closed off.35 But the substantial variations in the price of even adjacent plots of land suggested that improvements were possible even in what might look like the least susceptible environment. Poor land, he argued, was less a matter of unfavourable natural endowments than a product of poor cultivation. This could be corrected by intensive use of animal manure to improve the quality of the soil and, more generally, by using the best existing agricultural practice as a model for improving general standards of cultivation.36 Agriculture (illustrated by a quotation from Xenophon’s Oeconomicus) involved hard work, extensive practical knowledge, an eye for what succeeded best, a large amount of human co-operation and considerable ability to be just and fair in the exercise of authority. If this was the case, Hirzel wrote, then humans had to have a fairly rich set of natural abilities and philosophers might yet have more to learn from studying ‘‘those peoples we are pleased to call savages’’ because agriculture was as common among them as in states equipped with ‘‘European sciences and manners’’.37 Observation of this kind ‘‘might throw considerable light on the theory of the soul’’ and give ‘‘friends of mankind much for which to thank the Creator in the wisdom and goodness of the order in which the human race has been placed’’.38 Hirzel made the convergence between Schmid’s Re´flexions and Mirabeau’s memorandum quite explicit. Promoting the cultivation of corn amounted to increasing Switzerland’s ability to withstand the risks associated with major wars while simultaneously reinforcing the moral qualities which made the Swiss republics so attractive abroad. Mirabeau was delighted. His letters to Hirzel’s translator, Jean Rodolphe Frey des 34 ‘‘Ich danke Ihnen fu¨r die angenehme Nachricht von dem wahrhaft grossen Kleinjogg. Mirabeau wa¨re sein Bewunderer wie Sie und Ich’’ (J. G. Zimmermann to J. K. Hirzel, 2 July 1761). ‘‘Kleinjogg ha¨tte eine Republik so gut regieren ko¨nnen wie seine Familie. Welche bessere Schule fu¨r Minister, Steuer- und Grosspa¨chter, welche Mirabeau niederschmettert, als die Wirtschaft Ihres Bauern!’’ (N. E. Tscharner to J. K. Hirzel, 14 October 1761). Cited in Walter Guyer, Kleinjogg der Zu¨rcher Bauer, 1716– 1785. (Erlenach-Zurich and Stuttgart, n. d.), pp. 177 & 186. I owe these references to Be´la Kapossy. 35 Hans Caspar Hirzel, Le Socrate rustique, ou description de la conduite e´conomique et morale d’un paysan philosophe. (2nd edn, Zurich, 1764), pp. 32–6. 36 Hirzel, Socrate rustique, pp. 59–61. 37 Hirzel, Socrate rustique, p. 53. 38 Hirzel, Socrate rustique, p. 54.

ARTICLE IN PRESS 426

M. Sonenscher / History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426

Landes, congratulating Hirzel on his description of his exemplary hero’s way of life and highlighting its similarity to other natural societies still to be found in Europe (the Scottish clans and their analogues in the Auvergne, the Pas de Calais and Haute-Provence in France), were published in the second (1764) edition of Le Socrate rustique. ‘‘I would dare to predict’’, Mirabeau wrote, ‘‘that the race of that man will be the making of the honour, the strength and the benediction of his country’’. Quesnay was more reserved, adding in a note (which Mirabeau did not incorporate into his letter), ‘‘but the project would be, perhaps, rather singular and little suited (analogue) to the constitution of a great empire’’.39 By now, however, Mirabeau did not need to be reminded. In a later exchange with Johann Rudolf Tschiffeli (conducted via Frey), he made it quite clear that what applied to the Swiss did not apply to the large European monarchies. ‘‘Large-scale cultivation (la grande culture) involves leasing the right to cultivate my land to the highest bidder; small-scale cultivation (la petite culture) leaves it up to me or my hired servants’’.40 The first was suitable for large territorial monarchies; the second, for republics. The two systems were complementary, but would remain quite separate. This was the point of view which Quesnay repeatedly pressed upon Mirabeau. It meant that Physiocracy would be a long-drawn-out transitional programme which would have to rely upon the combination of legal despotism, open markets and large-scale agriculture for many years. But from another point of view, the two systems would, over the course of time, gradually converge. As Mirabeau emphasised in one of his very last works, the Entretiens d’un jeune prince avec son gouverneur (published in 1785, but outlined in the Ephemerides du citoyen in 1768–1769), the end-product of the transitional programme would be a large, populous and prosperous society, made up in the main of a large number of flourishing, small-scale agricultural producers and a highly-skilled, urban manufacturing sector. As mechanical power replaced human labour in meeting basic subsistence needs, and population increased in density and wealth, more and more of the property owned in large territorial states would revert progressively to its original, mainly use-defined, natural state (but this time in conditions of abundance, not scarcity). It would be a true state of civilisation (a word, it is well-known, that Mirabeau coined), in which opulence (faste) would replace luxury. The subdivision of fortunes, their transformation into acquired wealth, their interdependence and activity, which is the natural effect of the suppression of all means of pillage and subornation, will, without injunction, put an end to the disorders produced by luxury, false position (de´placement) and dilapidation. Cities would grow because the real wealth of the nation would augment their size.41 But they would grow in ways that made them more like the countryside. Just as highly profitable market-gardening had already made the plough unnecessary in the vicinity of great cities, so ‘‘men would be profitably substituted for the great machines of agriculture’’ in an increasingly densely populated countryside.42 From this perspective, Switzerland may have looked something like what Physiocracy was ultimately supposed to be. 39 Mirabeau to Frey, 8 November 1762. The draft (with Quesnay’s notes) is printed in Georges Weulersse, Les manuscrits e´conomiques de Franc- ois Quesnay et du marquis de Mirabeau aux Archives nationals. (Paris, 1910), pp. 83–86. 40 Staatsarchiv Basel, PA 485 B 6 h 40, Mirabeau to Frey, 7 May 1765. 41 Victor Riquetti, marquis de Mirabeau, Entretiens d’un jeune prince avec son gouverneur, 4 vols. (Paris, 1785), vol. 4, p. 198. 42 Mirabeau, Entretiens, vol. 4, p. 334.