Frédéric Bastiat
Economist, journalist and legislator · French liberal school
Claude-Frédéric Bastiat was born in 1801 in Bayonne, in south-western France, into a merchant family. His mother died in 1808 and his father in 1810; orphaned at the age of nine, he was brought up by his grandfather and his aunt Justine. He attended the college of Saint-Sever and the school of the abbey of Sorèze, which he left before graduating. From 1818 he worked in his uncle’s trading house in Bayonne, and in 1825 he inherited his grandfather’s estate near Mugron, where he lived as a landowner, studying political economy, above all Adam Smith.
In 1831 he was appointed justice of the peace for the canton of Mugron and was later elected to the General Council of the Landes department. Inspired by the campaign of Richard Cobden and the English Anti-Corn Law League, in October 1844 he published in the Journal des économistes an article on the influence of French and English tariffs on the future of the two peoples, which made him known at once; the same year he began corresponding with Cobden. In 1846 he co-founded in Bordeaux the first French free-trade association, and at the end of that year launched its weekly, Le Libre-Échange. After the February Revolution of 1848 he was elected deputy for the Landes to the Constituent Assembly, and in 1849 he was re-elected to the Legislative Assembly.
His Economic Sophisms (Sophismes économiques, 1845) included the satirical petition of the candlemakers, who ask for protection against the unfair competition of the sun. In 1848–1849 he wrote a series of pamphlets against socialism, which he identified with protectionism, and debated Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in public on the legitimacy of interest. 1850 saw the publication of The Law, in which he argues that the law should protect person, liberty and property and not legalize plunder; of What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen (Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas), on the unseen consequences of state policy; and of the first volume of Economic Harmonies (Harmonies économiques).
Gravely ill, he traveled to Italy in the autumn of 1850 on his doctor’s advice and died in Rome on 24 December 1850. The candlemakers’ petition became so well known that later economists often use it in defending free trade, and Joseph Schumpeter called him the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived.
Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica — Frédéric Bastiat · Mises Institute — Claude Frédéric Bastiat · Online Library of Liberty — Bastiat chronology · Econlib — introduction by Henry Hazlitt (Economic Sophisms) · Wikipedia — Frédéric Bastiat
