Frédéric Bastiat

A member of the French National Assembly, Bastiat developed the economic concept of opportunity cost and introduced the parable of the broken window. He was described as "the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived" by economic theorist Joseph Schumpeter.

As an advocate of classical economics and the economics of Adam Smith, his views favored a free market and influenced the Austrian School. He is best known for his book The Law, where he argued that law must protect rights such as private property, not "plunder" others' property.

Biography

Bastiat was born on 29 June 1801 in Bayonne, Gascony (Aquitaine), a port town in the south of France on the Bay of Biscay. His grandfather Pierre Bastiat (1742–1825) had come to trade in Bayonne from the inland town of Mugron in the wine-growing region of Chalosse and the Landes department, married Bastiat's grandmother Catherine Laulhé (also from the Chalosse) in 1770. Having armed a frigate at his own expense for the War of the Pyrenees in 1793 to improve his standing with the Republic, Pierre Bastiat acquired the estate of Sengresse (just north of Mugron), confiscated during the French Revolution from the house of Béthune-Chârost, at an auction on 9 June 1795, in the closing stages of the war, and made it his family's residence. The bourgeois prosperity launched by Bayonne's new status as a free port from 1784 was cut short by the dissolution of the town's chamber of commerce in 1791, the ensuing wars with Spain (1793–1795, 1807–1814), and the Continental Blockade (1806–1814); the Bastiat family then shifted its interests to privateering and trading with the American colonies. Bastiat's father, Pierre (1771–1810), the eldest of seven children and also a businessman, married Bastiat's mother Julie Fréchou (1773–1808) in 1800; they both died in the epidemics of tuberculosis that hit Bayonne during the Peninsular War. Frédéric, orphaned at the age of nine, was raised by his grandfather and unmarried aunt Justine Bastiat between Sengresse and Bayonne. He started his education with abbé Meilhan in Bayonne and attended the college in Saint-Sever, before in 1815 he was enrolled by his family at the Sorèze Abbey Benedictine boarding school near Castres (a royal military college, granted lycée status in 1813 and admitting Protestants), where he studied philosophy along with English, Spanish and Italian.

In 1818, Bastiat left the college and was sent by his grandfather to work as a junior clerk (commis) for his uncle, the lawyer Henry Monclar (1766–1831), in the Bayonne branch of the Monclar and Bastiat international trading firm, where his father had previously been a partner. Monclar, a theoretician of trade, acted as a mentor to young Bastiat. In a September 1819 letter to his friend Victor Calmètes, Bastiat acknowledged his disinterest in routine commercial affairs, his dedication to philosophy and politics, and his resolution to leave business soon, but also his realisation that "the good merchant … must study the laws and delve into political economy, which goes beyond the realm of routine and requires constant study". By early 1820, he had read Jean-Baptiste Say's Treatise on Political Economy; over the following five years, he continued to study the subject through the works of Say, Adam Smith, and Antoine Destutt de Tracy, and articles in Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer's discontinued liberal journal Le Censeur européen.

In 1821, Bastiat was admitted to the Masonic lodge La Zélée, whose ranks included his grandfather (since 1790), his deceased father (from at least 1792), and his uncles. He became the keeper of the seals for La Zélée in 1822 and acted as its orator in 1823. Through a fellow member of the lodge, printer Bernard Lamaignère (1776–1842), Bastiat joined the circle of young liberal intelligentsia surrounding the influential banker Jacques Laffitte, who was a native of Bayonne and Lamaignère's in-law.

Although Bastiat's plans to pursue university studies in Paris were not realised for family reasons, the estate of Sengresse he inherited at his grandfather's death in 1825 provided him with a means to further his theoretical inquiries. He withdrew from maritime commerce to lead the life of a gentleman farmer and dedicated much intellectual effort to agronomy, with frequent study visits to the Agricultural Academy of Landes (Académie agricole des Landes) at the river port of Mont-de-Marsan. In 1827, he embarked on a study of the works of Charles Dunoyer and Benjamin Franklin, while declaring the "virtues" of the latter to be unreachable for himself. A neighbour of Bastiat's estate, Félix Coudroy, a lawyer by profession and a devotee of Joseph de Maistre and Félicité de La Mennais's ultramontanism, became the main confidant of his mature years and a key influence on his intellectual development during the 1830s (their correspondence dated back to at least 1824), later credited in the 1850 Harmonies of Political Economy and designated by Bastiat to complete his unfinished works.

After the middle-class July Revolution of 1830, Bastiat became politically active and circulated a pamphlet addressed to the Landes constituents on the occasion of the legislative election of that year, in which he criticised government taxation and appealed to the individual rationality of voters on behalf of the general interest. He was elected justice of the peace of Mugron in 1831 and to the Council General (county-level assembly) of Landes in 1832. He was elected to the national legislative assembly after the French Revolution of 1848.

Bastiat, who had credited England with "marching as always at the head of European civilization" in 1825, developed an enthusiasm for Richard Cobden's antiprotectionist Anti-Corn Law League by 1842, and welcomed the opening of the English Club of Pau in the same year. Having achieved national recognition as an economist with the publication of his article in defence of Cobden's Manchester Liberalism in the Journal des économistes in October 1844, Bastiat began a correspondence with Cobden that resulted in a political alliance against protectionism and socialism between them. Bastiat visited England in 1845 and 1848, and by 1846, moved to Paris, where he witnessed the June Days uprising of 1848. In early 1846, he set up an association in Bordeaux to launch the free trade movement in France.

Bastiat contracted tuberculosis, probably during his tours throughout France to promote his ideas, and the illness eventually prevented him from making further speeches (particularly at the legislative assembly to which he was elected in 1848 and 1849) and cut his life short. In The Law, he wrote: "Until the day of my death, I shall proclaim this principle with all the force of my lungs (which alas! is all too inadequate)".

During the autumn of 1850, he was sent to Italy by his doctors. He first traveled to Pisa in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, then to Rome. Before dying on 24 December 1850, Bastiat is alleged to have called those with him to approach his bed and murmured "the truth, the truth". He is buried at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome.