Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau

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Victor de Riqueti Mirabeau

Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau (often referred to simply as the elder Mirabeau) (October 5, 1715, Pertuis – July 13, 1789) was a French economist of the Physiocratic school and father of the great Mirabeau.

Biography

Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, was a French economist of the Physiocratic school. The marquis was raised very sternly by his father and in 1728, he joined the army. He took keenly to campaigning, although he never rose above the rank of captain. He blames this on his inability to get leave at court to buy a regiment. Upon his father's death in 1737, he came into the family property, and after several pleasant years in literary companionship with Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues and the poet Lefranc de Pompignan, he married the widow of the marquis de Saulveboef in 1743.>>

While in garrison at Bordeaux, Mirabeau made the acquaintance of Montesquieu, and after retiring from the army, he wrote his first work, known as his Testament Politique (1747), which demanded for the prosperity of France a return of the French noblesse to their old position in the middle ages. This work was followed in 1750 by a book on the 'Utilité des états provenciaux. In 1756 Mirabeau made his first stamp as a political economist by the publication of his Ami des hommes au trait de la population, often attributed to the influence of Quesnay, but was really written before the marquis had made the acquaintance of Quesnay.

In 1760 he published his Théorie de l'impot, after which some tax collectors in the government, who did not like the book, exiled Mirabeau to his country estate at Bignon. At Bignon, the school of the physiocrats was really established, and the marquis in 1765 bought the Journal de l'agriculture, du commerce, et des finances, which became the organ of the school. He was recognized as a leader of political thinkers by Prince Leopold of Tuscany, afterwards emperor, and by Gustav III of Sweden, who in 1772 sent him the grand cross of the order of Vasa.

But his marriage had not been happy; he had separated from his wife in 1762, and many lawsuits from his wife and subsequent trials broke the health of the marquis, as well as his fortune; he sold his estate at Bignon, and hired a house at Argenteuil, where he lived quietly till his death on July 13, 1789.

Mirabeau’s work

The "friend of mankind" was also known as "Mirabeau the Elder" to distinguish him from his estranged revolutionary son, Gabriel Honoré (whom he had jailed several times, incidentally). Mirabeau was one of the first members of Quesnay's inner circle. Mirabeau was also the Physiocrat best-acquainted with Cantillon, whose work he consulted when crafting his 1756 treatise.

Most of the public became first acquainted with Quesnay's Tableau through its reproduction in Mirabeau's L'ami des hommes: Pt. 6 (1760). Mirabeau was, however, the primary architect of the "single tax" doctrine, expounded in his 1760 book and, de facto, leading economic strategist of Physiocrats.

Physiocrats and Mirabeau’s “Theory of Taxation”

The Physiocrats argued that the old Colbertiste policies of encouraging commercial and industrial corporations was wrong-headed. It is not that commerce and manufacturing should be discouraged, they said, but rather that it is not worthwhile for the government to distort the whole economy with monopolistic charters, controls and protective tariffs to prop up sectors which produced no net product and thus added no wealth to a nation. Government policy, if any, should be geared to maximizing the value and output of the agricultural sector.

French agriculture at the time was still trapped in Medieval regulations which shackled enterprising farmers. Latter-day feudal obligations — such as the corvée, the yearly labor farmers owed to the state — were still in force. The monopoly power of the merchant guilds in towns did not permit farmers to sell their output to the highest bidder and buy their inputs from cheapest source. An even bigger obstacle were the internal tariffs on the movement of grains between regions, which seriously hampered agricultural commerce. Public works essential for the agricultural sector, such as roads and drainage, remained in a deplorable state. Restrictions on the migration of agricultural laborers meant that a nation-wide labor market could not take shape. Farmers in productive areas of the country faced labor shortages and inflated wage costs, thus forcing them to scale down their activities. In unproductive areas, in contrast, masses of unemployed workers wallowing in penury kept wages too low and thus local farmers were not encouraged to implement any more productive agricultural techniques.

It is at this point that the Physiocrats jumped into their laissez-faire attitude. They called for the removal of restrictions on internal trade and labor migration, the abolition of the corvée, the removal of state-sponsored monopolies and trading privileges, the dismantling of the guild system, etc.

On fiscal matters, the Physiocrats famously pushed for their "single tax" on landed property — l'impôt unique.

The logic, as laid out by Mirabeau in his “La theorie de l'impôt” -“Theory of taxation” (1760) seemed compelling. He attacked the tax farmers--- financiers who purchased from the crown the right to collect indirect taxes--- and proposed that they be replaced with a system of direct taxes on land and on personal income.

Thus, any taxes levied throughout the economy will just pass from sector to sector until they fall upon the net product. As land is the only source of wealth, then the burden of all taxes ultimately bears down on the landowner. So instead of levying a complicated collection of scattered taxes (which are difficult to administer and can cause temporary distortions), it is most efficient to just go to the root and tax land rents directly.

Mirabeau’s “ordre naturel”

The Physiocrats identified three classes of the economy: the "productive" class (agricultural laborers and farmers), the "sterile" class (industrial laborers, artisans and merchants) and the "proprietor" class (who appropriated the net product as rents). Incomes flowed from sector to sector, and thus class to class.

A "natural state" of the economy emerged when these income flows were in a state of "balance", i.e. where no sector expanded and none contracted. Once the "natural state" was achieved, the economy just continued humming along, reproducing itself indefinitely. Described and defined in Mirabeau’s famous "La philosophie rurale" ( Mirabeau 1763 ), this text has been considered the best statements of early Physiocratic doctrine.

The Physiocrats ( i.e. Mirabeau, Quesnay etc. ), unlike many of their contemporaries, continued to view the State as a parasitical entity. It lives off the economy and society, but it is not part of it. Government has no prescribed place in the ordre naturel. Its only role is to set the laws of men in a way that permits the God-given laws of nature to bring the natural order about.

Any attempt by the government to influence the economy against these natural forces leads to imbalances which postpone the arrival of the natural state and keep the net product below what it would otherwise be. A general laissez-faire policy and the "single tax" were the speediest, least distortionary, and least costly ways of arriving at the natural state.

However practical many of the Physiocrats' policy measures were, they wrapped their arguments in metaphysical clouds. They differentiated between the ordre naturel (natural order, or the social order dictated by nature's laws) and the ordre positif (positive order, or the social order dictated by human ideals).

They charged that social philosophers had gotten both of these mixed up. The ordre positif was wholly about man-made conventions. It was about how society should be organized to conform to some human-constructed ideal. This, they argued, was what the "natural law" and "social contract" philosophers, like Locke and Rousseau, were concerned with.

However, there was, the Physiocrats argued, nothing "natural" in them at all — and so these theories ought to be dumped. In contrast, the ordre naturel were the laws of nature, which were God-given and unalterable by human construct. The believed that the only choice humans had was either to structure their polity, economy and society in conformity with the ordre naturel or to go against it.

Unlike the Mercantilists, the Physiocrats did not really spend too much time thinking about whether maximizing the net product was a "good" idea (e.g. did it enhance the power of the sovereign? did it produce general happiness? did improve general morality?, etc.).

Trying to develop Cantillon’s idea, the "friend of mankind", Mirabeau ( Mirabeau 1756) declared the true wealth of a nation is its population, ergo the greater the net product, the greater the population sustainable (and presumable happier). But most of them focused on the fact that it was the "natural" thing to do. And anything that is "natural", according to the spirit of the age, was the "good" thing to do.

Physiocrats’ damaging of their case

The Physiocrats' own style did not help their case. Their pompousness, their mysticism about the ordre naturel, the affected, flowery way in which they wrote their tracts, their petty "cliquishness", their unrestrained adulation and worship of Quesnay and Mirabeau — whom they referred to as the "Confucius of Europe", and the "modern Socrates" — irked just about everybody around them.

Even those who ought to be their natural allies, such as Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and de Mably, despised the Physiocrats with a passion. In a letter to Morellet regarding his upcoming Dictionnaire, the otherwise good-natured David Hume expressed his disdain for them thus:

"……I hope that in your work you will thunder them, and crush them, and pound them, and reduce them to dust and ashes! They are, indeed, the set of men the most chimerical and most arrogant that now exist, since the annihilation of the Sorbonne……." (Hume, Letter to Morellet, July 10, 1769).

And Adam Smith killed them with faint praise, arguing that the Physiocratic system "never has done, and probably never will do any harm in any part of the world" (Smith, 1776).

Legacy

Mirabeau, as the political and economic strategist of Physiocrats explained their position and intentions in a letter to Rousseau. He claimed the aim was to return the humanity to ‘the primary notions of nature and instinct’ which was discredited by the long public credit crisis.

As an opposition to the British commerce-based model, Mirabeau wanted to reform the monarchy and restore the French fortunes without major political upheaval, albeit viewing agriculture as the premier sector ( see Mirabeau 1760 ).

Physiocracy was not opposed to commerce per se; it was rather one of the most confident and complex responses to the progress of “commerce and civilization” ( term coined by Mirabeau in lit. 1760). Mirabeau wanted to develop commerce that was compatible with the Christian virtue, by establishing a political and legal framework within which the harmful passions would be curbed and natural morality reasserted.

This aim alone should put Mirabeau in the pantheon of enlightened political and economic thinkers of all time.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• de Mirabeau, V.R., Mémoire concernant l'utilité des états provinciaux . . .( Memoirs Concerning the Usefulness of the Provincial Estates . . .), 1750
• de Mirabeau, V.R., and F.Quesnay, Traite de la monarchy ( 1757- 1779 ),ed.G. Longhitano, l’Harmattan, Paris 1999
• de Mirabeau, V. R., L'ami des hommes, ou Traité de la population ( The Friend of Man, or Treatise on Population ) Parts 1-3 , 1756, Part 4, 1758, Part 5, 1759, Part 6, 1760
• de Mirabeau, V. R., La theorie de l'impôt (Theory of Taxation), 1760
• de Mirabeau, V. R., La philosophie rurale (with the collaboration of Quesnay ), 1763 ( this text has been considered the best statements of early Physiocratic doctrine)
• de Mirabeau, V.R., Leçons économiques (by L.D.H), 1770
• de Lornnies, Louis, Les Mirabeau (2 vols.) 1879
• Ripert, Henri, Le Marquis de Mirabeau, ses theories politiques et économiques, 1911

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