Why doesn’t France like free trade ? For David Todd, we must go back to the economic debates of the XIXe A century to understand how the choice of a commercial protection policy has been assimilated to the defense of national interest.
David Todd’s work is on the border between economic history and political history. He continues a well -marked path for the XVIIIe century, but still little cleared for the first XIXe century: to study how economic questions have become a political issue. The question was addressed by many Anglo-Saxon authors about France of Enlightenment: Emma Rothschild, John Shovlin or Michael Sonenscher to name the most recent works.
Voltaire had noted in his Philosophical dictionary The appearance of the economy in the political debate: “ Around 1750, the nation, full of worms, tragedies, comedies (…) began to reason on the wheat ». The debate touched two points: that of inner wealth (should it be promoted agriculture or industry) and that of trade. It is the thread of this second debate that David Todd takes over, from 1815. France had successively experienced two protectionist regimes: Colbertian mercantilism, then the Napoleonian blockade, briefly interspersed with liberal episodes (the release of the grain trade by Turgot in 1774, the Franco-English trade treaty of 1786, the abolition of corporations).
Restoration and maintenance of protectionism
The restored monarchy found itself in front of a complex heritage, but chose to continue on the mercantilist and protectionist path, maintaining the customs system established by Napoleon. Customs had indeed become a powerful administration, organized on the military model, and above all effective. There is no shortage of similarities with the debate on centralization open at the same time: the prefects were held by the majority of royalists, and in particular ultras which claimed the suppression of the departments and the return to the provinces, as a symbol of Napoleonic despotism. But the effectiveness of the administrative system put in place under Napoleon quickly convinced the governments of the Bourbons regime of the utility of its maintenance.
The debate on commercial policy was of an additional dimension: it touched a deep, ideological and symbolic choice, on the nature of French society, and on the interests that we intended to favor. According to David Todd, the parliamentary chambers devoted 20% of their debates, between 1814 and 1822, to business issues. Added to this was added a sustained editorial production, between supporters and adversaries of free trade, in an attempt to influence the political decision. These debates are organized around Foreign ideas, which crystallize tensions and structure the intellectual field of force. David Todd distinguishes four periods, with their dominant theme: the time of the prohibitions (1814-1824), that of Liberty (1824-1834), of the Nation (1834-1844), and finally the protectionist moment (1844-1851).
The choice of a prohibition policy under restoration is explained by the author for double moral reasons. First, protection is presented as the return to a privilege regime which makes it possible to protect the actors most useful to the nation. The moral argument becomes the spearhead of protectionists ; Customs surveillance must also make it possible to combat a major source of corruption: smuggling. The prefects of border departments, in Alsace or in the North, are the first to highlight the economic damage caused by its practices. Chamber’s debates add a political color to the problem: smugglers are presented as examples of moral corruption caused by the revolution.
Continuity with the choices made under Napoleon is therefore patent. It is partly explained by the sustainability of a certain number of institutions which provide information to the government: prefects, chambers of commerce, the General Council of Manufactures and the General Council of Commerce, which already existed under Napoleon. The parliamentary system brings a new representation of interests, but, at first, the groups linked to ultras, large landowners in particular, make their point of view prevail.
Free trade vs national interest
The abuses of the customs administration fuel political challenge on the theme of the defense of trade freedoms. If free trade has its defenders, Jean-Baptiste Say or Simonde de Sismondi in particular, their influence is less, notes Todd, that the dissemination of brochures, as the Memory on Mousselines From 1816 on the tyrannical effects of customs laws, or that the campaigns carried out by Alsatian traders for the freedom of commercial transit, or Bordeaux traders to enjoy the law of warehouse. Several factors are thus coalized to propagate liberal ideas. THE Catechism of political economy by Jean-Baptiste Say is a vector for popularizing new economic ideas. Adolphe Blanqui and Charles Dupin, based on the press, help to spread them. Liberal ideas receive decisive support with the affirmation of the wine regions, victims of the prohibitive system and affected by the economic crisis in the last years of catering. The theme of freedom of trade is thus imposed in a certain ambiguity, bringing together under the same banner the liberal intellectual bourgeoisie and the land or wine owners interested in export. This heterogeneous coalition does not resist the evolution of the July monarchy where the resistance party prevails over the movement. Economically, the return to protectionism is justified by the use of a new vocabulary, that of national interest. There “ Nation », Theme carried by the Liberals under the Restoration, becomes in the hands of Thiers a weapon to justify a policy of protection of the national market. The campaigns carried out by the textile industry bear their fruit in a context of discovery of pauperism and the social question, after the Lyon revolts of 1831 and 1834.
For Todd, this intellectual climate was able to influence the German Friedrich List, who publishes his National political economy system In 1841, after a stay in France from 1837 to 1840. However, List’s approach also draws its roots in a specifically German context, where economic reforms were marked by the desire to catch up with German delay on Napoleonic France and then on England.
The book makes us discover a series of little -known actors, from Henri Fonfrède to John Bowring, Liberal side, or Mathieu de Dombasle, agronomist and defender of national industry. To the Association for the free trade of Frédéric Bastiat responds to the association for the defense of the national work of Auguste Mimerel. The Chamber of Deputies is thus the subject of intense lobbying operations, on the part of industry and trade circles. We thus see by what means of dissemination the economic issues are politicized and arouse growing interest, beyond the only environments directly concerned.
The fever of protectionism even wins the radical left in the last years of the July Monarchy. If the Saint-Simonians and the Fourieristes are rather supporters of the freedom of trade and the union of the peoples, a white Louis recognizes the usefulness of prohibition to protect workers from the factories, and a Philippe Buchez systematizes the English theme. Free trade is only the prerogative of a minority of intellectuals, such as Michel Chevalier, former Saint-Simonian who becomes the adviser of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Conversely, in England, as David Todd reminds us, the link between political and economic liberalism was not broken: the Liberal Party which triumphs in 1846 was also the lawyer for the enlargement of the right to vote.
Economic identity or policy ?
France does not like free trade, notes David Todd in his introduction, before concluding on the need to build a “ European economic culture (P. 419) to dispel this distrust. We can regret this essentialist approach, which would make a country’s membership in free trade the outcome “ natural From its economic and cultural evolution, especially since it somewhat contradicts the demonstration of the book. “” Free trade ” And “ protectionism Are two historically built principles. As the fundamental work of Jean-Pierre Hirsch has shown, French merchants were able to pass with ease from one discourse to another, with flexibility summarized by the motto: “ Let us do and protect us a lot ».
L'” economic identity »Of a country remains a difficult concept to grasp. As the author recalls, the triumph of the principles of free trade In England is first of all that of well understood interests of the nation. With an industry enjoying a certain technological superiority, and an advanced rural exodus which made agricultural protectionism less necessary, England did not have the same economic or political constraints as France, where small peasant property had come out of the revolution. But each of these two ways had its justifications and, in the end, its effectiveness. Should we seek the manifestation of a particular identity ? The choices of economic policy, as shown in David Todd’s work, are first of all political choices: they engage less a national identity than an arbitration between different well understood interests. At the time of the international financial crisis, this book reminds us that the economy of free trade remains a political decision, one of the determinants of which is the vision that a nation has of itself, its identity and its interests.