ABSTRACT
Jean-d’Acre, where he served with distinction and died after the amputation of his right arm. The third son, Louis, died in 1840 in Paris, where he had retired after a very lucrative career as a sugar refiner in Nantes. Happy and successful in business, he began as a manufacturer of calico in Abbeville before he took over the Nantes sugar beet factory, which he transformed into a cane sugar refinery after the Napoleonic wars. Louis was the author of several books on economic matters that received considerably less attention than those of his more famous brother, in which he attempted to correct what he perceived to be the errors of Jean-Baptiste.3 The latter was not entirely pleased with this development, and wrote to tell his brother as much. In 1822, Louis Say’s Considerations sur l’industrie et la législation sous le rapport de leur influence sur la richesse des Etats, et examen critique des principaux ouvrages qui ont paru sur l’économie politique appeared, and Jean-Baptiste wrote to him that it was ‘vexing’, both from a personal and scientific perspective, that such a work might appear and confuse a badly informed public (Lutfalla 1991:27–8). In 1827, Louis Say’s Traité Élémentaire de la Richesse appeared, and Jean-Baptiste wrote ‘I will not hide from you that I am annoyed by this new publication…you err; the nature of things perpetually contradicts you’ (Say 1848:543–5). Say’s father arranged for him a solid education. As a very young child, he
excelled in a course in experimental physics offered by Lefèvre in Lyon. At the age of 9 years, Jean-Baptiste enrolled in a boarding school set up by two
Italian immigrants, Giro and Gorati, dedicated to innovative methods of education and scientific, as opposed to classical or religious, study. There, he came into contact with new ideas that were beginning to revolutionise natural science. Financial difficulties required Say to withdraw from the school, accompany
his family to Paris and take up employment. Nevertheless, as soon as the opportunity arose, his father sent Jean-Baptiste and Horace to England in 1785 to learn the English language and to study commercial affairs, as was the fashion for young men of their background. Nothing could have had a more dramatic impact on the young Say than the opportunity to observe British commercial affairs at a time when her industries were just about to reap the effects of industrial technology and to conquer the markets of the world. Industrial expansion, the full effects of which would not be apparent for some time, was imminent. Whatever setbacks and industrial crises Jean-Baptiste would witness over the course of the rest of his life, and they were many and significant, he never lost the faith in industrial development that he first acquired during his youth. This enthusiasm for industrialism characterised all of his writing in political economy. Being able to read Adam Smith in English was undoubtedly one important consequence of this visit to England, but it was of relatively small importance beside the profound impact that witnessing the benefits of economic development had on his subsequent career. This early sojourn in England was the occasion of a striking event that
reappeared in a chapter of his Cours Complet d’Économie Politique Pratique, thirty years later, with the odd title ‘Taxes that generate no revenue for the Treasury’. During his stay, Say boarded at the small village of Croydon near London. One day, his landlord appeared and proceeded to board up one of the two small windows that allowed light into his room. Say protested and demanded to know why he should be deprived of the sun that gave him so much pleasure. The landlord responded that he had no choice in the matter because he was not about to pay the window tax; one window would simply have to go. Say did without the sunshine because of the tax, but the Treasury was no richer on account of the window that was eliminated. The tax had cost Say the window, but his sacrifice made the Treasury no better off. This experience became an often told anecdote, which Say reported on many occasions to explain his early attraction to political economy, not to mention the need for sound fiscal management on the part of the public sector. Say returned to Paris after the death of his English employer. Despite his
own desire for a literary career, he bowed to his father’s wishes and continued his commercial apprenticeship. In 1787, Say found employment in an insurance company directed by Clavière, who was later to become Minister of Finance. His suppressed desire to pursue a career in the arts rather than in commerce found expression in his fondness for amateur theatrical performances. Say was never to become wealthy but never lacked the comforts of middle-class life, and he claimed not to value money beyond the freedom it gave his mind and character. From Clavière, he borrowed a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of
Nations, which he found so powerfully attractive that he purchased and annotated his own copy which was ultimately presented to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences by his grandson Léon Say on 7 January 1888. He was later to attribute his meticulous judgement to the habits of order that he learned in Clavière’s austere office. Say’s first publication appeared in 1789, a pamphlet entitled Sur la Liberté
de la Presse. In later life, he evinced a certain amount of discomfort with this early effort, condemning its rashness and poor style. Nevertheless, it did attract the attention of Mirabeau, who employed Say on the staff of his republican newspaper, the Courrier de Provence. Despite his claim that this position brought him nothing but the opportunity to process subscriptions (Say 1848: 556, ‘letter to Dumont’), it in fact brought Say into direct contact with the ideas of the principal French writers of the period. In 1792, the invasion of Champagne called the French to arms, and Say
enlisted in a company of young intellectuals organised as the Compagnie des arts. Almost immediately after his return, he married Mlle Deloches, who was the daughter of a respected lawyer, on 25 May 1793. This marriage, forged in the midst of the Terror, lasted close to forty years and was, by all accounts, a happy one. Marriage had the effect of establishing the young writer definitively in Paris. The relatively small fortunes of both the Say and the Deloches families
were compromised by the depreciation of paper currency. In fact, the financial catastrophes of the period destroyed the finances of Say’s father, and constrained his own ability to establish himself in business. These setbacks encouraged him to establish, with Chamfort, Ginguené, Amaury Duval and Andrieux, La Décade philosophique in 1794. This became the first literary review to emerge from the chaos of revolution. Say contributed a number of articles and opinion pieces to this journal dedicated to literature, morality and politics. He served as general editor for six years. By 1807, when it was suppressed, the review had filled fifty-four volumes. The founding of La Décade accompanied Robespierre’s execution on 28 July
17944 (after an unsuccessful suicide attempt), which left a political vacuum. The Convention had closed the Jacobin clubs and had repealed the Decree of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794), which would have permitted arrest on any pretext , forbidden defence counsel and signif icantly broadened the applicability of the death penalty. Fearing for their own lives, Robespierre’s enemies had forged a temporary alliance and, when he called for them to be purged, he was arrested. Desperate food shortages and high prices provoked serious unrest in Paris, and forced the Convention to produce a new Constitution. The jeunesse dorée (gilded youth) fomented opposition to Terror, and battled in the streets with the sans-culottes. The gilded youth were the indulged children of the professional classes, who had avoided conscription through family ties. Tolerated by both extremes, they were responsible for the re-emergence of moderate royalists. The White Terror began when Jacobins in the west and the southeast of France were massacred by royalist supporters.
