ABSTRACT
At the end of the seventeenth century, France had to face serious economic problems, linked in particular to agricultural crises and a huge public debt. The government of Louis XIV had also to deal, since decades, with the religious and intellectual troubles caused by an important strand of Catholicism: Jansenism. It is in this context that, from 1695 to 1707, Pierre de Boisguilbert, a Jansenist, published his works and proposed the first coherent free trade approach to political economy – an approach which was developed later by François Quesnay and A.-R.-J. Turgot. Starting from the fundamental religious creed of the Original Sin and the ensuing corrupted nature of men – whose attitudes in all circumstances are led by their self-interest – and drawing on ideas presented by two other Jansenist authors, Pierre Nicole and Jean Domat, Boisguilbert developed the first coherent liberal framework based on an automatic equilibrium in markets in a regime of free competition where the selfish behaviours of the agents are self-regulated. The government should not intervene in the economy, the State must only deal with police, justice and defence. Moreover, breaking with the idea that the quantity of the circulating medium matters, his developments focus on relative prices, in terms of which a general equilibrium is defined.
