ABSTRACT
In seventeenth-and eighteenth-century France, the question of the transition to a market economy was permanently on the agenda in various forms. Although the debates were often rather confused, the main issues at stake were formulated more and more clearly and the great controversies of that period marked the emergence of many of the most important ideas later integrated into the main corpuses of economic doctrines. The climax occured during the final decades of the eighteenth century. Three important attempts were made at that time to fill the gap between theory and practice and to achieve the transition to a market economy. The first, 1763 to 1764, was limited to agriculture; the second, well known and much wider in scope, was led by A.R.J. Turgot and took place between August 1774 and May 1776; the third, still wider, occurred fifteen years later during the French Revolution. While the first and the second attempts failed, the third proved more successful and decisive. Recently, the revolutionary period has attracted the attention of scholars (Servet, 1989; Faccarello, 1989,1993; Faccarello and Steiner, 1990). By contrast, this chapter aims to analyse some ideas expressed or simply reconsidered during the early 1770s.
