Remembrances of the Lausanne Conference

Remembrances of the Lausanne Conference [. . .]ix The International Congress on Taxes was held from 25 to 28 July 1860 in the Vaud Canton, in Lausanne, a nice city perched on three hills whose name can hardly be pronounced without remembering, at the risk of being boring, that it is situated at the northern shore of Lake Geneva, just like Coppet, where Madame de Staël lived, and Vevey, scene of the love between J.-J. Rousseau’s Saint Preux and Julie.x The meetings were held in the sessions room of the Great Council building and presided over with firm dignity and politeness by Mr. de Miéville, a lawyer.xi Among the 94 participants from France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Poland and elsewhere were the following prominent persons: Messrs. Frédéric Skarbeck, author

of Théorie des richesses sociales [1829], Joachim Pepoli, Louis-Maria Pastor, and André Zamoyski, whose titles do not need to be mentioned; several other men of fame in science or politics; and, finally, the most distinguished men from the Vaud Canton, and others who were notable like Messrs. Joseph Hornung and Edouard Secrétan, professors at the Académie de Lausanne, and Bory-Hollard, member of the Great Council. There will be no doubts that France was well represented if I say, in particular, that Messrs. Joseph Garnier and Émile de Girardin were present. – Wherever a scientific congress is held, French ideas are eagerly expected and favourably received.xii This being so, Mr. Garnier, unyielding supporter of the direct and single tax on income,xiii and Mr de Girardin, inventor of the direct and only insurance of capital,xiv must be, and indeed were, the most outstanding persons of the conference. Among the French economists, a group consisting of scholarly and diligent men can be distinguished, well versed in the works of the Physiocrats and the [380] English economists, and all more or less disciples of J.-B. Say, who have done a great deal for economic science in shedding light and solving nearly completely and definitively all the problems relating to industry and commerce. These gentlemen’s doctrines regarding the questions I have just mentioned have been explained by them in the Dictionnaire de l’économie politique, a praiseworthy and remarkable work. Mr. Joseph Garnier is in the top rank of these economists. In our opinion, however, these gentlemen were not only wrongly averse to metaphysics, but also to moral philosophy, which precluded them, as we see matters, from being able to clarify and get to the bottom of either the natural theory of value in exchange and social wealth, or the moral theories of property and taxation. In this respect, Mr. Garnier should not be considered separate from his school and from the other disciples of J.-B. Say. Anyway, he should be considered as an educated, conscientious man who did not obtain his reputation and position as an economist by presenting to the credulous public, in the name of political economy or statistics, his own reflections on private morality, matters of hygiene, or whatever, as so many others have done. Mr. Émile de Girardin is not a better philosopher than Mr. Garnier, and he is much less an economist. Nonetheless, if Mr. de Girardin’s ideas on taxation seemed to us highly inadequate, his way of presenting and upholding them appeared to us to be very remarkable. Without at all being a skilled orator, Mr. de Girardin has the most solid and valuable qualities in discussing his ideas: a deep-rooted conviction and a strong belief, resulting in complete absence of charlatanism and an uncommon measure of frankness. Mr. de Girardin never goes beyond the realm of his ideas and never stays within it. Furthermore, Mr. de Girardin has a boundless broad-mindedness: the most extreme, the most direct, and the least concealed disagreement never annoys or astonishes him. Add to this that this man, who is illustrious, and who is certainly worthy of being so, if not as a theorist at least [381] as a political activist, is absolutely devoid of arrogance and pedantry, that he has a simplicity that is both distinguished and

informal, and it will be understood easily how many talents he can draw upon to captivate an audience. No, Mr. de Girardin’s socialism is not ours, but we feel great sympathy for him because he has the soul and the character of a true liberal. In this respect, I remember a typical incident. The participants of the congress were initially split into two sections: one had to deal with the rational theory of taxation, and the other had to examine critically existing taxation. The discussions in the first section were extraordinarily lively. The chairmen, who included Mr. J. Garnier, tried to direct the discussion by having some formulas adopted. Some members of the section, including Mr. de Girardin, refused forcefully to take a position prematurely on the essential questions. The chair asked the participants if they wanted to discuss according to a schedule or not, and the majority of them answered that they wanted to discuss the subjects in their natural order and not according to the chair’s. Thus, abandoned more or less to itself, the discussion very quickly concentrated on the definition of the State: a good or a bad theory of taxation depends on a good or a bad conception of the nature and role of the State. It was therefore rather peculiar that Messrs. Garnier and de Girardin espoused the same doctrine about the role of the State and the nature of taxation; the only difference being that the one tried to impose his ideas by authority, whereas the other aspired only to make his ideas to triumph in a free debate.