ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Police against police: Herbert’s Essai sur la police des grains against Delamare’s Traité de la police
Author: Boyer Jean-Daniel
The influence of Claude-Jacques Herbert’s Essay on the general corn police (Essai sur la police générale des grains) has been frequently pointed out to explain the origin of the judgment of 1754, seen as the premise of the liberalization of the corn trade in France (Afanassiev, 1894; Kaplan, 1986, p. 88). Yet, the reasons for its success remain more enigmatic. Indeed, in the mid-eighteenth century, Herbert was not the only author who had taken up the issue of the grain trade and questioned the existing legislation. Indeed, Dupin , Gournay , Plumard de Dangeul or Forbonnais also had provided new analyzes — some of them much better — on the issue (Meyssonier, 1989, p. 229). Still, after a half-hearted welcome , Herbert’s Essay has managed to eclipse all others. The fact that it is exclusively dedicated to the issue of corn could explain its diffusion and success (Depitre, 1910; Meyssonier, 1989). The intervention of an anonymous reader who had sent a letter to the editor of the Journal oeconomique describing the Essay as the best writing on the subject may have been decisive (Depitre, 1910, p. XXXVII). We do not want to question these interpretations, but we would like to show that the success of the Essay lies more in the fact that it is a direct answer to the book that legitimized the regulation of the grain at the time, that is, Nicolas Delamare’s Treaty on the Police (Traité de la Police). Herbert’s Essay is explicitly an anti-Delamare text. It echoes the Treaty on the police: it takes up Delamare’s legal texts’ quotations, and also some mythical, roman, biblical and historical ones; occasionally attempting to overthrow them. It also criticizes Delamare explicitly, for his ideas and actions within the police. We also want to underline that Herbert’s market model is directely built against Delamare’s one (see Charles, 1999). But the main point of our contribution is to show that Herbert doesn’t propose a real liberalization of grain trade : he does propose a new police which aim is to ensure the economic strength of the French kingdom. Inner freedom is only a means to better the balance of trade. Finally, Herbert’s Essay contributed to the definition of a new police in France. More generally, we can say that the writings of Gournay’s circle are directed to that aim. So we can qualify Meyssonier’s position, who sees, in this circle, the premisses of an egalitarian liberalism (Meyssonier, 1989).
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